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Comment by mattbee | Hacker News Reader

There were loads of vendor-neutral identity ideas that all fell flat because nobody wants to sign up just for an identity.

This one is hilariously complicated; the thread ends with this call to action:

Want to get a portable web3 account?

Pick an Eth wallet: https://ethereum.org/en/wallets/find-wallet/

Get ETH (sometimes built into wallet, otherwise use a service like Coinbase)

Get an ENS name: http://app.ens.domains * (Choose which is your username by setting reverse record at My Account)*

It's that easy!

I think the author underestimates how little most people care about their weak passwords, or centralised authentication.

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> There were loads of vendor-neutral identity ideas that all fell flat because nobody wants to sign up just for an identity.

Yep, I agree SSO by itself isn't enough of an incentive to use something. A key part of the thread is that that's not what's happening. People are getting Ethereum accounts and even ENS for other reasons, and the fact that this is being used for SSO is a side-effect.

>This one is hilariously complicated; Yes, but this is getting simpler over time. Better than it was a few years ago, still clunky, getting better over time. That is what crypto incentives is doing to pub/priv key management and related things. Again, this is a key part of the thread: crypto is incentivizing adoption and improvements in tech that existed previously but people didn't have a strong enough incentive to adopt or improve.

You don't need ETH or an ENS domain to use Ethereum for single sign on. Just need a wallet. The wallet can be totally empty. The ENS domain is simply for human readable account names.

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 ever feel the need.

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

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.

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