I swear to god sometimes I feel our proffesion mostly consists of people that are a weired combination of arrogant and alternatively gifted. They do not value and do not understand how the rest of society does things.

Hundreds of years ago we have invented this cool thing called a Safe. It works better than 90% of tech-based security systems out there. Write something on a piece of paper, put it behind a locked door, and you will be safe from 99% of scams and attacks that exist. If someone breaks into your house, and get this piece pf paper they will be leaving real fingerprints, and real police will get involved. If noone breaks into your house, then only select few people are ever near that safe.

And even absent a safe... Absent a trusted family member pulling an inside job, how much risk is there really for an average--or even not so average--person to having accounts compromised because someone found passwords written down on a piece of paper somewhere in their house.

Yes, perhaps the equation changes if you have roommates/family you don't really trust.

The trick is to then store it somewhere that anybody who came into posession of it would be unable to figure out -what- master key it was for.

If a friend of mine has an arbitrary chunk of ASCII stored under their google contacts under a name only they and I recognise, absent rubber hose cryptoanalysis of them it's not going to be an issue, and frankly I don't consider that relevant to my threat model - if somebody's -that- excited about my accounts they'll start with the rubber hose on me at which point all bets are already off.