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by oneplane 1437 days ago
Initially, the main reasons were:

- Identification (bi-directional)

- Privacy (or secrecy)

A side-effect of those are tamper resistance. As the internet got older, more tamper-based abuse was happening and the benefit of tamper resistance became practically more important than the identification part. To be realistic: most people don't actually know how to identify what website they are on, and they also don't know what the identity should be. This is also why EV (extended validation) is completely worthless and mostly purged from webbrowsers.