Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, talks about cryptocurrency account security:

"The place where user experience starts fraying is: what happens if either your account gets hacked or if you lose your password. And that's the aspect of user account authentication technologies that I'm interested in seeing where it evolves.

Because ultimately if "self-sovereign" user authentication technologies end up totally failing then that means that it is very difficult for the blockchain space to achieve substantial ass adoption.

I'm interested in Social Recovery. I'm interested in multi-key schemes where you have one key and some server has one key.

"Social Account Recovery" is interesting. This is even used in some centralized systems today. For example, if you lose access to your WeChat account, then one of the ways you can recover it is you can try logging into the account and then part of the security question is recognizing which of these accounts are actually your contacts. And then after that, the WeChat ascends some of your contacts confirmation codes, and you have to tell them "offline" to reply back with a message confirming those confirmation codes. And then if they do that then your account gets unlocked. So it's kind of "M of N social account recovery".

I'm very interested in seeing how well those kinds of things end up turning out in practice. There's obviously hardware wallets, there's different forms of multi-sig, there's combined computer-phone stuff. I'm hoping that we'll see much more of these models get tried, and then we'll see if anything ends up being both good enough for regular people to use and actually secure enough for regular people to be secure.

And if not, then we'll just fall back to everyone using Coinbase Custody or whatever, and that'll be much less fun but it will probably still kind of work and it will be better than the status quo."

- Vitalik Buterin (Creator of Ethereum)

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Original TechCrunch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHMjbsKN1p4

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