To be honest I had not heard of them till now, and I am a bit confused even after reading some of their site... So if the difficult part of being a CA (which I think is verifying that I, Paul Brian, own and control the rights to barlcaysbank.com and should have a certificate in that name) if that bit is either not done (!) or is reliant on donations to be able to afford it, is this going to work?
This is not what regular style certificates verify. That is what Extended Validation certificates verify and they're not issued by letsencrypt.org and generally are a lot more expensive. The only thing that regular-style certificates verify (this is what current CAs do, you can also grab a free one with automatic validation at https://www.startssl.com/ ) is that the person who controls the domain name has requested t…
From the blog:
just too much of a hassle. The application process can be
confusing. It usually costs money. It’s tricky to install
correctly. It’s a pain to update.
If the reason there is not enough SSL around is because it's too much hassle for webmasters, I doubt there is a solution. If you want to take payments you get SSL. if that's too much hassle PCI compliance is going to really stretch you.