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Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity
#52I don't really see what this gives over Auth0, Orly or various other identity providers which have social login plugins available…and none of those seem to be involved with anything related to smart contracts, which makes them infinitely preferable in my opinion.
You don't need to register with the various providers or set up any plugins. You set things up once and then you're done. See Dick's comment about the reg bit at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180661 Also, jrockway shared relevant Auth0 comments in this discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180939 . Is your reluctance around smart contracts influenced at all by https://www.hello.coop/pages/fina…
Not at all. I do not believe that smart contracts are a feature. With smart contracts, there's a shift to mostly untested buggy contracts written on buggy and wasteful execution systems (e.g., Ethereum or some other crypto-chain). It's also completely unclear whether "smart" contracts would be considered enforceable in many or most jurisdictions.
There's well-documented failures of so-called "smart" contracts, and IMO building something like this on top of one is a recipe for disaster, just like the rest of the crypto-blockchain ecosystem.
Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't feel like it's worth giving up control over your user's authentication to an intermediary in return for saving a week of work. Maybe the case could be made for day-1 of a startup, but certainly not year-1, it's just too critical a component. Are you not outsourcing to an intermediary with Apple/FB/Google? Authentication is critical. Completely agree. It is also not a differentiator for your application unle…
> Are you not outsourcing to an intermediary with Apple/FB/Google? This is a product decision, it gets you better security (on average), brand association that may be good for the right product/SSO combination, easier signup (at least in theory), and in many cases is necessary for integrations with those services. Using Hellō gets you better security (on average), but not as much as going direct. It loses some of the…
As a developer, you don't know which provider the user has chosen, and the provider does not know which apps the user is using, improving privacy and resiliency.
> And it likely complicates integrations with the services. If you want access to resources at the provider, such as Google Calendar, then you will need to directly integrate to get the access token. Hellō provides identity, not access to resources.
Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to register with the various providers or set up any plugins. You set things up once and then you're done. See Dick's comment about the reg bit at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180661 Also, jrockway shared relevant Auth0 comments in this discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180939 . Is your reluctance around smart contracts influenced at all by https://www.hello.coop/pages/fina…
Not at all. I do not believe that smart contracts are a feature. With smart contracts, there's a shift to mostly untested buggy contracts written on buggy and wasteful execution systems (e.g., Ethereum or some other crypto-chain). It's also completely unclear whether "smart" contracts would be considered enforceable in many or most jurisdictions. There's well-documented failures of so-called "smart" contracts, and IM…
Agree that there have been many failures in the smart contract market.
In contrast to many crypto projects, we are only using smart contracts for financing Hellō so that we can separate the return on investment from the cooperative governance. This removes one of the common failure modes of governance gone awry.
There is significant innovation in the crypto ecosystem and while there are failures (as there will be with any novel technology) there are also successes. As we don’t need to issue any smart contracts in the immediate future, we will be able to build upon the successes.
Re: Show HN: Hellō, a cooperative approach for online identity
#55Hi HN! I’m Dick Hardt[1]. Over the last twenty years, I’ve led the design of identity standards (OAuth 2.0, JWT) and systems that you and billions of others use every day.[2] You know that these systems don’t always work in your favor. Each is bespoke and most, if not all, of your identity is locked up in these silos. I called this out in my Identity 2.0 OSCON talk in 2005 where I popularized a user-centric identity…
> - How we’ll fund Hellō with smart contracts extremely hard for me to get excited about something that has blockchain in it these days
The blockchain aspect is not supposed to get you excited. :)
As a co-operative we don't have equity to sell for financing. Tokens enable us to separate ROI from governance, and many investors are willing to invest in tokens.
As a developer or user, the blockchain aspect is hopefully irrelevant.