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Comment by thesandlord | Hacker News Reader

My big question with using a Web3 login is what advantages it gives the website owner.

With social Web 2.0 login, I can be fairly sure the person logging in has a valid email address, a name, etc, and it is a single click for the user vs filling in all the info all over again.

With a Web3 login, it is basically the same. Except I'm not really given any personal info like name or email, so I need ask them for that anyway. I guess you can tie that into your wallet somehow?

But I don't see this as a 10x solution. Do people really not trust FB/Google/Twitter that much? Why does currency and money need to get involved?

But in another world, isn't this the problem Keybase was trying to solve? Of course, they got mixed up in their own cryptocurrency as well (XLM) which had so many issues with bots trying to get into the airdrop. So idk.

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People already use ENS do register a <some-name>.eth name to the respective ethereum address. It's also easy to write a smart contract that keeps meta-info on an address. This data would be public.

> Why does currency and money need to get involved?

It doesn't. You only need a blockchain to keep public data. You can sign a message and login with that, no need to send a transaction, can be done with balance 0

Buy I thought the whole point was "owning your identity"... and know you're suggesting that we should put or personal data on a blockchain so everybody can see it?

The identity owned is the private key.

have you ignored the "public data" part on my comment ??

why do you twist "owning your identity" to mean putting everything about you "somewhere public" (like a blockchain)

>Do people really not trust FB/Google/Twitter that much?

People in general or HN audience?

Web3 emphasizes privacy be default. Emails are no longer needed for password management so if u need them for something else users should opt-in.

Apple already provides something like that that’s WAY more popular and doesn’t require the waste of resources a public blockchain would.

I know some people (especially us techies) like to control the whole stack but who do you think the majority of normal users would prefer?

Bitcoin doesn't support web3. Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake, so the resources issue is gonna become a thing of the past. Also using web3 for authentication doesn't broadcast any transaction. So zero resources are used at that point.

Apple has a closed platform mindset, I hope users will see the benefits in a decentralized open protocol.

> I hope users will see the benefits in a decentralized open protocol.

See I think this here is the biggest issue. I feel like we have 30+ years of proof that normal users LIKE centralization for the convenience and ease it provides.

Email is basically the last man standing when it comes to distributed implementations and 1) it had reached mass adoption early enough to survive and 2) we’ve centralized it to a large degree anyway with Gmail and outlook.com

I have a hunch that many services they will probably want to collect the emails anyway. It provides websites a convenient excuse to ask people to join their marketing spam list. In most cases privacy isn't a profitable business proposition.

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