> Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar
How do you think that works? Google can refuse to do business with you but that doesn't mean you can't use a different email provider.
Similarly, if your particular identifier is on some kind of list, changing from an email address to another public identifier doesn't force anyone to allow you access they weren't otherwise planning to give you. If your email address ends up on a list of known spammers, etc. there's no reason why a blockchain address won't go the same way (and if the answer is “I'll keep making new ones”, ask how that's gone for email spam).
> 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
I'm not assuming they're stupid and inflexible, I'm assuming they're not going to give you money to use a new system which doesn't give them something in return. For example, your conflation of losing a coin with losing control of a wallet is leaving out a lot: if I lose a quarter on the street, I'm out a tiny amount of money but I don't also permanently lose my life savings, mortgage, and ability to login to web sites as in your proposed alternative.
Once you start thinking seriously about real-world usage, you see why even most cryptocurrency proponents pay companies to deal with those issues for them and those banks in all but name are going to be what most people end up using for compliance reasons.
You mentioned persona, which relies on email. Lose gmail=lose your account on possibly hundreds of websites.
Wallets can indeed be very large "coins". People are going to come up with creative solutions for this, eg. you can split each bitcoins in a different wallet, share the keys with trusted people etc. Cryptocoins are not yet widely used, but there is nothing stopping people from coming up with new ingenious ways to store their hard money safely as they have done in real life. It 's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
> People are going to come up with creative solutions for this
You have created a problem where none existed previously, and now speculate about creative solutions to that problem. What isn't answered here is why I should opt-in in the first place.
> It's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
The underlying issue here, I think, is that you perceive all of the systems you're up-ending and re-writing as fundamentally technical in nature. But that's wrong: banking and assets and governance and contracts and everything crypto stakes out as it's domain, they're all fundamentally social problems. You can't write an algorithm to run a country. It's just the wrong model.
So, no, people aren't going to come to terms with the notion that if your ledger slips out of your pocket and into the sewer that your entire identity or all of your wealth or whatever is irrevocably lost. That's just not gonna fly.
> You mentioned persona, which relies on email. Lose gmail=lose your account on possibly hundreds of websites.
Think about this more: we're not talking about a blockchain where the failure is permanent and irreversible. If you forget your Gmail password or someone phishes you, you can go through Google's reset process and regain control. It's still a mess but it's repairable. Similarly, if you don't like Google for whatever reason, email is a distributed system which means you can run your own server or switch providers easily. Similarly, most sites have the concept of linking multiple email addresses or other means to perform a password reset. Nothing about this problem requires turning your internet experience into a series of microtransactions (often not so micro).
> Cryptocoins are not yet widely used, but there is nothing stopping people from coming up with new ingenious ways to store their hard money safely as they have done in real life.
Yes, and they've largely picked the traditional banking system. Most cryptocurrency users use exchanges because those are hard problems which require 24x7 security and operations, and the vast majority of people choose to outsource it.
This is why I suggested studying the long history of this because while the internet has always been decentralized many things people use have increasingly centralized _by user preference_. OpenID had an unfriendly design but it's far from the only thing people have tried, Persona being an obvious example, and in general the public hasn't cared about this enough to even switch to a free service much less a microtransaction-based one.
> It 's a change of mindset, that it is possible to lose digital assets permanently. I think many people can come to terms with that in the end
People have been getting familiar with that for half a century. The difference is that the proposed systems are designed to be fragile rather than robust, cost more to use, and the proposal is to link more of your entire life into those systems without a recovery path. If there isn't a really clear, compelling benefit this is not going to be a successful sales pitch.
How do you think that works? Google can refuse to do business with you but that doesn't mean you can't use a different email provider.
Similarly, if your particular identifier is on some kind of list, changing from an email address to another public identifier doesn't force anyone to allow you access they weren't otherwise planning to give you. If your email address ends up on a list of known spammers, etc. there's no reason why a blockchain address won't go the same way (and if the answer is “I'll keep making new ones”, ask how that's gone for email spam).
> 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
I'm not assuming they're stupid and inflexible, I'm assuming they're not going to give you money to use a new system which doesn't give them something in return. For example, your conflation of losing a coin with losing control of a wallet is leaving out a lot: if I lose a quarter on the street, I'm out a tiny amount of money but I don't also permanently lose my life savings, mortgage, and ability to login to web sites as in your proposed alternative.
Once you start thinking seriously about real-world usage, you see why even most cryptocurrency proponents pay companies to deal with those issues for them and those banks in all but name are going to be what most people end up using for compliance reasons.