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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's not technically a sign up, but the new user flow needs some work. There are boxes for "handshake name" and "signature" but no indication of what you should put there.

I tried leaving them blank and got an error message: "You need to include a valid Handshake name and signature generated with the key associated with the name."

But it doesn't explain how you do that.

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I apologize for that. There was an assumption that most people were aware of the Handshake Naming system [1]. Handshake is a naming blockchain that's recently been gaining adoption quickly (Namecheap [2]) (Opera Browser [3]). Using this, you can control your name, which is your identity, on the internet. There's a lot of other cool benefits, but as it pertains to this project, it's the names, cryptographic proof of ownership of said names, and the cryptographic provability that the messages were written by the owners of said name.

There are many ways to get Handshake names, but the easiest ways are to use Bob (non custodial) [4] or Namebase (custodial) [5].

[1] https://handshake.org/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/handshake/comments/pt55vb/namecheap...

[3] https://twitter.com/opera/status/1476841607005622273

[4] https://github.com/kyokan/bob-wallet

[5] https://namebase.io

So handshake.org seems to be the authoritative source on everything handshake, and it has several lengthy posts describing how using anything but it and things it vouches for to interact with handshake is about the absolute dumbest thing a person could possibly do [1]. And while namebase.io looks like it might provide an incredibly intuitive "getting started with handshake" experience, it's not vouched for by handshake.org. Can you explain why using namebase.io to mint a handshake name isn't the dumbest thing I could possibly do?

[1] https://handshake.org/claim/

The instructions you pasted are for claiming a name that was pre-reserved when Handshake launched [1]. This is different from creating and obtaining a new name on the blockchain.

[1] https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-names

Are you implying people should feel free to create and obtain a new name on the blockchain using any random website? Also I do not see the list of popular GH names in the link you provided.

> Are you implying people should feel free to create and obtain a new name on the blockchain using any random website? Also I do not see the list of popular GH names in the link you provided.

The popular names are in the names folder.

I wouldn't recommend obtaining a new name from any random website. I don't think I did so. I'm going to avoid continuing this thread as gaslighting isn't usually something one would wish to engage in, obviously on the receiving end, but on the creator's end too.

I hope you are able to find peace in the next year.

Happy new year to you.

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