[LeetHacks]

Because at the end of the day PayPal is better for the average consumer than a solution where somebody needs to handle a private key.

A lot of tech savvy people lost money due to losing their keys. Now imagine the disaster if your mother needs to handle them.

Payment solutions are also heavily regulated, often also in favour of the consumer. If my bank goes bankrupt or gets hacked I have much better garuantees of getting my money back compared to when I lose my private key.

The final reason (in my opinion) that "private key solutions" are not adding much is that to legally use it you need to comply with the regulations for traditional finance. Hosting an exchange without KYC can be considered illigal in many western countries.

Want to advocate for less regulations in finance? Sure, that's a valid political opinion. But you need to go into political solutions for that, not technological ones.

[JonathanBeuys]

For the average use "handle a private key" just means installing an app. If crypto currencies were popular enough, it would already come with a phone, just like a browser.

People already keep super important stuff on their phones. Their email accounts, their lifetimes photos, their contacts, their notes... Losing those seems to be more dangerous than losing your digital wallet. An event that would be similar to losing your physical wallet.

[hnaccount_rng]

Loosing my physical wallet will cost me: About a hundred euros (cash), the annoyance of having to get a replacement for the cards: - ID (probably 4 weeks or so and a visit to my Bürgeramt) - Medical Insurance (probably a week and a phone call) - 2 credit cards and a bank card (one, maybe two phone calls and a couple of euros) - a handful of membership cards, non of which are card only and only there for backup to the corresponding app I would say the total loss of this rounds to 100 euros and a couple of phone calls.

Your equivalent is not "loosing your wallet, it's loosing access to your bank account (which would cost at least thousands of euros). There is a difference! No, being in physical possession of my bank card doesn't give you the right to the contents of it. And there are _lots_ of redundant security layers beyond the simple card.

[zeroclip]

False equivalence. If you lose your crypto hot wallet, you might lose $100 as well. Much less of a hassle than losing your physical wallet with several important credit, debit, health, driver’s, and ID cards.

A hot wallet is meant to be used like cash in your pocket. Putting thousands or millions of dollars in your pocket would be unwise. The same logic should apply to a hot wallet.

You can store higher amount of wealth in a cold wallet, like a multi sig or smart contract wallet that has social recovery and transfer protection.