Comment by sunshine-o
3 days ago
Phone numbers are just a liability:
- It is kind of expensive,
- You are forced to provide it to many official institutions,
- It is the default or mandatory insecure 2FA for many institutions,
- It always get leaked somewhere and is one of the most common/reliable identifier.
We still have them around governments and telcos love it and old people and scammers are its last users.
The cost is a feature. Kinda also the case with IPv4 addresses.
Same problem with IPv4.
We've been paying for v4 and v6 for decades but somehow we cannot get rid of v4. My guess is there are a lot of interests at play.