So, web3 regularly gets updated into the front page, only to be utterly trashed in the comments session.
What gives?
Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
101–110 of 319 posts
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#102Federated/Decentralised identity/authentication is a solved problem.
For example, this is essentially OpenID.
Unfortunately this entire concept failed to gain traction.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s even a standard for doing this with WebAuthn.
...which has effectively neither adoption not momentum to achieve adoption: https://sec.okta.com/articles/2020/04/webauthn-great-and-it-... For better or worse, there are a large (and ever growing) number of Metamask users these days...
Absolutely, but let’s not pretend this is some magic technology that only cryptocurrency can solve. Nor is it clear cut that we’ll see adoption of wallet logins outside of crypto circles.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how a blockchain-based approach, with so many disadvantages compared to Persona, could possibly succeed outside of the blockchain enthusiast community What’s in it for the user to sign up for persona? Nothing What’s in it for the user to get a crypto wallet? Money There’s your answer.
I don't know. Brave promised me money, and I still haven't gotten anything of significant value from that.
Really? BAT was pretty profitable. Showing me a few ads as desktop notifications paid for a lot of my transaction costs in the early days. I just looked, BAT is up 754% over all time.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, multiple independent sites could individually ban you. That's a fundamentally different problem, and much much less likely. An antidote to that would be using a different key on each site you authenticate to. You still only need to store a single key, all other keys are derived from that yet cannot be associated with their sibling keys. > What you’re saying is also trust with web3. Not quite sure what you mean…
I’m not sure what your point is here - you could also create a new Google account per website or simply use an email address. The author advocates using third party services such as meta mask, who would need to be trusted. How do you implement it without any third party site. If we are talking about likelihood it’s unlike you’d be banned from Microsoft/Facebook/Google for no reason too. Furthermore as the administrat…
You have to trust MetaMask to some extent, like any software you run locally, but MetaMask never gains control of your keys or identities, it's just a tool for using them (obviously 99.9% of users aren't auditing the code or building from source, but that's a totally different threat model). If MetaMask stops working for you, you can use a different tool with the same keys. If Google stops working for you you cannot transfer your account to Microsoft or Facebook.
> If we are talking about likelihood it’s unlike you’d be banned from Microsoft/Facebook/Google for no reason too.
I've seen posts on this forum about it. It happens and there's not much you can do if it does.
> you could also create a new Google account per website or simply use an email address.
> Furthermore as the administrator how you stop bad actors?
Apologies if I'm missing something, if it's easy to spin up unique identities on both what's the difference here? It seems like it would be one or the other.
And yes you can create a new Google account per website, but you are still at Google's mercy to authenticate. My 1Password has ~250 logins, I'd be seriously worried about a ban from Google if I made 250 accounts.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#106Several years ago, Mozilla/Firefox created "Persona," which was an open-source federated identity system that provided all the benefits described here. The idea was that it would eventually be built into browsers. I used it on a commercial site myself for many years. It failed to gain traction, and Mozilla eventually pulled the plug. Persona had many advantages over the Web3 vision described in this article. It was p…
The Persona team approached the company I was working for, asking us to add Persona login alongside our other login options. Mozilla came to us because we had a huge web presence at the time (about the size of Wordpress, let's say). We discussed it internally and ultimately rejected their request. We were going through a re-org and just didn't have anyone to spare. We were also rewriting the component where the login…
> I also wonder why nobody has tried it since.
For what it's worth, the vision does live on and people are working on developing web standards that get us closer towards it. One example is the W3C's "Credential Management Level 1" from 2019, which specifically references[0] Mozilla's work:
"The API defined here does the bare minimum to expose user agent’s credential managers to the web, and allows the web to help those credential managers understand when federated identity providers are in use. The next logical step will be along the lines sketched in documents like [WEB-LOGIN] (and, to some extent, Mozilla’s BrowserID [BROWSERID])."
More recently, in fact, today, I see there is a "Federated Credential Management API" draft published,[1] which has the goal of:
"enabling a website to request a users [sic] federated credentials from a user agent, and to help the user agent store the users [sic] federated credentials for future use."
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/credential-management-1/#teh-futur
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#107The major issue with the article is that the source of the described problems are due to business agenda and not technology. Everybody can run an OAuth2 authority but of course of only tech giants have the marketing to lure everybody into their nest.
Technology won't fix greed which drives business.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. Brave promised me money, and I still haven't gotten anything of significant value from that.
Really? BAT was pretty profitable. Showing me a few ads as desktop notifications paid for a lot of my transaction costs in the early days. I just looked, BAT is up 754% over all time.
Twice, on different devices, I tried Brave as my default browser for month with ads turned on, and both times after a month of clicking on ads, the browser still said I had 0.0 BAT.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure what your point is here - you could also create a new Google account per website or simply use an email address. The author advocates using third party services such as meta mask, who would need to be trusted. How do you implement it without any third party site. If we are talking about likelihood it’s unlike you’d be banned from Microsoft/Facebook/Google for no reason too. Furthermore as the administrat…
You have to trust MetaMask to some extent, like any software you run locally, but MetaMask never gains control of your keys or identities, it's just a tool for using them (obviously 99.9% of users aren't auditing the code or building from source, but that's a totally different threat model). If MetaMask stops working for you, you can use a different tool with the same keys . If Google stops working for you you cannot…
> Apologies if I'm missing something, if it's easy to spin up unique identities on both what's the difference here? It seems like it would be one or the other.
Yes except for a centralized entity the admin would have recourse. How does a web server admin deal with it in the case of blockchain?
> I've seen posts on this forum about it. It happens and there's not much you can do if it does.
If we are talking about anecdotes I’ve seen people lose their private keys to phishing and consequently all of their money, so…
> You have to trust MetaMask to some extent, like any software you run locally, but MetaMask never gains control of your keys or identities, it's just a tool for using them (obviously 99.9% of users aren't auditing the code or building from source, but that's a totally different threat model). If MetaMask stops working for you, you can use a different tool with the same keys. If Google stops working for you you cannot transfer your account to Microsoft or Facebook.
This is not true, depending on implementation. Even if we accept what you’re saying as true you can run your own oauth server.
Basically it seems the entirety of your argument rests upon trusting a centralized service. However the scenarios posited by the author are ones where blockchain is used to login to a centralized service to begin with so I don’t understand the criticism. Furthermore, unless one is to accept the infinite possibility and quantity of accounts, inevitably just like most other identity services, blacklists will be created.
If that is not effective then blockchain will simply not be an option for most sites.
Ultimately this convoluted web3 is no better than using an email address forwarder and a regular email and password.
Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1
#110What’s even the difference between «owning your digital identity» with email/password vs any other authentication method? Why does it even matter [0]? You don’t own any data connected to that digital identity [1]. I might be a bit on a radical side here, but to me it’s either you own everything or you own nothing. There’s no in-between.
[0] Except for OAuth since OAuth provider could ban you at any time.
[1] Until it's encrypted with your own public key and isn't stored anywhere in plaintext. Which can't be 100% guaranteed with any proprietary 3rd party service.