If I understand correctly, you're proposing that we trust a set of individuals and hope that they'll cooperate when asked to, instead of relying on a single party which can be made to cooperate whether they like or not by the judicial system. That doesn't seem like an improvement to me.

> we trust a set of individuals and hope that they'll cooperate when asked to

Yes, in most cultures these individuals are called “family” or “friends”. It’s a rare concept in the crypto world though, yes.

Now imagine if some app replacing 911 broadcast an emergency message to your friends or neighbors, with your location.

Who would you trust more to come to your aid when there is a situation?

How about in a rural area or one where police are overworked?

How about if each neighborhood could hire its own police agencies and police agencies would compete on how well they keep people safe and maintain order without excess brutality? If they got to know the people they are policing, and worked with the clergy and others to help them holistically?

That is how libertarians think.

I'm really not sure what this comment is about, sorry. Are you offering a critique or just throwing out ideas for someone to ponder?

If you're critiquing the idea that family/friends won't be able to respond when you need them the most, not everyone has family/friends. So there will naturally be companies that act as account recovery services as well.

I think the critique goes deeper than that. An informal agreement between you and your circle of friends and family is not a legally-binding agreement, and is not enforceable at all. A modern economy needs private contracts that are fully enforceable by courts of justice, it cannot rely on informal agreements like this. Further, you're asking people to become custodians of your on-line accounts? I don't think anyone wants to become custodians of someone else's on-line accounts, even if they are your friends. I find super weird that someone genuinely thinks this a workable idea or that this is something that would be appealing to the general public. It reminds me of survivalism.

The point is YOU have the choice of who YOU choose to fulfill role X, and you can spread the tiny responsibility across multiple entities, while removing the liability that one of them could just impersonate you anytime. It’s totally up to you, and you can recreate the legal custodian relationship if you wish, but then they or their employees would technically have full power over your account.

Are you the kind of person who LOVES signing in with Facebook, and trusts them to safeguard your keys and identity in their nice centralized database — if anything goes wronng you’ll have the legal system, another nice top-down system of laws and enforcement, to correct everything, right?

I don't have Facebook, but from what I gather they are not in charge of safeguarding anyone's keys or identity. So... yeah, I have trust in the rule of law. For example, banks pay millions every day to customers in compensation for improper charges as a result of court rulings. If you can't trust the rule of law you have bigger problems than worrying about Facebook stealing your identity... but I'll leave it here.

> If you can't trust the rule of law you have bigger problems than worrying about Facebook stealing your identity

Most individuals cannot bear the weight of corporate lawfare. Congrats on winning a nice case and getting a good pay out. but that is survivorship bias.

You got it the other way round. I haven't won any case.

> An informal agreement between you and your circle of friends and family is not a legally-binding agreement

You’re right, it’s much deeper and more significant than laws (which are broken literally every day).

> A modern economy needs private contracts that are fully enforceable by courts of justice, it cannot rely on informal agreements like this

That may be what an economy needs, but what a society, culture, or civilization needs is the deep bonds of human relationships. Those things are built on families.

> I don't think anyone wants to become custodians of someone else's on-line accounts, even if they are your friends.

Have you ever helped your friends or family? Have you ever been helped by them?

I find this a necessary question to ask because the only people that critique this idea are those that do not have any real friends or family. And to be fair, I already addressed that in my original comment (there will be services / companies to help people in that situation).

This is just a particular implementation of "reset password". I don't have legal recourse if the sites I use don't implement a good account recovery protocol... They could implement it as "if you lose your password you're SOL" if they want. It's just a nicety for me to be able to "implement" this myself by configuring a set of people or of technical steps I can use to recover my account.

My family and friends aren't qualified and don't have the necessary medical equipment to keep me alive on the way to the hospital. Also, they're busy during the day and sleep at night and I don't want to burden them with being available 24/7 to come to my aid. Also, like most social situations, people generally assume that others will care enough to respond, which leads to no one responding.

Emergency services are generally funded to be able to respond to an emergency, are available 24/7, and know that if you call them, they're the ones that need to come. I trust them nearly absolutely to come if I call them, though I do know that if they are funded poorly, they may come too slowly to help me, which is why I want them to be funded properly, and in a way that operates at a loss (I don't believe these services need to turn a profit).

If I'm in a rural area, I know that response times are going to be very slow, but they will also be slow if it's friends or family, because it's a rural area, and everyone lives far away from each other. If it's the middle of the night, my assumption is that my friends and family won't be reachable at all, but maybe the police will be.

Neighborhoods funding their own services mean that rich people get great service and poor people are on their own.

I understand that this is how libertarians think, and this is why I think that libertarians live in a fantasy world where they believe things will work out exactly the way they've planned them in their mind.

Sounds good, until you get to the last two hypotheticals, which sound awful.

You choose your set of individuals. I trust my sister far more than any corporation or judge.

Judges know a thing or two about family disputes. Maybe you'll find yourself in need of one, eventually.

Yes, and lots of people end up on the bad end of the judicial system as well. There is no perfect solution for this, it isn't computer code, it's people, it's all just shades of gray. I think the "expected value" of having people I trust help me keep my accounts safe but recoverable is much higher (and much much cheaper) than that of thinking I'm going to successfully sue someone to achieve the same thing.

Well, there's a reason why civilisation is built upon private contracts and the rule of law, and not upon unenforceable agreements between individuals. It's because, even though none of the solutions may be perfect, one is clearly better than than the other.

Civilization is built upon both familial / social bonds and legal rules. Neither system would work well on its own.

The solution should be to not use monolithic blockchains, at least not for key management :)

Look at Sidetree protocol for instance