Understanding Authentication In Websites: A Banking Analogy

There is a strange ritual that web developers around the world have been perpetuating from the dawn of computers to modern days. Without this ritual, the web application cannot really exist. It is not “ready to go live,” a web developer would say. This ritual is the implementation of authentication.
You may have been through this ritual multiple times. But do you really understand what is happening?
This article is my attempt at making this ritual less obscure. It shouldn’t hav