51–60 of 67 posts
Web2 is not perfect but all the complexity brought by web>2 is just not worth the bits it’s written in.
Make something simple and easy to use and understand, dammit. I don’t want my mum to call me because her identity provider for Instagram is down.
Blockchain. It's always blockchain. Can we just not? How about we go back to web 1.0. TLS mutual cert auth with an ID card as a smart card, either from the government or from your favourite third party. Or maybe we go back to web 2.0 with OpenID. Users pick their own identity providers and websites can pick which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Actually, we already have that, and it's "sign in with Google/…
If I need to prove my date of birth, why not present a credential, signed by the vital records agency of where I was born to prove it without any data broker in the middle?
As I said 48 days ago when this last came up on YC, the classic "Why your idea for stopping spam sucks" list applies.[1] Go re-read that and you'll see the same identity problems and proposed solutions. If people can create and abandon identities cheaply. they will use those identities for annoyance or fraud. Hence spam, robocalls, etc. This is also why the "federated" social networks are not too useful. On the other…
Bullshit on at least a couple fronts. First, even when people strongly have their real identity tied to their digital or other activities, it amazingly often does nearly nothing at all to stop them from all kinds of spammy abuse, fraud, lying, trolling and all sorts of bad behavior. This happens across the board, world-wide in any non-personal social or digital setting. Secondly, I'd argue that the ability to "decent…
The article completely misses the mark in creating some weird narrative about 'web3 turning into web5', all seemingly based on a wordplay announcement by Dorsey, thereby giving that project a lot of undue credibility. In reality, many of the good projects and people referenced at the end of the article have been working for years without any notion that their projects are sprung out of some hyped but underspecified '…
OP here. Did not mean to imply that web5 sprung out of web3 in any sense. Really I just found web3 to be a useful reference point for explaining SSI. Lots of people understand how web3 works at this point, but there's way less mindshare around the idea of a digital wallet that actually holds credentials and not just private keys. To that end, I'm generally happy to support the hype, and hope this stuff gets more atte…
It's really hard for anyone unfamiliar to the area to not read that in your article. To take three quotes out of the whole narrative: "But web5 takes it to the next level", "it's possible to keep the good parts of web3 while improving on its privacy properties (...) thats what web5 is all about", "In web5 (...) This is a radical departure from both web2 and web3".
I get that you wanted some nice story for your blogpost, but it's just not grounded in reality, and you're supporting the wrong actors here if you really want to claim that 'web5' is about privacy.
> I'm generally happy to support the hype
Happy to support privacy destroying technology by adopting their buzzwords while plenty of people – which you even reference at the end – do keep ethics in mind. Alrighty then.
For the "Learning resources" section, I would also recommend checking ION¹. I have tested a few DID Methods including Sovrin, Veres One, and ION, and the latter is the most spec-adherent and well-implemented, apart from receiving funding from companies like Microsoft and TBD (which is proposing web5 in the first place). And yes, it is the only DID Method to receive support from big tech (was incubated within Microsof…
Blockchain. It's always blockchain. Can we just not? How about we go back to web 1.0. TLS mutual cert auth with an ID card as a smart card, either from the government or from your favourite third party. Or maybe we go back to web 2.0 with OpenID. Users pick their own identity providers and websites can pick which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Actually, we already have that, and it's "sign in with Google/…
Blockchain. It's always blockchain. Can we just not? How about we go back to web 1.0. TLS mutual cert auth with an ID card as a smart card, either from the government or from your favourite third party. Or maybe we go back to web 2.0 with OpenID. Users pick their own identity providers and websites can pick which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Actually, we already have that, and it's "sign in with Google/…
Blockchain has value here, essentially acting as a distributed collection of digital signatures. If I need to prove my date of birth, why not present a credential, signed by the vital records agency of where I was born to prove it without any data broker in the middle?
The only thing the blockchain protects against in these circumstances would be that the government is denying ever signing your date of birth and you losing your signed token. I don't think that's a problem in practice in most countries where an alternative trust system would even work.
Blockchain. It's always blockchain. Can we just not? How about we go back to web 1.0. TLS mutual cert auth with an ID card as a smart card, either from the government or from your favourite third party. Or maybe we go back to web 2.0 with OpenID. Users pick their own identity providers and websites can pick which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Actually, we already have that, and it's "sign in with Google/…
In case you didn't know, Git is effectively blockchain. It's just that 'breaking' the chain/rewriting history is as simple as `git push --force` and other clients can accept the rewritten history with `git reset origin/ --hard`. Blockchain is (more) useful when artificial scarcity isn't involved.
Git is basically a Merkel Tree, but not a blockchain.
Blockchain. It's always blockchain. Can we just not? How about we go back to web 1.0. TLS mutual cert auth with an ID card as a smart card, either from the government or from your favourite third party. Or maybe we go back to web 2.0 with OpenID. Users pick their own identity providers and websites can pick which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Actually, we already have that, and it's "sign in with Google/…
Well, one of the few plausibly-valuable additions to the world offered by blockchains are globally-distributed databases not owned/controlled/bound to any single organization. Why not make use of them for something other than scams, pump & dumps, etc.?
I'm not paying $10-$30 to store data on the ethereum blockchain every time I need to add some kind of datum (assuming the ethereum blockchain). That price will only go up once such a system actually becomes used by many parties, making the system even more expensive.
I'm already overpaying for getting the government to do stuff for me. I don't want to overpay some random servers all over the world instead of my government, that's just moving (and duplicating) the problem.
Are blockchain people physically incapable of speaking plainly? Its hard to cut theough the buzzword bullshit, but this sounds like they reinvented PKI and added 10 billion layers of indirection. Is there more to it than that? Or is this really just taking the latest technogies of the 1990s, and explaining it badly so people think they have invented something new?
> Are blockchain people physically incapable of speaking plainly? While I agree that blockchain technologies can quickly fall in bullshit buzzwords, there is still food for thoughts here, but you have to be somewhat familiar with the subject to understand it. Let me try to explain it from software engineer to software engineer. The core of web 5 is "self sovereign identity" . That means you (the user) gets to be in c…