Show HN: Decentralized Authentication Powered by Bitcoin Cryptography
starfish.computer
starfish.computer
The main properties:
Convenience: Uses Bitcoin Cryptography (Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet) to generate all identities from a single seed, no need to back up passwords for every site. No need to worry about passwords.
Decentralized: The identity system does not require a third party, all identities are generated from the embedded Bitcoin wallet.
Privacy: All identities are sandboxed to each app provider by default. Also, no reliance on 3rd party authentication provider provides privacy.
It's an early alpha, and I would appreciate any constructive feedback.
How would you say it compares / complements / competes with Vapor?
Short answer: Vapor will use Starfish as the default wallet, but not exclusively.
Long answer:
While working on Vapor I found that most existing Bitcoin wallets are focused only on onchain transactions and money transactions, and it's difficult to implement a frictionless UX when using them as they are today (Imagine having to redirect users to a wallet and manually sign every single API request).
Vapor on the other hand tackles a field that has not been explored much before--the "offchain" and "data" world--so I needed a wallet that would "just work" with everything offchain and everything data, while preserving privacy.
So I built one. And that's Starfish.
Basically, Starfish is a wallet that can work well with Vapor. You just keep it on, and everything will "just work" frictionlessly. That said, the reason why it's "Starfish" and not "Vapor Wallet" is because Vapor is wallet agnostic. Vapor is a protocol and will support signing with all types of Bitcoin wallets and all types of signature schemes, in a plug-and-play manner. The Starfish approach is one of the options, which provides a seamless UX and provides more privacy and convenience.
Vapor is coming soon, just wanted to release Starfish first in order to avoid confusion.
You can already build some super interesting stuff with Starfish alone. The Vapor layer will make them more "persistent" by providing ways to wrap everything in a Bitcoin transaction format.