> b) you can print important travel documents ahead of time c) you can bring a backup device on your travels.

While I remain on the fence about passkeys, I often see this argument from advocates when things go wrong along the lines of: "why didn't you securely store your backups and keep them with you at all times"

Firstly, it's annoying when a user is already in that situation, it does not help them solve the problem right now.

Secondly, it clearly faces a scalability issue, a significant proportion of passkey users right now tend to be well informed on the authentication model and threats, but when it scales to billions of users many of them will not be well informed and will not think about how to be prepared for when things go wrong, potentially locking them out of everything they would need to fix the situation.

While I appreciate the advantage this model gives, I struggle to imagine it will work well on the unsuspecting public.

> I struggle to imagine it will work well on the unsuspecting public.

Right, that's because there's a 0% chance we end up in a world where everyone who uses the internet reliably carries a Yubikey or similar backup on their person. It's wild to me how many people here are seriously proposing this as a solution. That might work fine for a typical HN poster, but expecting it to scale to the general public is some insane tech bubble myopia.

In reality companies will either provide enough workarounds to negate any security benefits or a whole bunch of people are going to lose access to accounts they own. If passkeys ever get widespread I'm guessing we'll see more of the former option, leading to a lot of unnecessary confusion and very little practical benefit.

Here are some successful companies with odd-sounding names: Google, GoDaddy, Survey Monkey, Nvidia, Caterpillar, Coca-Cola