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Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

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Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#31

Post by whoknew1122 »

chrischen wrote: post #26
whoknew1122 wrote: post #20

So the Director of Operations of ENS Domains says Ethereum has solved an extremely solved problem and one of the cornerstones of that solution is... wait for it... ENS Domains. Gotcha. I also take issue with: >Ethereum is giving average ppl computer generated public/private key pairs... 'Average' people aren't into crypto. And the average computer user doesn't know how to use asymmetric keypairs. Anyone want to try t…

What is this hypothetical “average” person, and if you aren’t one (presumably) then how do you know what they are?

I work in support for AWS's security services, which includes both web auth and encryption services. I deal with plenty of IT professionals every single day that don't have a solid grasp on concepts like "don't attach your private key to a support case".

If IT professionals--who are presumably above average in IT knowledge since it's what pays their bills--don't uniformly understand how to handle asymmetric keys, what hope do most non-professionals have?

Do I know the exact profile of what the average computer user is? No, but I'd bet a paycheck that it doesn't include using crypto or private/public keys.

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#32

Post by mondoveneziano »

bl557 wrote: post #23
mondoveneziano wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable. This is generally a concern I have about blockchain technology. What if it succeeds in its goal to play a major role in some sector, and something immensely important becomes attached to it. Mistakes happen. Both by humans and by computers. Software having bugs, hardware failing, bits rando…

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo.

Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened.

Would you be happy with the outcome of this simple mistake being irreversible?

If not, and if you think litigation should retransfer ownership to you, what is the value of an immutable ledger, if the house went to a malicious party who does not intend to perform the transfer on said ledger, or to an address without private key, making transfer not possible in the first place?

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#33

Post by _hyn3 »

bl557 wrote: post #23
mondoveneziano wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable. This is generally a concern I have about blockchain technology. What if it succeeds in its goal to play a major role in some sector, and something immensely important becomes attached to it. Mistakes happen. Both by humans and by computers. Software having bugs, hardware failing, bits rando…

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Could you explain this a bit more; how does the logic/argument that the problems an immutable blockchain present in this SSO scenario (namely, that it's basically unfixable as a total system) follow that we would never drive cars etc if we continued in that line of thinking?

Cars/planes/rockets seem to be fixable most of the time, or at least we would prefer them to be. (The last one is probably the least-easily fixable, and that is generally considered to be a negative attribute -- something to be mitigated, not celebrated -- and requires careful and even over-engineering because it's so hard/risky to fix a rocket in space.)

Or, perhaps I am completely misunderstanding your point?

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#34

Post by _hyn3 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #32
bl557 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo. Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred…

Excellent points. Many real-world problems that people are seeking to solve with a blockchain are often not good fits for the unique attributes that a blockchain has. Many of these problems are best suited to continued centralized administration, or targeted improvements without changing the entire governance model.

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#35

Post by xur17 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #32
bl557 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo. Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred…

> Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened.

I've thought about this a lot, and I think the solution is to use something similar to "social recovery wallets" [0], but with a dao (group of people) as the recovery mechanism. Basically, assume that the blockchain has the correct owner, and require very strong proof to overturn. This has the advantage of making 99.9% of transfers very cheap, rather than 100% of transfers expensive as is now.

RealT is a company that sells "tokenized" real estate, and they do something like this. They assume the ownership on the blockchain is correct, but you can contact them, and they can overturn ownership if you prove that it was stolen or transferred erroneously. I'd personally take this one step further and have a group of people in the community that oversee the process (basically a court, but a lot more efficient and transparent).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477940

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#36

Post by mondoveneziano »

xur17 wrote: post #35
mondoveneziano wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo. Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred…

> Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened. I've thought about this a lot, and I think the solution is to use something similar to "social recovery wallets" [0], but wit…

If the company in your example can be contacted to overturn ownership, essentially degenerating the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger to levels comparable of existing solutions, then what is the actual advantage of this not only inefficient, but inefficient by design method of bookkeeping?

I find it hard to reconcile "99.9% of transfers very cheap" with the property that at least proof-of-work and proof-of-space actively rely on literally counteracting any effort at becoming more efficient.

"Classical" distributed ledgers in databases are not already more efficient by several orders of magnitude, they are made more efficient through advancements of technology, and those efficiency gains are actively sought out by participants, given that they usually directly translate into profit through reduction of overhead.

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#37

Post by fanf2 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #10

This is an extremely solved problem. Unless you have a dramatically interesting solution to the real hard problem, global account recovery , ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that's how you reset a login. Since you're doing that already, "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple" are perfectly cromulent solutions and likely to continue dominating. The actual last thing…

> The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable. This is generally a concern I have about blockchain technology. What if it succeeds in its goal to play a major role in some sector, and something immensely important becomes attached to it. Mistakes happen. Both by humans and by computers. Software having bugs, hardware failing, bits rando…

The main practical example is git. It does have some partial mitigations for fixing its historical record, for example the mailmap file for correcting names and email addresses. And, I suppose in the worst case a project could rebase its entire history to expunge illegal commits.

Fortunately there’s little chance of blockchain as in cryptocurrency succeeding outside the scammers and their marks.

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#38

Post by xur17 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #36
xur17 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred to someone else, or lost to an address with no existing private key. Alternatively, you were in the process of buying a house when the same happened. I've thought about this a lot, and I think the solution is to use something similar to "social recovery wallets" [0], but wit…

If the company in your example can be contacted to overturn ownership, essentially degenerating the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger to levels comparable of existing solutions, then what is the actual advantage of this not only inefficient, but inefficient by design method of bookkeeping? I find it hard to reconcile "99.9% of transfers very cheap" with the property that at least proof-of-work and proof-…

> If the company in your example can be contacted to overturn ownership, essentially degenerating the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger to levels comparable of existing solutions, then what is the actual advantage of this not only inefficient, but inefficient by design method of bookkeeping?

Currently when you buy a house, you have to go through a decent amount of effort both in time and money to essentially determine "who owns this house, and are there any liens on it". By using tokenized ownership, you can get rid of this part. Yes, it's not ideal that someone can override the ownership, but it's setup in a way that requires extensive effort and documentation to do.

Ideally the party that could overturn ownership wouldn't be a company, but instead would be an elected, large group of people that determined this. And maybe there could be a way to opt out or select an alternate override?

The point is that this system can be a ton more efficient, enable additional abilities (fractional ownership, instant, extremely low fee loans, etc), all things that the existing system does not allow. Yes, allowing ownership overriding isn't ideal, but I don't think allowing a group to override ownership in a transparent way completely negates all benefits of a system like this.

> I find it hard to reconcile "99.9% of transfers very cheap" with the property that at least proof-of-work and proof-of-space actively rely on literally counteracting any effort at becoming more efficient.

Ethereum will be moving to proof of stake in a year or 2 (> $10B are locked up until this occurs, so I am very confident it will happen).

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#39

Post by bl557 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #32
bl557 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Let's ignore space, where currently the highly elevated risk is well known to the few participants. If we could undo car and plane crashes, we would do it. We cannot, and my question is whether we want to force the same property on accidents that we currently can safely undo. Another example: Let's assume ownership of a house is defined by a blockchain. Through a mistake, ownership of your house has been transferred…

Good points, and in response I would say that not everything needs to happen directly on chain. Just as an example there can be some company that develops an interface between the blockchain and the user that audits their code, insures themselves in the case of software bugs, and provides users with the ability to eject their assets from the platform. Maybe there are regulations that protect consumers against these problems. Crypto/blockchain UX is not even in the "command line" phase yet, we're still writing punch cards and feeding them into computers in my opinion :)

Re: Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On

#40

Post by bl557 »

_hyn3 wrote: post #33
bl557 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by that logic we would never drive cars, ride airplanes, go to space, etc

Could you explain this a bit more; how does the logic/argument that the problems an immutable blockchain present in this SSO scenario (namely, that it's basically unfixable as a total system) follow that we would never drive cars etc if we continued in that line of thinking? Cars/planes/rockets seem to be fixable most of the time, or at least we would prefer them to be. (The last one is probably the least-easily fixa…

The post i was responding to made the point - "do we want to attach extremely important things to a system that is by design irreversible?

Human life is both extremely important, and the loss of it is irreversible, at least for now :). People generally seem to be willing to take risks for the sake of convenience.

But in the end I believe we should be able to have our cake and eat it too - that is benefit from blockchain tech with safeguards preventing such scenarios

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