Yep, same here. Fortunately they don't seem to use it for anything yet, somewhat begging the question of why it's there in the first place. (It doesn't need to be stored in a user-visible way if the only purpose is as a poor/annoying "proof of humanity" against sockpuppet accounts).

Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?

It was used to geofence access to some countries a few years ago, if I remember correctly.

To which one? Claude doesn't support it either [1], and Gemini is tied to a Gmail address to begin with.

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-chan...

Most services I know allow changing both.

That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

> That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?

It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.

> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.

Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.

At some point, it must be worth it to implement this just for the sake of their customer support team alone.

Then again, they have LLMs that can just deflect all "change email" related questions to an FAQ article containing the "wontfix" information...

Nor changing the phone number. But who would ever need to change their phone number, right?

Taking possession of the ransom without getting arrested/physically followed by the police is what foils most kidnapping plots [1], and cryptocurrencies definitely address that part.

Criminals don't really need strong anonymity as long as the payment system has strong censorship resistance and at least one counterparty won't mind accepting "tainted" funds.

Arguably, privacy is much more important to non-criminal individual users as they themselves can be targeted by criminals as a result of their income/holdings being globally visible, and unlike organized crime, they often have less means to protect themselves from $5 wrench attacks.

[1] Source: I watched many crime thrillers growing up

Unironic congratulations on being self-aware enough to take your profits without it affecting your reasoning. Anecdotally, not many seem to come out of crypto net positive with that mindset.

It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow.

There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.

And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains.

There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.

> If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments.

That’s exactly my point.

Hard to argue with that reasoning, on several layers.