Skiff X Ethereum Naming Service | Hacker News Reader

Skiff X Ethereum Naming Service

skiff.org

25 pointscrhutchins5 comments

It's exciting to see apps adopt these features, but Ethereum is extremely expensive to participate in. I hope to see support for ENS implementations on alternative chains like Celo's NomSpace or Avalanche's Avvy.

Avalanche has already shown previews of its future high fee problem. ENS plans to add layer2 support which will drastically reduce the transaction fees associated with ENS. Layer2s have the benefits of alternative L1s but without the centralization risk that other L1s have that can lead to unrecoverable assets (centralized L2s can censor you and then you can forcefully exit to L1).

Skiff looks interesting, however the eth integration is just fluff. It adds nothing. Metamask sign to login is good.

Is skiff a Saas? My fear is that E2E is incompatible with saas model. The powers will always bribe or coerce the vendor to push backdoored js for specific users. It’s happened many times. You can only trust your own servers.

I'm strugling a bit with Skiff, I really want to like it but I don't understand what is actually private or decentralized about it.

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Their site says:

> Everything on Skiff is end-to-end encrypted. Your most sensitive data is private, decentralized, and truly owned by you.

According to a previous blog post [1] they claim they're using a key pair for identification, which they seem to be creating and controlling, and I can't find any mention to back it up, or provide my own in their UI.

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In their settings they also have a way to enable "decentralized storage through IPFS" but doesn't mention anything else and I don't understand what it does. It doesn't mention how files are stored, in which format, and how I can find their CIDs.

They go on to claim:

> Now, Skiff users can store files, static content, and more via the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). Inside the settings page, users can enable or disable IPFS storage: Skiff users will be able to store files, static content, and documents fully decentralized on IPFS.

> In this model, all user data - still completely end-to-end encrypted - is viewable and accessible on a transparent ledger, instead inside a big-tech-owned database where it may be analyzed for advertisements and invasive analytics.

Not sure if they are calling IPFS a ledger, what they mean by transparent, and mainly how this stops them from analyzing your documents for advertisements and invasive analytics.

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Their whitepaper [2] is pretty much a product description and implementation overview. From a quick glance it talks about a centrally managed service that people need to talk to, doesn't describe any sort of federated/decentralized protocol or sync protocol, nor documents the CRDT events that make up the documents.

Their github org [3] doesn't seem to have any implementations or documentation of their protocol and how one could implement something that that talks with Skiff.

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I really really want to like Skiff, and if they hadn't mentioned "Decentralized" and "trully owned by you" I probably would like them even for being a Google docs competitor.

What am I missing? If someone could please point me to any docs/code around how any of their keypairs/ipfs/crdt/e2ee stuff work I'd really appreciate it.

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1. https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-decentralized

2. https://skiff-org.github.io/whitepaper/Skiff_Whitepaper_2022...

3. https://github.com/skiff-org

imo Brave browser ($BAT) and Skiff's e2ee collaboration workspace are the only two non-financial web3 applications that are actually usable and make sense. Glad to see an integration with ENS after the MetaMask integration got added

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