That's a drastic exaggeration of the effort required. The backup is to write down 24 words. For more redundancy, write them down again on another piece of paper. Put them somewhere safe enough considering the amount you have stored, and you're good. I know people with crypto who are not especially technical, but have no trouble with this.

(Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)

I think ckolkey was referencing this now-HN-famous dismissal of Dropbox when it was first announced in 2007 (top comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I admit I missed that. But backing up your self-hosted wallet is way less technical than rolling your own Dropbox, so I don't think it changes my argument.

I have family members that have done the following:

* Email me photos because they don't know how to add them to a shared google photo album.

* Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how.

* Forget their email password so just made a new email account.

* Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time they get a new phone.

A very large segment of the population behaves in this way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these people?

What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover the money he was defrauded of?

I have family members who paid for computer service because Microsoft was so nice to call them after detecting an issue with their computer. But lets get them all cold wallets to hold their money.

And those people should use social recovery wallets, as I've mentioned several times above.

As for Grandpa, I hope he doesn't have a checkbook.

You're saying Dropbox is a grift with a $7bn market cap?

Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven".

The bank is just someone else's ledger.

Yes. As a service. Which is what people want.

Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.

> Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just someone else's computer", which is the same as "the bakery is just someone else's oven".

I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.

Some people do, and it should be possible for them to do so.

And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service.

Why can't there be room for both?

I'm not trying to ban people from becoming bakers. You do you.

I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be.

Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'.

Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.

Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes this".

> Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent

One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.

Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not use the product because of speed or because of any IP agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?

I'm not going to deliver a commission over BitTorrent or IPFS. That's absurd.

> Why not use bittorrent or IPFS?

The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.

I've had files sitting on Google Drive for longer than IPFS has existed. Let's not pretend that IPFS/etc is a solution to relying on services that are far older than it.

I don't know if I would jump straight to a grift, it comes down to use case. If people are just dumping random documents, sure. And selling people that they need to back up every picture they have taken on their phone that they will probably not look at again is a bit grifty. However keeping digital copies of important documents is not a bad idea, like a house burnt down situation. Ideally, you maybe have family you can trust to keep a USB with those documents, but that is not always an option for some people.

How do you think the internet should have been designed to make CDN, DDoS protection, and file hosting better than the existing services?

People keep saying cryptocurrency is a grift despite having multiple orders of magnitude greater of a market cap, so sure, why not?

Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7 high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were designed a bit different, that config might be slightly different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there somehow).

Bitcoin has no utility.

It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.

If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.

We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.

> If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.

There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.

This is so obviously wrong ... I don't know what to say.

Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.

If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.

People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.

BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.

> Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.

And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.

This is completely wrong/upside down.

There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.

Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..

> There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking,

There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).

> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..

Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.

That doesn't even make sense. Dropbox and BitTorrent are not providing the same service. Maybe you're trying to compare to Resilio Sync but still wrong.

Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.

I have been using bittorrent for 15 years and still pay for Dropbox because it's a very useful service.