271–280 of 319 posts
Why can't this be done with existing public key cryptography?
It can. The biggest success of crypto has been putting public/private key pairs in the hands of 10s of millions of people.
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It feels like you're trying really hard to not get web3 any credit here. Try making something like this in the traditional web. People have tried and failed. Ethereum provides a robust, secure, and increasingly usable key storage and usage system to everyone which makes "just signing a message" a simple task and not a 10 step process probably involving a CLI. It's worth considering the utility of this and the possibi…
I haven’t heard a convincing argument for why only ethereum can get users to use key pairs. You can improve the UX of key management tools without a global network of redundant computers.
I never said this.
>You can improve the UX of key management tools without a global network of redundant computers
Yet nobody has ever done it until now.
The only thing blockchain would add is a gas fee whenever I would log in somewhere, and would keep the same UX problems I'd have with login anywhere else.
Keep in mind the most successful project EVER in managing identity was let's encrypt. A centralized non-profit that got the internet to use https everywhere by signing ssl certificates and vouching for everyone's server for free, and as far as I can tell without collecting any personal data about anyone. Web3 is going to solve "this" (whatever this is)... Riiight.
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> Websites that integrate web3 wallet login do get something new: built-in, straightforward payment rails. Is this really any better than Apple/Google pay? Those are already set up, trustworthy, I don't need to convert my fiat into a cryptocurrency than can swing in value wildly, and it's super easy to set up with stripe or any of the other platforms that the website is probably already using.
What happens if Visa/Mastercard decides to block the merchant you want to use? Or you yourself are a merchant that gets hit with high fees simply because you're in a business that is deemed "high-risk"
Several 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…
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> Yeah I think it is mostly businesses that think this is a huge problem to solve to have identities matched across everything seamlessly. Your comment just gave me a thought - just imagine the online advertisers using this for tracking purposes! At the risk of spreading FUD, it would not surprise me to learn that perhaps this web3 thing is being fuelled/funded by the existing crop of online advertising networks or t…
> At the risk of spreading FUD, it would not surprise me to learn that perhaps this web3 thing is being fuelled/funded by the existing crop of online advertising networks or their close associates? Hardly FUD, of course these companies are watching. They have more cash than they know what to do with. They will acquire anything that even remotely takes off (even by the low standards of crypto). Google acquired their w…
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> That being said, if (major if) auth through web3 did take off, I wouldn't be surprised if over time it slowly creeped back toward a solution that doesn't use blockchain since a non-blockchain solution would probably be simpler, cheaper, and faster. I don't think you necessarily need blockchain. Can't you just prove that you are who you say by signing something and sending it to the service? You can just use the pro…
> I don't think you necessarily need blockchain. Can't you just prove that you are who you say by signing something and sending it to the service? It's important to remember that blockchains are just public-key cryptography where you have a private key that can sign things and, importantly, everyone knows everyone else's verified public keys. That's it. It solves the key distribution and verification problem that PGP…
Also GPG doesn’t have a key distribution problem. You can spin up a keyserver or use a popular existing one.
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And none of that has anything to do with blockchain.
It feels like you're trying really hard to not get web3 any credit here. Try making something like this in the traditional web. People have tried and failed. Ethereum provides a robust, secure, and increasingly usable key storage and usage system to everyone which makes "just signing a message" a simple task and not a 10 step process probably involving a CLI. It's worth considering the utility of this and the possibi…
Unless you were to upload each and every chat to a blockchain - which is prohibitively expensive - I don’t see the killer advantage over the previous alternatives. Also, many people here are also programmers, developers, and - surprise - hackers, so I am sure we would be interested in the mouth-watering use cases you’re thinking of (I looked at the Tweet thread you linked but it was just an explanation of public key cryptography in general.)
[^1]: Apple also refused to backdoor a terrorist’s iPhone at the demand of the FBI. OpenSea intervened when someone stole assets from a collector (https://blockzeit.com/opensea-nft-marketplace-stops-hacker-f...)
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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.
The web3 solution is significantly easier than webauthn, if what I read in the above article is to be believed.
The point still is that logging in with public-key cryptography is not exclusively a technology supported by cryptowallets.
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What happens if Visa/Mastercard decides to block the merchant you want to use? Or you yourself are a merchant that gets hit with high fees simply because you're in a business that is deemed "high-risk"
Fair, but that seems like a really really small segment of the market assuming it's legal. For 99% of businesses I don't think this is an issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/business/visa-mastercard-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/20/tech/onlyfans-explicit-co...