https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/authorization.png

>Unless someone figures out a way where we can safely share computing power and connections to real-life services (e.g. banking, having an identity, communication in general), I think there is no real alternative.

I think the opposite is true. We don't have adequate sandboxing of userspace on most desktop OSes. If your malware has access to the victim's home directory and can phone home, they've been pwned for all intents and purposes. Root access would matter if userspace programs were well sandboxed.

On OSes where this is true like android, you have terrible interoperability of userspace programs and it's impossible to get "real work" done. Not to mention that without root access, you are just relying on the corporation to manage your system for you, which isn't tenable for a democracy.

You don't need all of this trusted computing stuff to have secure, private payments. Chaumian ecash and cryptocurrencies have known this for a while. Just use a digital signature scheme instead of relying on open-source information.

I don't think these problems are opposing; both are real.

I totally agree that user space is not as much of a useful concept on a single-user device. Originally, it helped to shield users of the same system from each other. Most of this was based on file system authorization. This hasn't been extended to internet access in a very useful way.

However, even on single-user devices, having root access makes it easier to hide malicious processes. Granted that in modern operating systems it is already totally unclear what most processes are doing, so one can simply hide in plain sight.

I'm still not convinced we can get by without a lot of trusted computing stuff to have secure payments.