Hi, Christopher! Thanks so much for your contributions to Zcash! I finally got around to reading this long message of yours, and was pleased to see that passkeys are on your menu. I was just enthusing about them and even mentioned Blockchain Commons on another thread.
I tend to agree with your comment:
However, we know that the accessibility of passkeys is currently winning a lot of converts.
I basically think that the current state of the art of authentication is below the level of “good enough” for 99% of users. In both security and in usability, it’s bad. I think this is true of all of the current state-of-art tools and processes: passwords, 2fa, wallet seed words, TOTP, hardware security keys, hardware wallets, etc. It’s all so bad that it is a constant struggle for normal users to be able to do normal things without getting hacked, accidentally deleting their info or locking themselves out of their accounts. And, imho, passkeys are above the level of “good enough”. They aren’t perfect, but for 99% of users, they make the problem go away, without having to learn any new concepts or skills.
So, I expect that passkeys are going to rapidly spread throughout society. There will always be a long tail of a huge number of users that continue to use old technology (passwords, seed words, etc), similar to how a lot of people/businesses continue to use fax machines for years/decades after the rest of us switched to email, but I think that in only a few years the majority of people will think of passkeys as the one and only natural, normal, standard way to log in to things, and will regard any web site or tool that requires any other method as being primitive and inconvenient.
My question for you is: how would the user experience change if you successfully executed one of these projects on your menu? I suppose that largely depends on what UX improvements your wallet partners would deliver to their users. I try to use all of the Zcash wallets, so I would happily look at a demo videos, wireframes, or narratives about Alice trying to accomplish something and what steps she has to take.
(Btw, as you know I am not on the Zcash Community Grants Committee — just a passionate community member — so please only spend your time replying to this if it is helpful to you!)