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Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

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Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#241

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

iskander wrote: post #74
superfrank wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite these advantages, Persona failed. 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. And, on a technical level, a federated approach seems innumerably simpler and less wasteful than a blockchain-based approach. Sometimes it's all about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right a…

For all of its flaws, I find the web3 space fun...but I'm also hoping that some of the non-financialized use cases move to other kinds of distributed algorithms, like Hypercore ( https://hypercore-protocol.org/ ). Even if the technological ideal comes to fruition in a few years (sharded modular proof-of-stake consensus blockchains with zero-knowledge rollups and dedicated data availability layers), it will still eter…

I see the speculation-everywhere mode that web3 is currently in as a something that the future web will occasionally devolve into.

An idea will come along that enough of us can get behind, that idea will attract money and solve real problems for a while and when they're no longer problematic enough to warrant spending money on the system will collapse back into speculation hell until the next idea-that-we-can-get-behind comes along.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#242

Post by threeseed »

thebean11 wrote: post #92
endisneigh wrote: post #84

So what happens when you get phished with Web3? If the value of all crypto goes down 10% YoY why would you use it? The author makes a bunch of silly assumptions: > 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 pr…

Identities on Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are not portable. They can permanently ban you and you lose access to every single service you used them to authenticate to. Private keys are portable between wallets.

Which is a problem 99.999999999% of people will never experience in their lifetime.

And even if it is a problem you can always reach out to the website and get them involved in moving your account to a different provider.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#243

Post by threeseed »

serverholic wrote: post #154
roca wrote: post #138

I'm open to the idea that there are real problems that are best solved by PoW/PoS blockchains and smart contracts, so I was hoping this article would reveal one. It doesn't. As mentioned elsewhere, Persona was already a perfectly good technical solution to this, years ago. It failed for various reasons, none of which would be addressed by blockchains/smart contracts. Likewise, the problem of "conveniently and securel…

Have you actually used a web3 website? Once you have your wallet setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had. Also, I find it funny whenever someone says something like "web3 doesn't actually solve anything that hasn't been solved by other technologies like X". Then why isn't anyone using X? Why is nobody using Persona or Webauthn despite being "superior"?

Have you actually used a web2 website with a Mac ?

For every website I can just press TouchID once, it will auto complete my credentials and click the login button for me. I can't see how web3 could possibly be faster.

Plus I can still access that website on any device e.g. public or work computer without needing to worry if I can install a Chrome plugin.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#244

Post by PragmaticPulp »

serverholic wrote: post #154
roca wrote: post #138

I'm open to the idea that there are real problems that are best solved by PoW/PoS blockchains and smart contracts, so I was hoping this article would reveal one. It doesn't. As mentioned elsewhere, Persona was already a perfectly good technical solution to this, years ago. It failed for various reasons, none of which would be addressed by blockchains/smart contracts. Likewise, the problem of "conveniently and securel…

Have you actually used a web3 website? Once you have your wallet setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had. Also, I find it funny whenever someone says something like "web3 doesn't actually solve anything that hasn't been solved by other technologies like X". Then why isn't anyone using X? Why is nobody using Persona or Webauthn despite being "superior"?

> Have you actually used a web3 website? Once you have your wallet setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had.

So much of the web3 discourse involves the same two tropes:

1) "If you ignore the hard parts and only focus on the easy parts, then it looks much easier"

2) Ignoring the fact that regular old solutions are actually even more streamlined. It's not like web3 invented the concept of storing credentials and auto-filling forms. These are basic features used by hundreds of millions of end-users on a daily basis. It takes mountains of effort to get web3 just to almost reach UX parity with what we already have.

The only way web3 can feel like a better UX is if you haven't bothered to try any recent UX advancements in regular, non-web3 technologies.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#245

Post by readams »

Sargos wrote: post #232
bko wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But it doesn't solve that at all since there's no way to tie something on the block chain to the real world. All the same problems of knowing whether some particular PGP key belongs to the person you want apply the same to a wallet address.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#246

Post by threeseed »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #58

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…

> 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.

I work for a bank and it has nothing to do with being old school. We use exactly the same technologies as any modern startup would e.g. Serverless, Kubernetes, Cloud etc and deploy into Production with blue/green releases every week.

It's just that the user experience of our entire customer base comes first. And whilst everyone "gets" usernames, passwords, PINs, TouchID, FaceID etc they really don't understand OAuth and other federated identity approaches. Like what Google or Amazon has to do with my finances and why I have to visit their site to reset my password.

People thinking that Web3 is going to solve this problem really don't understand that it isn't a problem that needs solving.

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#247

Post by epolanski »

ranger207 wrote: post #53

As other comments have pointed out, there are other technical solutions to decentralized identity. The blockchain doesn't solve this problem any better than private keys or Persona or whatever. The article acknowledges this. The problem with existing solutions is not the technical problem, it's the social problem: making the new solution easy to use, fixing bugs and covering edge cases, and getting it deployed widely…

Ownership IRL is proved by notarial deeds, what do you want to prove with a blockchain and how?

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#248

Post by accountofme »

Sargos wrote: post #232
bko wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How does everyone know everyone's verified public keys? How are they verified? Who does the verification? How do you trust the verifiers? How do you know that person x in the real world has pubkey x?

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#249

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rchaud wrote: post #169
endisneigh wrote: post #84

So what happens when you get phished with Web3? If the value of all crypto goes down 10% YoY why would you use it? The author makes a bunch of silly assumptions: > 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 pr…

> No, this is not true. That's why most people on this site are not logging in through Google. Sites will store their own data, and if you trust them to store that data there’s really no reason to just trust them to store a link to your identity. You're missing the point. Yes, we don't need oAuth to log into HN. But HN is a site that is over 15 years old, and reflects the technology of its time. Instead, look at the…

> Reddit is roughly HN's age, and you can see that with the introduction of VC money and profit goals, they've shifted towards discouraging anonymous logins.

And what, you think they'll be okay with anonymous users if those users log in with web3?

Re: Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1

#250

Post by BoppreH »

The proposal is strictly inferior to SQRL[1] plus emailing your friends shares of your secret[2]. You get private keys, no third parties at all, social recovery, but with no Blockchain costs. Bonus point: you automatically get a pseudonym for each app.

The point about financial incentives aligning more easily in web3 is good, but I understood that even the poster child Metamask is not complete as it's missing good social recovery UX.

Please stop trying to sell snake oil.

[1]: https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

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