Imagine a simple tool for the internet, completely rebuilt for today’s world. One app. One thing that you own. It proves who you are and lets you pay for things in one place. Something that only checks you. No intermediaries. No passwords. No credit cards.
If a website wants to know that it is you real, you don’t type anything. You just tap “Yes”, such as unlocking your phone with your face. That tap is a quiet, safe confirmation that you are you, but nobody learns anything about you and nothing is stored or stolen.
When do you want to buy something? The same. A tap. It is as if you are handing in cash, but digital, no forms, no card numbers to fill in, no companies that keep your payment information forever.
One tool. A tap. Works everywhere. Protected by design. Built for people, no companies.
Now let’s perform a thought experiment. Imagine that this elegant system does not exist and that we were collected in a meeting room in the late 1990s and designs the Identity Layer for the Internet. A rogue engineer gets up and says, “I have a better idea.”
“Okay, instead of giving users a tool that they serve, let them rely on a centralized third-party account: an e-mail address, somewhere organized by a company. Those companies can read your messages, close and follow where you go at any time. That e-mail is your username for everything because it is easy to remember and people look at how their e-mail looks.”
“To prove who you are, we will use passwords, just a few words or symbols that people have to remember. But people suck to remember dozens of strong, so they will reuse the same password everywhere. To solve that, we need another app called a password manager, just to survive our own bad idea.”
“Is it safer?” someone asks.
“No. It is worse. Every website will now store millions of passwords or hashes in giant databases. Hackers will constantly break them in and steal. These leaks will take place weekly. We will just accept it as normal and have websites to look up when you are hacked lol.”
“Okay … is it more private?”
“Absolutely not. It is a privacy catastrophe. Every login, every action, is registered in a number of disconnected data silos, all connected to a single identification of the business ownership. The user leaves a trace of digital exhaust everywhere: an exhaust that is enormously profitable to collect and sell a product.
“Isn’t it easier to build and use?”
“Not a Chance. To Patch the Glaring Security Holes, We’ll have to Bolt on More components. We’ll need a two-factor authentication system that Sends codes to a consumer separate device. We’ll needs annoying convue-tonguted users arsers Password ‘Email loops, which Themselves Become a Prime Vector Takeovers A Rube Goldberg Machine or Failure Points: The Email Provider, The Service’s Database, the Password Manager, the 2FA app, the SMS -Gateway … “
He pauses. “And here is the worst part: after all that hassle only to log in … you still can’t pay!”
The room is quiet.
“That whole system and all that complexity does nothing for buying things. To pay, you still have to find a physical card, 16 numbers, a expiry date, a security code, all in a web form in a web form. But don’t worry that we ask everyone to use HTTPS so that they feel secured.
“So what is the advantage of this … system?” Someone finally asks.
“Well,” says the engineer, “it lets people sign up for free things that they will never use again without needing money in advance in advance.”
That’s it. That’s the big advantage. For this single, narrow edge case we have created an uncertain, privacy-invasive and breathtaking complex architecture that has separated the identity of the trade and had charged the entire digital world with friction and risk.
However, here is the truth: The severity of convenience is the most powerful, irrational power in the world. A better system does not win by being better, it wins by being lighter because people exchange a pound of their sovereignty for a shred of convenience, every time.
So why are we still stuck with this mess?
The honest answer is that the user experience of the alternative so far was a steep cliff instead of a soft driveway. The ethos of “Be your own bank” came up with the frightening consequence of “Be your own high-stakes security expert”. Managing seed sentences, understanding gas costs and navigating the ruthless finality of transactions created an entry threshold that was simply too high for the regular user. The reassuring safety net of a link “forgotten password” was preferred over the catastrophic potential of a lost hardware portionian or a misplaced sentence of 12 words.
That is frightening. No wonder that most people chose the poor but familiar: a password, a reset -link, a bank that can help if something goes wrong.
But that changes.
The new tools do not ask you to become a technical expert. They build the power of ownership in things that normally feel like unlocking your phone with your fingerprint or approving a payment with a tap. Functions such as social recovery (Trusted friends help you to gain access), Smart wallet (that works as apps, not crypto -dashboards), and Pass key (Using your phone or face instead of passwords) Make a safe, self -knowing identity easy.
The goal is to make the right thing, make it easy, not to make everyone a crypto expert.
In any rational design meeting, that engineer would have been laughed at from the room.
But here we are, life in the world that he has described.
The good news? We don’t have to stay here.
Of course, many in the regular technical world still see this type of technology so infected by the association with hype, scams or volatile cryptocurrencies. They all reject it as “blockchain stuff”, a knee shock reaction that the baby throws away with the bath water. But the core idea is about ownership, privacy and ultimately users a safe digital “self” that works just as seamlessly as the rest of the web.
The internet was built without a native way to prove who you are and to move strong value. But now, for the first time, that missing piece (cryptographic signer, example: Polkadot Vault) is finally working like the rest of the web, simple, fast and yours.
#accidentally #built #wrong #internet