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Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

billprin.com

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Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#62
I'm reading this with an open mind, but I have questions:

> Problem #1: Owning Your Own Digital Identity & Fixing Authentication

My very technical friends who are security minded are on keybase.io. Multiple usernames and passwords across the internet is solved in various ways without blockchain. There are a lot of good password managers (I use and encrypted text file.) I don't feel Google owns my identity because I use their authentication system, so unless I'm missing something, I don't see a problem.

> enables advanced features like social recovery, which lets you recover your account if you lose your key via a smart contract that takes votes from guardians (friends or paid services).

> The idea here is that you could give keys to your friends and family, or to some sort of business service, then if you lose your key, use your friends to “vouch” for you and move the account to a new key.

This doesn't seem very workable in a practical sense. It seems like this could be spoofed fairly easily or the business service gets hacked

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#63

... why would I want to share my wallet to something I trust less than a strange dog? Or part of my identity? No thanks. One of the great things about usernames/passwords is it didn't demand that vulnerability - you could come up with whatever and it was your responsibility to keep up with your shit. Systems that mimic real world systems on average feel less prone to this silliness.

email/password is terrible UX for vast majority of user. it's forgettable, it's not secure, and it exists only because it have existed since dawn of computers.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#65

I honestly thought this was going to be a joke post because that top image is ridiculous. Maybe I'm just old, but it reads to me as Web 1.0: Great Web 2.0: Ugh, ok Web 3.0: You're serious with this?

It's not Web 3.0, that was the semantic web, which also aimed in some sense to be decentralized data but wasn't about turning the internet itself into a vehicle for ridicules investment ponzi-schemes. The "new" one is Web3

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#66
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

federated systems are bad, they combine the negatives of centralized and decentralized systems it is no wonder that they fail repeatedly

Perhaps, but I think in this case what killed Persona was lack of adoption and interest from the public, nothing inherent to the actual technology

Yea, but that's kind of my point. Actually decentralized software is just out there and you can use it if you find a use case for yourself, there is no one that would shut it down if it isn't popular enough.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#67
> We need some way of saying “who we are” on the internet in a consistent manner. That way we can communicate with others in a verified way and associate with digital data that we own. We also often need that data to be interoperable between different web properties.

Do we really need this? Do we really want to permanently tie identity across websites like this? I find this initial "need"/justification/requirement questionable.

I have a login on HN that is totally unique to e.g. Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn. Same with work vs personal. This is deliberate. I do not want to have the same identity here as I do elsewhere. There are many hopefully obvious reasons for this - mostly privacy (both in terms of immediate "in the moment" privacy, but also temporal privacy in the sense that I might not want some potentially ill-advised comments I made on some website 15 years ago to come back and bite me), but also it offers protections against "cancel culture" and general cyber-stalking and doxxing etc as that would become a whole lot easier if you can just run some query on a blockchain and find every single website I've ever used and dredge up my comments/content/etc. Being able to do that sounds very dystopian to me - why don't we just tattoo a barcode on our necks and be done with it?

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#68

I'm reading this with an open mind, but I have questions: > Problem #1: Owning Your Own Digital Identity & Fixing Authentication My very technical friends who are security minded are on keybase.io. Multiple usernames and passwords across the internet is solved in various ways without blockchain. There are a lot of good password managers (I use and encrypted text file.) I don't feel Google owns my identity because I u…

Alone the audacity to think a single point of failure without any chance of recovery is a good idea for persona management in the real world is insane.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#69

He isn't describing the true state of the world. Banks, brokerages, mortgage providers, and medical entities mostly don't use oauth2 and won't use this stuff either. The world is still old school. Grandpa dies and I go find the paper will. I get an affidavit from a lawyer and a death certificate with a seal from the state. I go into the bank with a bunch of papers and they figure out what to do. There isn't a chain o…

It's forever off because it's the wrong solution to a problem that no one is invested in even fully identifying let alone working at.

My hot-take parallel argument is that full self driving is a smart road problem with 'dumber' cars and not a dumb road and smart cars problem. But there's no scope to VC of profit your way into smart road infrastructure so we do it the wrong way round and hope we can throw resources at it till its fixed.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#70

I honestly thought this was going to be a joke post because that top image is ridiculous. Maybe I'm just old, but it reads to me as Web 1.0: Great Web 2.0: Ugh, ok Web 3.0: You're serious with this?

Agreed - the UX mock up there looks awful. If you go look at coinmarketcap.com there are already hundreds of coins out there. Are users going to have to find their wallet from hundreds/thousands on the lists? Or are maybe not all sites going to support every wallet, so therefore you're going to need to have multiple wallets to support multiple sites ... suddenly that "consistent identity" fails as you are actually juggling 20-30+ wallets for logging into different sites.

.... or it ends up that everyone just logs in using an ethereum wallet and you're back to centralisation.

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