It's quite easy: you download this Zero Knowledge Confabulator utility from github and load it up into your TAILS instance. Make sure you pull all this over Tor and use a North Korean VPN and please for the love of god verify the MD5 hashes. Once you've done this, you put your wallet key into the ConfabUtil which will produce a zk-snark. Memorize this because you will next need to go into an airgapped, seismically isolated room and write it down onto a one time pad. Now you start digging, and once you cannot dig any longer you can safely place this one time pad into the bottom of the hole, climb back out, and rest easy knowing Your Crypto Is Safe.

I sure am glad that I can be my own bank!

This is pretty much what it sounds like to a laymen like me. It's aggravatingly complex, with like, 18 points of user error failure points. And even if I quadruple checked, I'd wanna check 17 more times after that, and I'd still feel I messed up some crucial step at some point.

I love the juxtaposition of this comment with its sibling. Comedy gold.

With a hardware wallet where you store your seed phrase. You would never type this seed anywhere. You would store backups of this seed in something like a metal sheet that you can buy. You would be extremely careful of the numerous phishing attempts that you will encounter. Also with malicious smart contracts. And you would have a hot and cold wallet, to minimize risk.

Remember that this is an alternative to a small card that is widely accepted internationally that I can reclaim a transaction with a quick phone call.

Until the operators decide for their own mysterious reasons to make your small card stop working, or that you suddenly owe them a bunch of money you never had, or both at the same time.

How is any of this possible in the real world? If my bank says I owe them money, it’s on them to prove it. If they can’t I can easily take them to court.

"Easily" is far from my experience. I eventually got everything back but it took literally years.

I’d love to hear more.

I don't know much more, which is the frustrating part of the experience. When we got an actual court date they were suddenly happy to give me all my money back, and I was too tired to push further. But until then it was block, stall, ask for more copies of the same identity verification documents or claim that they somehow didn't meet the requirements (e.g. claiming that my bank statements weren't acceptable identify verification because they didn't show the account being in active use, despite it being my main daily account), insist simultaneously that they couldn't tell me anything but it would all be resolved soon.

I’m not a crypto fanatic but credit and debit cards are very susceptible to fraud

But in those cases the user gets their money back. This isn’t the case with crypto.

People with time get their money back. People without it get nothing back. And that’s not even mentioning the legal scams like overdraft charges… I’m just saying, the existing system sucks too.

It's not that much time, and frankly you need the time with any method. The last time it happened to me, my card provider noticed the transactions, blocked the card and phoned me to ask if I made them.

The time before, I phoned my bank and told them I had a charge I didn't recognize, they asked me to fill in a form and refunded me within 48 hours.

Absolutely, as much as any other payment method. Meanwhile there are consumer protections available for them. One phonecall and a form will pretty much instantly reverse a debit card, credit card, or direct debit transaction with any bank in Europe. On more than one occasion this has happened to me and it's taken less than 15 minutes to resolve.