Scams are everywhere these days, and it’s easy to feel like the internet is dangerous—that we’re one click away from being tricked, having our passwords stolen, or our accounts hacked.

I think that’s a bit of a misunderstanding. These kinds of scams existed long before the internet. Back then, information moved slowly, so they could only spread among people you knew or in a limited area. News of someone being scammed also spread slowly, so the problem didn’t feel as big. In the pre-internet era, pyramid schemes, investment fraud, and the like were already common.

To me, the internet mainly sped up how fast information travels. It lets scam messages reach strangers more easily and gives bad actors more chances to target people they’ve never met. So I’d say how often we see fraud has more to do with how fast messages spread than with the internet being inherently insecure.

In fact, the internet could have stayed much more dangerous than it is today.

In the early days we only had HTTP. Any data between a website and your browser could be eavesdropped on fairly easily. It was like writing your safe combination and credit card number on a postcard and mailing it—anyone could read it. Later, TLS, HTTPS, certificates, and related standards turned that postcard into something more like a locked package, so that “man-in-the-middle” attackers couldn’t just listen in.

Even with these technologies, keeping certificates up to date was—and still is—tedious and costly. Yes, certificates used to cost money, and even now some companies still pay for them. These technical, time, and cost barriers slowed the adoption of certificates and of safer browsing.

About ten years ago, a group of smart, idealistic people started Let’s Encrypt. They made things much easier: getting a certificate for your own site became free and fully automated. Huge numbers of sites now use it to renew certificates automatically every day, and Let’s Encrypt has been a major reason HTTPS usage has grown from under 30% globally to around 95% in the US.

Yet many ordinary users have no idea how much Let’s Encrypt has done for security on the web—and plenty of developers, including me, use it as casually as turning on the tap and often forget how important their work is. I was reminded of that when I saw their recent post celebrating ten years.

Thank you, Let’s Encrypt, for a decade of making the internet safer.