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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

#71

Post by bcmillegan »

deft wrote: post #52

This has already been solved, its called Public-key cryptography. Ethereum gave everyone a key, but usability issues have stifled making that useful offchain. ENS isn't needed.

Yes, public key cryptography is not new. What's new is that crypto incentives has spurred the creation of a highly competitive industry to improve private key management, and incentives people to get and manage one.

ENS isn't needed strictly speaking, but highly useful to make everything human-friendly. It's like saying DNS isn't useful because you can just input a website's IP address.

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

#72

Post by bcmillegan »

chrisco255 wrote: post #65
deft wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the ENS domain is simply an additional layer of rent-seeking. Metamask sign-on is great. ENS is a pointless cash grab.

It's not a cash grab. Its an optional domain registrar. Feel free to start your own smart contract based registrar. Otherwise .eth domains are accepted pretty much everywhere as a substitute for a public key. ETH addresses are 40 digits long. Yes, you can copy/paste. But having yourname.eth is nice for user friendliness. Best part though is, you have a choice. And you can always register a domain much later if you ev…

Yep. Also note that ENS is a generic naming system, not just .eth names. You can also import in DNS names you already use, e.g. I own brantly.xyz on DNS and also imported it into to ENS: https://app.ens.domains/name/brantly.xyz

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

#73

Post by noxer »

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…

Systems build for enterprise usage, for example for banks, do have multi-sign accounts [1]. Each key can have a weight and you define a total that's needed to sign a transaction.

For example 8 keys where each has the weight of 1 and a signing threshold of 4 is required. That would mean form the 8 keys (persons) a maximum of 4 can lose their key. On top of that you may still have a master key that overrides all. Or you could lock 4 of the 8 keys in different places not meant to be used but just as backup for the 4 keys in use.

This stuff already exists. See [1] https://xrpl.org/multi-signing.html

There are almost endless possible solutions that could be implemented if needed. For example you could make a master key that overrides all others but requires an unlock Tx followed by an arbitrary escrow delay where funds are locked. This would be useful if a master key is stolen. As soon as someone uses it, it would be known that the key was stolen so the people with the multi-sign key could move the funds away before the funds are unlocked.

You could also make funds move to a previously defined rescue address after a while of inactivity. So in case the key got lost the fund would move to another address you just have to wait. And if the keys are not lost the time is reset every time a Tx is signed. Kinda like a dead man's switch. So people can inherit your funds if you are unable to sign a Tx.

The possibilities are kinda endless. If there is a need for it it can be coded.

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

#74

Post by mondoveneziano »

noxer wrote: post #73
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…

Systems build for enterprise usage, for example for banks, do have multi-sign accounts [1]. Each key can have a weight and you define a total that's needed to sign a transaction. For example 8 keys where each has the weight of 1 and a signing threshold of 4 is required. That would mean form the 8 keys (persons) a maximum of 4 can lose their key. On top of that you may still have a master key that overrides all. Or yo…

Understanding cryptography and smart contracts, what if the increasingly complicated smart contracts you describe have bugs?

> For example you could make a master key that overrides all others but requires an unlock Tx followed by an arbitrary escrow delay where funds are locked.

At what point is switching to a more classical database both worth the increase in efficiency by several orders of magnitude, and the decreased reliance on bug-free code?

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

#75

Post by meowkit »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #31
chrischen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wha…

I agree, but this stuff will be abstracted away. Everyone has a smartphone and the “average” user knows next to zero about how the device itself works.

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

#76

Post by meowkit »

bcmillegan wrote: post #68
deft wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the ENS domain is simply an additional layer of rent-seeking. Metamask sign-on is great. ENS is a pointless cash grab.

A decentralized naming system that solves what was previously thought to be an unsolvable computer science problem (Zooko's Triangle) that's open source and self-running, and where funds (that are raised with a minimum fee to prevent name squatting) go to a community multisig, is "rent-seeking" and "pointless cash grab"?

While I agree here, I want to clarify that I as far I know ENS still has back doors for the creators to control it until sufficient decentralization is possible and the core functionality has no major bugs.

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

#77

Post by vmception »

bcmillegan wrote: post #66
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…

> 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. Yep. Note that ENS is an open source self-running protocol, i'm really the dir of operations of True Names LTD, the non-profit that de facto manages. Funds raised from .ETH name registrations/renewals don't even go to TNL but to an E…

And TCP/IP wasn't the only protocol floating around until it was

So another point for not worrying about a mother-in-law in her 70s as various solutions get tried and more stacks get added to the stack

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

#78

Post by bb88 »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #48
fanf2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

git does not have a distributed consensus algorithm, however, and does not rely on proof-of-work/space/stake. Whether a rewrite of history is accepted is up to every consumer of any repository individually.

When etherium and bitcoin forked, the distributed consensus algorithms didn't resolve it. People decided which forks they wanted to use themselves.

That's not much different than git frankly for any given open source project.

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

#79

Post by randomhodler84 »

bb88 wrote: post #78
mondoveneziano wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git does not have a distributed consensus algorithm, however, and does not rely on proof-of-work/space/stake. Whether a rewrite of history is accepted is up to every consumer of any repository individually.

When etherium and bitcoin forked, the distributed consensus algorithms didn't resolve it. People decided which forks they wanted to use themselves. That's not much different than git frankly for any given open source project.

What are you talking about? You misspelled “Ethereum” and Bitcoin never forked with it. Its a totally different thing. Unrelated. Chain splits Are nothing like forking code in open source; forking code is this analogous to altcoins. LTC is a code fork of BTC.

Chain splits are more like a consensus failure and could be likened to a religious scism.

It’s generally undesirable and so are forked coins. There are many many fork coins that nobody cares about.

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

#80

Post by barry27 »

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…

extra points for usage of the word "cromulent"
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