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The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

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Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#21

Post by sksksk »

vasilakisfil wrote: post #9

The future of online identity is indeed decentralized and not distributed, meaning that users will always have some super nodes to handle their identity on behalf of them. In my opinion Facebook/Twitter/etc are not identity providers, they are silos. Sure they are very successful ones and can even used as identity providers at some places, but as long as they don't open up they can easily die anytime. The author sugg…

They did offer @facebook enails once, and it would integrate with your messages app.

It didn’t really take off though, and I guess was quietly withdrawn.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#22

Post by api »

edoceo wrote: post #14
kory wrote: post #8

If anything, my bet is the future of identity is more centralized. Decentralized solutions, as I've read about them in their current form, require a significant amount of technical knowledge to understand. That is, to understand both what they are and, more importantly, their benefits ("why does this specific solution matter to me?"). Past that, the user experience is extremely poor in comparison to clicking "log in…

Couldn't the UX just be improved and deliver the benefit while hiding the complexity?

Yes, but that requires an economic model. UX is often well over 90% of the work for a product and usually includes a ton of work that is not much fun and people have to be paid to do.

Centralized has subscriptions, advertising, and "surveillance capitalism." Decentralized has nothing. I had some hope that cryptocurrency would provide some kind of mechanism, but cryptocurrency was taken over and destroyed by scammers and bad money drives out good.

The lack of an economic model is IMHO why decentralized solutions have not succeeded, not technical challenges.

One possibility would be to abandon the free as in beer part of open source ideology and go back to just charging for software, but licensing and payment add friction and it's very hard to compete with "free" options funded surreptitiously via surveillance.

BTW the fact that cryptocurrency was destroyed by scammers and criminals highlights a second huge issue: it seems to take the efficiency, executive ability, coordination, and direct human guidance of a centralized system to resist bad actors. This is why even the most democratic countries have mechanisms to phase shift into dictatorships during emergency or war. I have yet to see a decentralized system that became popular and was not instantly destroyed by black hats.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#24

Post by rendaw »

uniqueid wrote: post #11

In my ideal world, we have a framework for brick-and-mortar businesses to act as internet notary service providers. If you want a general-purpose open-id style account, you visit a notary, and provide them with a fee and proof of your identity. You tell the notary how much information they can share (in particular, whether they can release your name to the internet, or just the "we verified this account is held by a…

It could also make things like online voting (like, for winners in a contest or features in software) possible which would otherwise be impossible due to multiple accounts.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#25

Post by aaron-santos »

uniqueid wrote: post #11

In my ideal world, we have a framework for brick-and-mortar businesses to act as internet notary service providers. If you want a general-purpose open-id style account, you visit a notary, and provide them with a fee and proof of your identity. You tell the notary how much information they can share (in particular, whether they can release your name to the internet, or just the "we verified this account is held by a…

Who notarizes the notaries?

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#26

Post by vmception »

smt88 wrote: post #10
vmception wrote: post #4

in before everyone shills their unnecessarily tokenized identity cryptocurrency that nobody ever used and never ever will

I 100% agree with you, but generally I find "in before..." comments to be unhelpful at best and harmful to the discussion at worst. In the latter case, it's typically because it's not only attacking on a straw man, it's actually announcing, "Hey, I'm creating a straw man!" at the beginning of the comment. If you do want to head off the crypto founders before they show up, perhaps you could write a comment along the l…

or

"I predict from prior experience that a bunch of cryptocurrency identity bagholders from 2017 will show up to shill their useless project not realizing it will never catch on and that product's adoption will never buoy their bags even if it did catch on"

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#27

Post by kory »

edoceo wrote: post #14
kory wrote: post #8

If anything, my bet is the future of identity is more centralized. Decentralized solutions, as I've read about them in their current form, require a significant amount of technical knowledge to understand. That is, to understand both what they are and, more importantly, their benefits ("why does this specific solution matter to me?"). Past that, the user experience is extremely poor in comparison to clicking "log in…

Couldn't the UX just be improved and deliver the benefit while hiding the complexity?

The UX isn't the most looming problem, but it's one that needs to be solved. My question is: How in the world would you convince people to use keys to verify their accounts to one unique, anonymous, identity, as the OP suggests? I just don't see it being something people would spend the time to do. Not to mention, getting to a "Login with Google" level of UX, available as universally as "Login with Google", would be extremely hard without a centralized authority.

The bigger problem is convincing people that it's worth switching. Apple is the closest to doing this with "sign in with Apple". "Sign in with Apple" hides your identity from the client site, the value prop is clear for the user, and the process as close to frictionless as possible. But the solution is still "centralized". Apple stores all of the information to make the system as frictionless as it is.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#29

Post by uniqueid »

orf wrote: post #18
uniqueid wrote: post #11

In my ideal world, we have a framework for brick-and-mortar businesses to act as internet notary service providers. If you want a general-purpose open-id style account, you visit a notary, and provide them with a fee and proof of your identity. You tell the notary how much information they can share (in particular, whether they can release your name to the internet, or just the "we verified this account is held by a…

> You could have a notary vouch that you're a licensed driver, or have a college degree, visited a certain country, etc. Humans, generally, are very bad at caching document fraud. It wouldn't be a vouch for a licensed driver but instead it would be a vouch for "a bit of plastic that looked like a driving license to me". There is lots of sophisticated fraud and often automated solutions have a much higher rate of dete…

Absolutely! It would be far from perfect, and, but for the worst-case scenario that the internet currently embodies, not worth pursuing. But there's so much room for improvement today. Just placing a barrier against sock puppet accounts would already be a huge win.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#30

Post by nsl73 »

uniqueid wrote: post #11

In my ideal world, we have a framework for brick-and-mortar businesses to act as internet notary service providers. If you want a general-purpose open-id style account, you visit a notary, and provide them with a fee and proof of your identity. You tell the notary how much information they can share (in particular, whether they can release your name to the internet, or just the "we verified this account is held by a…

Why would I ever trust a notary?

As a person being notarized it sounds like I have to give that business more personal information about myself than I usually have to do to get an online identity, as suggested by your subpoena statement.

As a service trying to verify accounts I now have to trust a third party. Maybe the notary has a business that sells fake IDs in the back that are then used in the notarizing process. Maybe my competition set up a burner notary node in order to flood my service with malicious accounts. It sounds like an attack vector.

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