Lets talk about blockchains
cmdli.dev
cmdli.dev
"One of the most promising and new developments in recent years has been a renewed interest in building decentralized systems of all types. Many people are looking into building a system of decentralized identity and giving that control back to the users."
IE, decentralization is great, but blockchain type concensus building is rarely needed or useful in such systems imo.
Take IPFS, for example.
Decentralized hosting without a blockchain. Pretty nifty!
Now, how do you make sure your stuff stays on the network in a similar decentralized way?
Pinning it in your own node and paying pinning services is still centralized, Filecoin, on the other hand, is not.
And they do have a reputation system.
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final
See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain may match one's use case. Extracted:
Generally you need the conditions of needing both (i) append-only log and (ii) distributed/decentralized before considering blockchain 'technology'.
Blockchains are also only needed in situations where you need a single, global source of truth. Ie, where eventual consistency / gossip networks wouldn’t be good enough. So blockchains are needed to avoid the double spend problem, but plenty of real world software can get on just fine without a single central ledger. (Eg scuttlebutt, CRDTs, etc).
Not everything needs a blockchain, but consumer tools for generating and verifying cryptographic signatures would have never reached the same level of adoption as they have w/o the incentives that blockchains provide.
It's a bit like Rust's borrow checker. Not everyone needs it, but an ecosystem where it's the default for building anything has a competitive advantage at large.
Web3 uses public key cryptography by default, which is a tremendous advantage over ecosystems that need to add it later.
In times of "fake news", this alone could be a killer feature, even without the money.
None of the crypto 'investors' I know personally do that, instead just use a trading platform, functionally identical to any traditional trading platform.
There are now 21 million monthly active users of Metamask, which is a 38-times increase from 2020, according to Metamask statistics. Metamask is now the easiest way for people around the world to interact with unique applications that use web3. There are currently 3700 applications that use web3. Mar 27, 2022
I think Ledger, the french company, sold millions and millions of hardware wallets. And with these you absolutely have to handle the keys yourself (well, the keys are "hidden" behind a "seed", which is list of 12, 18 or usually 24 words chosen randomly, with a checksum in the last work, among a dictionary of 2048 words).
That's millions of people basically having a 256 bits integer on paper (or metal sheet etc.) that never ever made it to anything else but a HSM.
That's quite an achievement I think.
And Ledger ain't the only player in the space.
Now of course there are fuckups. Some people are losing their list of 24 words, for example.
But it's still quite something.
Now, more than 50 million people in Mexico have generated their "eFirma" public/private keypair and use it every year to pay their taxes. It is also being actively used as a legally binding digital signature.
[1] http://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/cys/v23n2/1405-5546-cys-23-02-4...
If there were such a permission scheme, such as in Facebook's now likely defunct cryptocurrency idea, you would not need proof of work. You'd just have a list of authorized signers of new blocks and if someone does something bad you kick them off the list. This is basically how the web PKI system works with browser certificate whitelists.
Lots of cryptocurrency critics over-argue their case by denying that this was a novel innovation, but yes it was novel. It has big downsides but it works. Personally my big issue with crypto other than the energy waste is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself is toxic and full of scams and other trash.
Are you saying that the incentives provided for successfully mining a block in crypto's isn't necessary to their security? I can't think of a single expert that agrees, or an example in the space of that working. Block reward is typically thought of as a tradeoff between security and inflation.
Pics or didn't happen.
The effort we invest to encourage thoughtful dialogue is paid back in the long run by keeping the quality of discourse high(er) and making less work for dang.
It's a really interesting space to research for economists or political scientists. It's also a lever to turn government, social, financial and other systems into software.
All that to say, yes, PoW and PoS are not necessarily tied to blockchains or DLTs.
You can use PoW as a sort of captcha, for example. If it costs a little bit of CPU to submit a request to a website it's not a big deal for a human. However, if you're running a bot-net suddenly it starts to hurt!
True, it won't solve the problem of malware botnets, but PoW or PoBandwidth schemes can make it too expensive to run botnets on cloud services so the only place left to go is illegal botnets.
So if I lock up a secret with bcrypt today and require 100k rounds of hashing, it will still require 100k rounds of hashing to unlock for any brute force attempt of the ciphertext for the rest of time. A server (or blockchain network) could evaluate a PoW submission 50 years from now and determine that difficulty should be raised to 100T rounds instead of 100k rounds.
That's exactly what HashCash was conceived to do (to fight email spam). It was a neat predecessor to Bitcoin.
Blockchains are unique in their design to be self-sustaining decentralized cryptocurrencies; the self-sustaining part is what, in my mind, distinguishes them from the other technologies which rely on external incentives to keep them running.
In ideal worlds as designed for PoW and PoS everyone has roughly an equal stake and equal incentives. Reality differs.
IBM talks about private blockchains, but it kinda seems like without spending a lot of computing power to make it infeasible to re-compute, you're relying on trusting that people won't. If I control all the machines in the private blockchain and the cost to compute the hashes is low, presumably I could replace nodes that I want to remove or alter and then just recompute.
For example, let's say that I'm trying to create an immutable ledger of emails sent for compliance purposes and I have 10,000 emails. Later, I want to hide 5 emails sent and alter 5 email's contents. I replace the remove/alter the nodes and then just re-compute the chain storing the new version of the chain on the servers I control. I then tell regulators that those emails never existed and we have the immutable block chain to prove it!
Even if a blockchain is public, what is protecting against someone disputing history? If it were computationally cheap, I could come up with a longer chain than the current Bitcoin chain with certain transactions altered to favor me. The reason I can't do that is because the proof-of-work makes it infeasible for me to re-compute a block before the network has already put a new block on the chain (presuming I control less than 51% of the compute power in the network). To recompute 10 blocks, I'd need to control an overwhelming majority of the compute power in the network.
But if the data is important and we're not giving people a big reward for mining the chain, it seems like it would be vulnerable to alteration. Sure, you could say "I saw the chain with 1,000 links and then I saw the chain with 1,100 links, but this new chain disagrees with some of the original 1,000 I had. Someone is doing something sketchy, but is it the first person trying to rewrite history and not being able to mine fast enough or is the second person rewriting history and has enough compute power to become the longest chain?" Again, with Bitcoin this isn't such a problem because PoW makes it infeasible to re-compute that stuff. However, if we're talking about a blockchain that isn't secured by PoW (or PoS), what is preventing that?
If I want to create a public ledger of all my shipments with blockchain and there are 10-50 shipments per day at various unknown times, it seems insecure. I put up a piece of shipment data to be added, and then it gets added to the chain. That's the good scenario. Now I want to rewrite history so I go back and re-compute some stuff and then for the next 20 shipments I privately compute the signatures before broadcasting to the network so that I'll have a chain 20 longer than everyone else which will replace the old chain (and with it the data I'm looking to alter).
I could just be missing a piece that makes this comment void, but it's always seemed like Bitcoin's resistance to history-rewriting is the PoW. Without that, I could simply re-compute the history, create a longer chain, and replace the current chain. Yes?
Also, it's not clear to me whether you're asking about PoS security too, but if so, the reason one person can't go back and rewrite a bunch of it is because the right to create blocks is spread out randomly across the entire active set of stakers. So if an attacker only controls a small fraction of the total stake, then their signature would only be valid in building a small fraction of the chain they would need.
What if they decide to ban me for some reason? Do I get banned from all of them?
Centralization is only good for the center, not the constituents.
They bought you for in-game loot. Time to check your own personal definition of "hate".
I'm being mean because I feel that for those of us who "hate" something, we need to act on that feeling and accept the consequences. This seems the only way to change (yes, I know it's mostly insignificant in the face of the millions of counter-cases). If you give in the craving, there's no chance at all. You gotta be in it to win it.
I didn't have to pay USD for it, and now I have what is essentially a whole online pvp game to play with new stuff. Since I'm not one of the privileged few streamers that were just given access, that was the price to get into a game that one of the only friends whose gaming tastes overlap with mine.
I just wish there was more trustbusting going on. Letting large companies gobble up all the smaller ones is only good for the shareholders. Not the customers, not the employees, and definitely not taxpayers.
Would be exciting to find an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing
Let's not gloss over that key management is a hard problem, even for technical people, and that's a major reason this has not been particularly practical. FWIW this is also a problem for most blockchain based technologies.
Any technology that makes this impossible is not going to get mass-adoption.
The ideas argued against here haven't been popular in the crypto world since ~2018.
Nobody thinks you need a blockchain to sign into a website. When people talk about web3 based decentralized identity, they are usually talking about an identity that is coupled to an on-chain asset (NFT, position in a pool, etc). That does "require" blockchains for the reasons explained in the first few paragraphs of this article.
I put "require" in quotes because you could definitely build this stuff without a blockchain. But nothing like that will ever become widely adopted. It's not about "requiring" a blockchain in the sense of a necessary condition. It's about blockchains enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled.
Why were these things unlikely to be enabled in the first place? Maybe it wasn't worth the hassle (even though it is free)? Maybe people couldn't agree on one solution (even though there are a 1000 blockchains with their mutually incompatible systems)?
Or more cynically, maybe no one needed "worse SSO" in the first place and this is just attempt #245 to find a problem for our favourite solution.
The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order.
Blockchains that support smart contracts allow for people to install programs to that computer, which will add a bit more logic than simply debiting/crediting accounts. Others can then just send transactions to this computer to make a function call to any program (smart contract) that was installed on the computer.
The cool thing really is that we’re all using the same computer with the same database and the same programs.
Now in practice, nobody would trust a single point of failure like that. What if the computer crashes, or burns in a fire? Distributed systems to the rescue! We use distributed system protocols to run the same database on many computers distributed around the world. These distributed system protocols effectively simulate a single database/computer so that a few computers failing doesn’t mean the end of the blockchain.
On top of that, we refuse to trust the computers that participate in this protocol. They could be lying about the balance in your account. We want the computers to police one another and agree on the database they are simulating. That’s where consensus protocols are used: to make the distributed database secure even when some of the participants are malicious.
And that’s it. That’s blockchain tech for you. The obvious application is money, as the secure and simulated single computer is useful to simplify a payment system, but really any distributed database that cannot trust some of its participants can benefit from the advances there.
"Also, imagine that this really cool computer might be one of the ones that uses more electricity than some countries! Really, really neat!"
Proof of Stake reduces blockchain energy consumption by a lot. I've seen people quoting that a proof of stake block production consumes about as much energy as a Google search.
Composability lets you create a token to represent anything* of value and exchange it for other tokens. ETH and BTC are tokenizations of proof of work.
Open APIs exist for any verified contract on Ethereum. You can permissionlessly plug a new application into many existing ones if your application is even partially on-chain
The remaining 1% are problems that need to solve the double-spend problem.
Others exists, but yes, the only legitimate blockchain companies i know use it to stamp documents/emails. I also think a public blockchain can help democratizing a sort of global crypto auth like said in other comments.
But those issues, while hard to truly solve, are not really important, and can be tackled quite easely with third-party trust. I understand that we are more and more individualistic, that our social contract is dying and thus for crypto bros, a third party trustee is not an adequat solution.
The most successful version of it when broadband really took off was torrents.
Then we got git.
Now we got cryptocurrency/blockchain.
I think by the end of this hype curve/cycle, blockchain will be relegated to decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system.
I wonder what will come next. I don't see decentralized identity verification taking off. Public/Private Key encryption for ID means relying on users to not lose their private key...or storing it for them and backing it up in some form of centralized and managed storage (i.e. cloud). So not gonna happen.
I’m all for decentralized finance, but abhor the idea of a public ledger except for one very specific use case: government allocation and spending.
Privacy oriented blockchains may be slightly better, but if the safeguards are ever broken, they are no better than open ledgers.
The CBDC proposals are even worse, imho, proposing no public ledger, but allowing blessed private entities to receive events to make rain their own private ledgers.
I don’t know what digital decentralized finance looks like without public accounting, but I’d prefer something as anonymous and ephemeral as cash transactions for something that I use regularly.
The reason I'm saying this is because, if public key login is supported, and key management is hard, there's no reason why an alternative username/password method couldn't be also supported alongside. That way you lose one method of connection, you can fallback to another one.
Would you need this for all services you use? Probably not. For example using a public key login on something like hacker news, and being required to create a new account when I lose that? No big deal. Losing my public key when trying to login to my back account, well let me fallback to a "forgotten public key flow" that uses my email address to set up a new key.
We need something with logical centralization but independent of any single actor or company.
Blockchain development is funded by VCs looking to stay relevant.
It’s software; there’s no panacea and thousands of options for solving problems; blockchain is just one.
For convenience over security, it gave the choice of storing your private key on their servers. If Zoom was to one day shut Keybase down, your private key is now gone. Otherwise for security over convenience, if you store it on your own computer you're more likely to lose it.
Those trade-offs in Keybase's key management is probably why it did not take off including that they were on a VC payroll and not making any money at all from the service. It was only a matter of time that without Zoom, they would end up shutting down.
I'm not so sure about this. Each of my devices absolutely has a key stored on it that is offline capable. Loss of keybase servers would matter but not the extent that you're claiming, from what I can tell. https://book.keybase.io/security#your-private-keys-are-only-...
So what's missing?
Standards are good for interoperability. Decentralization, depending on the flavor, either focuses on distributed hosting ensuring the system not needing to be run by some huge international company, or on not having a center of authority that mandates some particular standard or agenda.
Many fail in the later aim. Bitcoin is supposedly decentralized but in practice controlled by a very small group, for instance.
I like to to think i'm not logging in with my wallet, i'm logging in with my private key. I just also happen to have a crypto wallet also attached to that same private key.
The only thing that does that is enforceable laws - that are also enforced.
The moment I give my date-of-birth to a site, they can store it wherever they like. I have exactly zero control over it.
So what is the data that I have control over in this new distributed future?
For example, if a hospital wants your health information, you have to manually approve their access over there. The same is true for other information the government stores. Government agencies likewise have to ask for access to information, for example, the equivalent of a DMV would request some personal info before they can obtain it.
Once given though, all bets are off. They could be selling it. There's no technological solution for that. Just laws.
>This can be incredibly useful, and is necessary for some applications.
There is no reason to have a system "without trust", the very idea of that makes no sense and there is no such thing as a system "without trust". Examples: To even use a computer or use a computer network you have to on some level trust the manufacturer of the systems as well as the supply chain that built it. To use any blockchain you have to trust that at some point it's not going to get 51% attacked. To use any businesses that work on the blockchain you have to trust those businesses on some level instead of just trusting "the blockchain" or a smart contract, if eventually you expect to receive a good or service that transfers into the real world, because agreements about those things can only be upheld by lawyers, not blockchains. The amount of entities you have to trust to realistically interact with any blockchain is massive. The idea that they're somehow "trustless" is simply wrong.
And I've made comments about this before but I'll make it again. Blockchains are useless and are unnecessary for every application. They do nothing that isn't better achieved by another consensus mechanism. The only reason to use PoW/PoS or any of the other blockchain consensus algorithms is to use them to implement cryptocurrency, which is only useful as a form of unregulated and volatile and mostly useless money that you can pay people in those tokens for running the network. If you can come up with any other way to pay people to run a network, then you don't need cryptocurrency.
That said it still doesn't make the list of cases this capability is needed any longer.
But there are a lot more lazy crackheads and dumb teenagers than professional burglars.
You trust your friend, but maybe not an anonymous online individual. So you might use the blockchain to accept payments from the anonymous individual whereas with your friend, you might accept a check or Venmo.
Trust is an inherent property of a functioning society, and hence why the bonafide use cases for blockchain and crypto are so few. If you live somewhere where the police, a judge, or government can make you whole in a dispute, not a lot of need for web3. If you live somewhere where that isn’t the case (failing nation states, authoritarian regimes), that’s a better product market fit for web3.
Crypto-skeptics talk like the legal system is currently equipped to robustly make you whole in those transactions. It is manifestly not. Those transactions do, in fact, depend on other means of establishing trust.
To be sure, a legal system is an important mechanism for facilitating trust. But also, be careful not to overstate its relevance either.
You're missing the point. If you create a system where you won't need to make use of the legal system because transactions execute correctly by default, your transaction costs are suddenly way lower.
Obviously your counterparty can still sue you after the fact, but thats a much better position to be in than needing the legal system to push the transaction through in the first place.
That's not what you get, because in practice you want some physical good for your BTC and a blockchain cannot enforce that you do get it, it can only enforce that the BTC are transferred from one address to another.
You can also tokenize a real world asset (for example a token representing an amount of gold). Then you have to trust the issuer of the token, but it's very possible you trust that issuer but don't trust your counterparty.
I meant that nothing is fully embedded within a blockchain (maybe physical was the wrong word).
I think we agree here. The question then is: how useful is this really?
For example, assume I have some USD that I want to trade for VT, and I want to decide between using a blockchain or not.
The counterparty risk solved by using a blockchain is:
1. No blockchain: the broker (who's between me and the person I want to trade with) can technically keep the USD and the VT.
2. Blockchain: this cannot happen because a smart contract prevents it.
But:
a. How often are you in a situation where you trust the entities backing the two assets (USD and VT here) but can't find a broker whose trustworthiness is implied by the trustworthiness of the two entities backing the two other assets?
b. Less trust is always better, but blockchain-based solutions bring their own problems (e.g. private key custody). Are there even cases in which this trade-off is worth it?
- Am not in a jurisdiction where there is a trustworthy broker for VT or USD?
- Want to loan someone my VT (for example for them to short)?
- Want to buy some derivative of VT (easy to do in the US for VT American-style options, but this isn't true for all derivatives on all assets in all markets)
- Need to buy a large amount of VT and using the open market isn't cost effective?
VT maybe isn't the best example in favor of crypto as it's probably already one of the easiest assets in the world to trade safely online. There's lots of other stuff that's way trickier in the current system.
2. the real hurdle is regulations rather than anything technical.
3. again, you don't need a technical solution, you need a legal one.
4. and this will be more effective thanks to a blockchain? How so? So far, blockchain-based solutions seem more costly rather than less.
The current system has a lot of limitations, but many (most?) of them are of regulatory rather than technical nature, and blockchains do not help in that regard.
Or where you don't want to share your identity... like maybe the internet?
Having the ability to implement a solution technically does not make it legal or without consequence (like Virgil Griffith, formerly of the Ethereum Foundation, who demonstrated to North Korea how to evade sanctions trading Ethereum and is going to jail for five years for doing so).
No, actually. Many people send crypto transactions all the time, and do so anonymously, and the vast majority of them don't get in trouble for it.
Descriptively, it is untrue that there is some sort of wide scale crack down on anonymous crypto transactions in the west.
And no, before you say it, it doesn't really matter if, hypothetically, a future government could become extremely authoritarian, and arrest all the crypto users, because for whatever reason, crypto has been around for a decade, and governments aren't doing that.
The reality, and facts on the ground, are that people making anonymous crypto transactions all the time, and don't get in trouble with that, no matter how much people will then respond to this post by saying "Well, what if the government started doing it tomorrow!". Its not happening. Therefore, it is a useful usecase.
Europe: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2022/html/ecb.sp220...
US Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
UK: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/uk-to-mint-its-own-nft-and-p...
China: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/24/china-says-all-cryptocurre...
South Korea: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42784384
Japan: https://www.fxempire.com/news/article/financial-services-age...
Caveat being India and Japan, these are the top 10 economies in the world.
People send crypto transactions all the time and don't get arrested.
I know this. You know this. We don't have to pretend.
People use crypto all the time and don't get in trouble for it. We both know this.
I used crypto just this morning on chain. Nothing happened to me, even though I didn't send a KYC letter to the government about it.
The government isn't going to show up at my doorstep tomorrow because I used a smart contract.
Your feelings, are what is called "cope". People have been predicting for years and years that all the crypto people were going to be sent to jail, yet it keeps not happening.
Instead, the only thing that has happened, is that more and more of the entire tech industry has moved towards using more crypto.
I went to GDC a couple weeks ago, and I learned that a freaking 3rd of the video games industry is desperately trying to figure out how to add NFTs to their games.
I wonder what industry will be next? And will it ever been enough, to dismiss the constantly wrong people, who continue to be wrong about all the crypto people going to jail? Because I remember the same arguments a decade ago. Still hasn't happened yet.
I still go to crypto meetups every week, and I am not seeing the police raids, for all the illegal things that you think we are doing.
Or, in other words. Cope.
Being part of a "functioning society" is not a static property and even less so in this globalized world.
Try coordinating work with a team distributed around the world and you will see that your functioning institutions do not help your colleague in Venezuela, Argentina, Syria or Ukraine. And if you don't have/know people from these places, ask yourself why. Try helping a Brazilian immigrant living in the US that wants to get their savings to buy property back home, see how painful/inefficient it is to send anything over $2-3 thousand. Suddenly your appreciation of "web3" increases.
And even just in your own developed country, there is no guarantee that things will stay functional forever. Just look at the US and the events of January, Hong-Kong, or any country that was a former state of the USSR and needs to worry about Vlad.
A decentralized web that does not depend on the functional institutions is insurance: you pray that you will never use it, but you should be glad to know it is there if you need it.
Takk takk
Have you considered:
Settlement is much quicker. Did you know it could take upto 7 years to settle a cheque/check.
You don't have to trust the business as much as the business has to trust you before they send the goods. Chargebacks and unfavorable refunds can eat into profit. Quick settlements elimate this issue.
That has nothing to do with blockchain and does not mean at all it is the best way to solve the problem
The solution to cheques isn't blockchain, but simply to advance out of 19th century banking. Even a 20 year old mainframe would be an upgrade over cheques.
There you go. Otherwise I would not see YC's most valuable startup ignoring all these critics and reconsidering and using it for Crypto Payouts if it was so-called 'unnecessary' or 'useless' in the first place. [0]
That is the problem with statements that take a very absolutist direction. It goes either way for anti-crypto supporters and also crypto supporters.
> Chargebacks and unfavorable refunds can eat into profit. Quick settlements elimate this issue.
The customer can instead contact the merchant for a refund instead of abusing the disputes system with chargeback fraud.
[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
One of the strongest usecases for blockchain is a distributed ledger among mostly trusted entities who frequently exchange resources.
One or more of the big banks is developing blockchain to facilitate payments between banks who end up settling enormous amounts of money between them on a daily basis. It is just nicer and much lower overhead to have a distributed and cryptographically proven way to interact with this ledger than having one bank administer it. The mostly trusted nature of the relationships between them also means if there is an error, transactions can easily be reversed or fixed and there’s no concept of anything being stolen because the ledger doesn’t actually store any value.
I don't care that my application doesn't need to be on all 7000 nodes, not even a factor.
And as far as funnels go, in Web 2.0 logic the point of the "funnel" was to convert a user into a paying user, in Web 3 they are already paying users at the beginning of the funnel, and pay to update the state of your application before you ask them to do anything, this is heavily optimized for driving revenue when applying the funnel concept. So if you design your application for this, you can strip out most of the complicated frontend and backend stack and don't have to pay subscriptions to any SaaS service, and get revenue because your funnel is 1 step too.
This is an interesting topic, blockchain security is very useful for a bunch of applications (i'd prefence that to say stop trying to touch the real world with the blockchain, and you realize it's fucking amazing) but you don't need the same amount of distributed security for all applications. Banking apps need high security, gaming apps need a lot less. Avalanche is really interesting in this respect. It has the main C-Chain which has thousands of validators but it also has subnets which might have just a few validators. This gives you the ability to toggle your security needs to your application (it also let's you toggle the VM, so you do things like add stateful precompiles which let you do things that may not be practical in the EVM.
There's an army of banking regulators in every country, and yet we still see bank failures where people lose money every year (even in developed countries with functioning deposit insurance there's usually a limit on the amount that is insured), plus we get the occasional financial crisis every few decades, after the memory of the last one has faded.
For example, if I say "I want to use TLS to order something from an online retailer because I don't want to trust my ISP with my credit card and purchase information" it would not be appropriate to respond with "well that's just ridiculous, because there's no way to remove all trust, after all you still have to trust the online retailer to ship you the item, you have to trust your credit card company to not overcharge you, etc."
Exactly. However:
> Services such as social networks could link the user's account to their global identity by providing a signed document proving the user's public key is tied to a certain account, or users can do this on their own by providing a public cryptographic proof on their account. (Keybase)
Yet Keybase kept your private key on their cloud for 'convenience' purposes. If you decide to manage the keys yourself, well you're probably more likely going to lose it. Hence, maybe that is why it didn't take off at all and even after they got acquired.
As for 'blockchain application' is that also why Skiff [0] exists and supports using ENS for identities and will still work even after Skiff shuts down? [1]?
"Your private keys are only stored on your devices. For extra security, your private keys are only stored on the device(s) you use Keybase on. They’re not even stored on Keybase’s servers. So if Keybase gets hacked, the security of your account isn’t compromised."
This article seems incorrect from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin, the blockchain figurehead, has needed trust in central authority many times, from 2010 when Satoshi was around [0] to 2013 [1] and beyond. The problem with blockchain as it’s expressed in this article is that it incorrectly describes the system boundary at the software level, where in reality the human layer is very much part of the protocol, especially when it is unclear which chain should be followed (see both citations) due to unexpected software behavior. The “human judge” or “trusted central authority” is part of the blockchain system to ensure its smooth and continuous operation. Without this, the blockchain would devolve into a confused mess, as parties disagree on what is a bug and what isn’t, and what is the “best chain” (regardless of its length). Bitcoin history is filled with these confusing events, and centralized parties always publicly clarify what is Bitcoin and what isn’t, and the rest of the users follow along.
Of course, if blockchain software were written perfectly from day 0 and didn’t need any further development, then you could always follow the longest chain “trustlessly”, but the problem is perfect software is impossible. As soon as the code does the tiniest thing that many users say is unexpected, you have a problem that demands centralized intervention.
[0] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...
[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
And the author is right that very few people need a world computer. Imagine if you send your grandma a message but but every time you do so you check in with the rest of the world for confirmation. That's 'apps on the blockchain'. Local state is fine and global consensus is irrelevant for probably 99% of what you do.
This is ridiculous. Try trading stocks without consensus. Play a game, any game. Even better, try exchanging public keys on an adversarial network with no pre-shared secrets or global state.
And what is ‘logging in to ethereum’? This might refer to centralized ethers.js front ends.
The “you don’t need a blockchain” argument is usually either based on acceptance of trust assumptions that go mostly unnoticed, or attacking a strawman of some knavish startup. Blockchain is also not the same thing as cryptocurrency. It may be more legitimate to say “You don’t need a cryptocurrency”, in the same way that it doesn’t make sense to play Doom on an ATM terminal.
How different is a blockchain from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT?
edit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26415908/whats-the-diffe...
Consensus of... whether or not the messages are correctly cryptographically signed?
This is important when your data is somehow updated and/or when you append more data to a given context, hence the typical tree data structure and not a hash table.
pushing data: i want to send money somewhere
pulling data: so and so (sometimes myself) has received money
you get a list of nodes by DNS resolving seed.bitcoin.sipa.be
then you connect at port 8333 and speak the "BTC" protocol or whatever and either listen for a bunch of data, or push your own data (like a transaction)
where is the validation part that you are referring to?
A could sign two messages: "I, A, send my bitcoin to B" and "I, A, send my bitcoin to C". There needs to be global consensus whether the bitcoin ends up with B or C, otherwise the coin would be effectively duplicated and it wouldn't work as money.
And further messages that A might sign in the future should not be able to retroactively change the recipient -- e.g. if we used a rule "the first recipient in alphabetical order wins", then A could take back the money months later by signing "I send my bitcoin to myself".
So bitcoin instead uses "the first transaction to be put into a mined block wins", and thus needs a global consensus for the order of mined blocks.
There is a huge community around "self sovereign identity" with a conference currently happening right now https://internetidentityworkshop.com/
What is hard to grasp about blockchains in this light is simply that when following this curve, they are projected to become relatively much cheaper and better across a range of metrics over time with hardware, software and algorithmic improvements, and therefore they will become increasingly applicable across a variety of scenarios, with consequential side effects in the same way that a shift in energy and transportation changes land use.
It should be a clue that the narratives of both pro and anti keep shifting around as both are frequently proven wrong in spectacular fashion, while the amount of money and employment piled into the space keeps rising amidst these spectacular failures. The market wants to "win crypto" and keeps losing as it slips out of grasp. Meanwhile, the people working on the core tech are experiencing an onrush of new algorithmic developments and have tons of things to build that they weren't even able to conceive of a few years before.
Saying "you don't need a blockchain" is a grandpa joke. Interesting times are happening.
First you claim blockchain can help with "hosed and portable". Then you claim hosted can help you manage on-chain identity and make it transferable.
While your first argument was plain wrong, your second argument is true, but unrelated to a blockchain: ANY kind of identity can be "hosted and portable": see email.
It's difficult to fully appreciate how important of a use case that is.
Its always lead to an interesting conversation that includes to many of the same points TFO mentions.
But what about the services provided by Notaries?
land registries and other necessarily robust and trustworthy transactions that aren't ever going to happen at a high-volume?
And are those issues actually bad enough that you would accept the new issues introduced by blockchain technologies?
I'm imagining my property becoming forever "unowned" because some real estate lawyer lost their escrow wallet key.
The original should certainly have been edited, but not because of the profanity (we're not Bowdlers here) but rather because of the clickbait. (That's the unless in "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
In posts like this where the article begins by confessing to clickbait, the next sentence usually tells you what the real title should be. I've pinched that for the title above.
A large majority of trendy new technologies in the software industry are driven by ephemeral industry buzz.
It takes time for us to collectively separate the wheat from the chaff. In the meantime it's generally wise to stick with what has worked in the past.
Ironic how sometimes people embedded in tech can be the biggest luddites.
ARPANET was necessary for rapidly exchanging data and compute resources among research labs, which precisely was what it was designed to do. It just happened to find way more uses beyond its initial goals, and evolved into the internet we know today.
However, can we take a moment to acknowledge how biased the crowd here is against blockchain? I know you’re tired of the buzzwords, but the other side is also tired of the hostility towards there maybe being something useful on the chain.
As the author has pointed out, things have evolved substantially over the last year and it deserves open and fair discussion.
The above highlights my point in a sense.
There is value to be achieved, I think, in a more nuanced approach.
Comparing energy usage of a global system with the total energy usage of a country is absurd, and people doing it should feel ashamed they didnt rationally think about what they said/wrote.
You could compare a blockchain transaction's energy use to that of a credit card payment. But that would not convey the scale difference.
A single bitcoin transaction uses more electricity than my apartment does in two months (at least during the spring).
Let's take Bitcoin for instance. I'm pretty sure that the electricity required to perform one single BTC transaction has grown by multiple orders of magnitude since Bitcoin first appeared, regardless of the possible efficiency improvements in GPUs or ASICs, and will continue to grow—hence, profitability will always scale linearly with the willingness and capability to waste.
On the other hand, dryers, Christmas lights, appliances, cars and laptops etc. have, if anything, all become more energy-efficient in the past decade, being able to perform the same funcion or better while using less power. On top of that, there's only so much washing you want to dry, or so many places you want to drive to—you don't want to indefinitely scale up the size of your dryer, or the number of cars you drive. And if you were to find a reason to scale up either of them, it would be because there is a business opportunity in providing a material service to customers, either laundry or transport. In that case, your profitability would be limited by how many people want their clothes dried or to be driven somewhere, and not just by how big you can afford the dryer or how many cars you can accumulate.
Also, the practical upshot of the previous dynamic was that only people who could afford thousands of GPUs/ASICs/FPGAs could verify transactions, so it was basically the same effect with more steps.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
this is a huge distraction, and another way to divide people, and use tricks or marketing to cause them to act out of FOMO and greed.
it would be "interesting" if we were debating how to solve the supply line fragility, the need for soil, the need to keep the temperature down, the need to achieve some modicum of equality here in North America so that millions of intelligent humans dont become slaves and have their potential as inventors and scientists wasted.
who survives all this will not see your comment, probably, but the facile way that you declare these fundamental questions of survival as .... uninteresting ... makes me despair.
There is value in almost every new technology, I think blockchain and co haven't gotten a bad rap thanks to the 'morons' who are basically just 'pumping and dumping' or 'hyping' to make quick money. Which IMO is a shame because it stops the real innovation taking place.
It could be something, but it's been given (rightly so) a stigma thanks to the cult of 'crypto bros'. So far a waste of potential.
Solved problem: Hyperinflation caused by excessive governmental money printing.
Yes, I know you may not consider this as a "problem", but tell that to the millions of people who have had to watch their life savings being erased to zero value.
Yes, the Bitcoin price may be jumpy, but we aren't yet seeing kids playing with bricks of trillions of Bitcoins because they'd be so worthless that you can give them to your kids as toys.
That DID happen with fiat currency:
Enter "hyperinflation" into your favorite picture search engine.
I personally own a 1 billion bill of a previous currency of my country which I bought for the equivalent of $5 on eBay.
I think you're referencing BTC in use as some kind of ubiquitous currency ? That would be an interesting use, until someone owns enough to influence the market, which, already happens, so it would make matters worse for more people
Meaning acquiring it fairly from the market?
As compared to fiat currencies, which can be issued and moved around with the snap of a finger. That's a net improvement.
Uhm, why not?
As far as I see, the price of Bitcoin has actually even hyperDEFLATED.
It started below $1! Now it is at $40000.
The non-"print more money" version will reject its blocks.
So even if they throw 90% of hashpower at it then it will not be the consensus because nobody uses a version of Bitcoin which accepts the blocks it mines.
I don't know that it counts since it's not a "blockchain" in the sense most people describe it, but Git is sort of "blockchain adjacent." It uses a Merkle tree to maintain a crytographically signed quasi-immutable ledger of transactions.
While it's probably not a "blockchain", I don't think that anyone disputes that Git (and its blockchain-like feature) is useful.
I suspect that this is going to be the "good" that comes from blockchain [1] and its ilk; a lot of interesting uses are going to pop up using blockchain concepts, and it will be cannibalized into something that is indisputably useful.
I agree that there are a lot of crypto idiots who act like all problems will be solved by Bitcoin or Ethereum, and I do think they give the legitimate research being done on blockchain (e.g. the Ouroboros protocol) a bad name.
[1] I know Git predates blockchain.
The problem is that the "social ledge" value of a blockchain is hilariously expensive, to the point that governments look cheap in comparison. And a private ledge doesn't bring a lot of value into any application (but where it does bring a bit more of value, it is getting adopted, like version control systems).
There are countless economy-changing experiments happening in the DeFi community. Rebuilding of Wall Street and insurance infrastructure being attempted on chain, where trust and centralization and scams or unfairness are ripe for disruption. Staking assets to provide liquidity pools has resulted in billions coming on chain.
Plenty of people are trying to make a quick buck. Plenty of hacks and bad engineering is happening. Most things don’t need a blockchain. I wish HN community looked deeper though.
I have personally found it rather difficult to tell the wheat from the chaff. If you have any suggestions on promising projects in the space then please do link me to it.
Looks like around 11 [1].
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=cryptocurrency&t...
Since repetition is off topic here, we need to avoid this and stick to pathways that haven't fried yet.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"We are building distributed filesystems" as a new(ish) practical user control is one such example. IPFS has been around for much longer than a year, so I'm not sure what the author means by "past year." Regardless, it is slow. Regardless, isn't privacy-preserving.
Perhaps the speed issue could be solved with improvements to the software. Let's imagine it's fast, then-- what are we going do with it? We can't house Scihub there-- otherwise the nodes replicating it will get hit with lawsuits. Similarly, we can't build a new Demonoid or any other sharing service that lets students and scholars pool together the various copies of reference materials that they own.
At the same time, college students are constantly bootstrapping all kinds of private content collections on private centralized services, and sharing it among themselves (and, unfortunately, not re-sharing it outside their group so these collections keep getting rebuild opportunistically), jumping from app to app as tastes for apps change. That's achieved with the current internet plus all the walled gardens that people use to get their work done. If our distributed filesystem cannot include the content these users are already sharing amongst themselves, then it's functionally equivalent to a hard-drive that won't allow writing based on certain content hashes. Moreover, if users still have to do cartwheels to use the distributed filesystem in a privacy-preserving way, they may as well use their current walled garden apps that are probably decades ahead in terms of UX.
Yes, blockchain certainly has its share of hot air from finance. But this pairing of blockchain plus decentralize-all-the-things overlays (which will be done baking real soon now!) is particularly prone to magical thinking. One because blockchain fans typically handwave scaling issues (or pivot to a non-blockchain approach which isn't functionally equivalent to blockchain), and two because decentralization zealots are prone to releasing vaporware.
I hope that clarifies things. I've certainly reacted on this list with hostility to low-effort blockchain pitches from people who have a clear conflict-of-interest. My hostility is probably like other people's here-- based in knowledge of the disappearing act that these magic-thinking systems can perform on the money of ordinary folks. That's real damage, and it's bad. The day someone makes a repo for "sloth sort" by pasting a jpeg of a sloth in a readme for sleep sort and performs a pump and dump scheme on it, I'll be sure to be hostile towards that, too. Meanwhile, people seem to only be doing that with blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. That more likely explains the hostility here than the idea that anyone is (unwittingly or otherwise) biased against blockchain.
Edit: typos, clarifications
I don't think you will get an 'open and fair discussion' here, even if you list examples like Stripe (Using blockchain for crypto payouts) [0] and Skiff (Using ENS for identities for their E2E decentralized workspace) [1].
When asked about this earlier, you get random incomprehensible replies like "CrYPtO IS SCaM" and admitting they haven't even looked at the article and either cannot answer basic questions or reply back with another question without given a concrete answer to the first.
Good luck getting an 'open and fair discussion' about anything crypto without someone screeching absolutist scam nonsense or some die hard crypto supporter / investor pushing their 'NFTs is the future' nonsense.
Don't fall in *either* of those camps.
Or is there a non-blockchain way to run a currency system that has no central authority?
Or Amazon gift cards?
You can't have a trustless, decentralized currency without certain styles of blockchain tech. Otherwise you're just once again trusting a central authority with control of a database containing your balance.
Always good for laugh.
anarchy
noun
a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority
Entrepreneurs will go where the money is, and if foolish investors are throwing money at blockchain-based startups, savvy entrepreneurs will take their money, and they should.
So what's the winning strategy? Raise money for blockchains and then "pivot" to databases?
Then you'd also get the praise for being a "visionary" who knows where the market is going lmao
I don't think so. Don't listen to cryptobros telling you this is a problem everyday users have.
I'm a web3 enthusiast, and this is what cemented it for me as a proper successor to whatever we have now. Everyone agrees the legacy web auth is broken. Do you use the same password everywhere? That's low security, you must have a different password, preferably randomly generated, for each and every website, each having an arbitrary set of rules. It's a massive pain in the ass and leads to clicking a lot of "Forgot your password?", and pray to god the site you're using actually properly handles your password, or doesn't accidentally (or intentionally) log or leak your password. Yes, it's happened before, many many times.
Logging in via wallet, on the other hand? Connect your wallet, choose your account, and you're in. It's stupid simple to integrate on the backend too, and incredibly secure as long as you don't leak your 12 words (but even then, you can use a ledger if you want to be safe). It also works as an unified account across different websites. It's amazing. Public key cryptography for the masses.
The chain of trust concept is the simplest and most powerful concept of trust we have in the real world, it fail because most people still have issue understanding the difference between local and remote and understanding why privacy is a value. Blockchain is "popular" just because it's sold as a tool to make money and people who do not know think "let's try it". Nothing more.
It's pushed because IT giants (who are probably those who really invented the concept) feel to be giant enough to kick banking out and replace them in a classic EEE move [1] while locking users even more because we need banks mostly for comfort and by law, but we can use cash "by nature" while we can't use cryptos without computers (full of crapware, down to the hw, produced by very few giants at least for their core components) and connections (again owned by few giants). They are sold as free, and they are in theory, in practice they are very hard prisons, worst than those who they say they want to replace.
About web3: just try ZeroNet, is a kind of PopcornTime clone, instead of movies it share text, websites. Under the wood just the classic BitTorrent. Fast enough to be used, but certainly not usable by all on scale. The real decentralization we need is web 1.0 with today an IPv6 global for any device and PUBLIC registars who offer domains for free to Citizens JUST mediating eventual overhands, no third party resale allowed... It's not done like we do not push Usenet again just because those who know do want a surveilled and locked IT, not a really free one.
[1] and bankers known that well: https://voxeu.org/content/banking-disrupted-financial-interm... and also it's more recent evolution https://voxeu.org/article/digitalisation-and-future-banking
Blockchains standardized an addressing namespace and proliferation of signing tools that are on the path to being ubiquitous. Other niches failed to do that. Speculation drives innovation. Blockchains have tradeoffs, the addressing namespace and signing doesn't actually use the blockchain or any consensus mechanism.
(address validation has to be done client side most times! some networks have added consensus level rules to add node level validation).
That's why blockchains "are popular", it's not a matter of what they are technically, they can be even just a mythical entity, a person, a particles, they are popular because someone have advertise them as "a tool to make money" and than countless humans have immediately responded. Try to talk about some crypto-enthusiast: I'm pretty sure 99% of the will prove to have no idea of what technically the blockchain is, BUT they surely tell you many strategies and judgments on this and that investment opportunity with this and that crypto, normally materialized for them in some remote web-services, of course.
It's the same model that push "anti-radiation, anti-5G magic stickers&co" on the market. People have no idea on them, they have a fear, a desire, a need, so an emotion and they hear that such tools might satisfy such need/desire/emotion, if the entry barrier is cheap they'll try "just in case". It's nothing about the nature or technicality of the tool.
This very business is the old classic Eduard Bernays way to push things to the public: he push cigarettes crafting a new scientific journal who publish easily new real papers, than he spread it a bit in most famous doctors' offices, MDs read real studies on them and like the journal. They also read dummy studies about how healthy is smoking and they blindly trust them. At the same time on the public he manage to get some famous people to smoke in public, he say that smoking was about feminine emancipation etc something that any relevant cohort like to hear. A small summary of his campaigns is here: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer
Crypto start in the same way: spread to some FLOSS cohort as a new project by a secret hacker, something to pique interest in those who represent the crème of the IT world, a bit later Ponzi's schemes for the general public, in the middle some spread in the business sector depicting how anything can be solved in a snap with the new exiting tech. A cohort see the interest of the others and global interest grow blind. We do not even know if the legend of some aborigines of I don't know which island have invented large rock to mark they financial transaction on is real or just a fabricated legend.
Try another point of view: what's wrong with the web? IMVHO:
- dependence on search engines, witch are so far a big&powerful only game, witch means that those big&powerful decide what we see or not on average;
- no easy entry barrier for those who want to produce contents, not just consume it. We have had and still have various "free hosted platforms", from the classic Geocities to Substack, but nothing individual and easy to access. We can easily publish on ZeroNet but how many know ZeroNet exists?
- lost of focus and software complexity, the web was about valuable contents who do not change much and many ask for, a usenet companion to avoid keep answering same questions all the time; now is mostly a software platform and nothing in the middle clearly define the right place in IT panorama.
Does web3 address any of these? IMVHO no.
What can solve these?
Well, first of all surely on the internet layer IPv6 with a static global per device for all, so we do not have NAT and dynamic IP issues, those who want can get a domain name and being easy to reach, others can still access their devices with pre-recorded static addresses. IP2IP calls are straightforward like filesharing especially with modern connections for those who have them etc. For the web part... A newborn Plan 9, witch means a new universal 9p modern protocol to mount remote resources with proper access level, the same for share files of any kind, so the same to see a streamed video, the same to send messages (just mount the target mailbox and save a file, the email was sent, namespacing ensure you can't read anything) or to read a classic web website, like one with pure CSS3+html5 and no js.
Do you want a newspaper? No need for a specific protocol and a specific server, the newspaper offer various access (free or paid) to relevant documents, you can even read them with your visual style easily, just overwrite the default CSS. No need separate feeds, they just grab the html without the CSS. The entire software stack for a modern web 1.0 will became so simple that we do not need modern WebVM no-one-but-some-giants can create/maintain.
Internet banking? No need from the bank side a crappy porcal with it's costs, just a common file format to talk to the client, relevant auth is part of the underlying system protocol, transactions are just signed text, like part of an XML stream. Customers can have their own favorite banking app with all their banks in one place, with all their history, notes etc integrated. Again a hyper-simplified software stack for much more results than now.
Nothing of the above proposals are in Web3. Nothing else in the end, just a smoky promise of being so powerful without details...
Well yes, I wasn't refuting the author's "You don't need a f%ing blockchain", but simply stating that IMO Web3 is already miles better than legacy web, even just for its main authentication system.
>That's straightforward with any old public-key cryptography scheme like PGP ... but the login part itself could just as easily be an old-fashioned PGP key pair.
This reminds me of HN's famous Dropbox comment.[1] Yeah, wallets are "just" public key cryptography, but it's easy enough for anyone to use and for developers to integrate. PGP is extremely convoluted in comparison, and to this day I have no idea how to sign a message with it without having to open up a guide. With metamask it's just two clicks.
Sendthing is a reasonable, user friendly alternative to Dropbox. There will be a Sendthing for pgp one day...
The great part of Metamask, is there's almost nothing proprietary about it. You could rip all the blockchain stuff out of it, and it would still work. If I wanted the blockchain stuff later, as long as it follows the standard.... I still could. Brave has it already integrated!
of course with the state of education on this topic being such wide and widening gulf, people are going to get taken advantage of with obvious distinctions that are not so obvious to them.
many of these scams are erroneous approval transactions. an approval transaction is necessary for another program to use your assets. that program can have a human controller or another function that allows it to seize your asset later.
you can read more about this here
https://kalis.me/unlimited-erc20-allowances/
(NFT standard classes inherit the ERC20 interface)
Certainly involving more crypto in the issue of logging in to things might be a net benefit, but there’s no reason it should come from blockchain instead of, say, the password manager and totp token software people are already getting used to using and that don’t expose you to financial damage.
In the end though, people still need to get into their accounts when software is unavailable so it seems unlikely passwords are ever completely going away.
What did you mean by this?
> people still need to get into their accounts when software is unavailable so it seems unlikely passwords are ever completely going away.
Using a password uses software?
Like I said, I think password managers and totp software are just inherently better positioned to 'solve' this (if it needs solving).
Also, I've long since lost any interest in participating get rich quick schemes built on fads, so "it's a lucrative space" isn't really the appeal you think it is.
> What did you mean by this?
Sometimes people lose their phones.
You’re basically asking me to try to solve world hunger with car manufacturing. I can see the merit in solving the problem, and am perfectly happy to help contribute to solving it, but your chosen tool has literally nothing to recommend itself as a solution.
> Assuming
> You’re basically asking
I'm not assuming that. I'm not saying that. I'm not asking you to do anything so what mistake is possible?
I'm not forcing you to drink, I'm not even leading you to the water. I said, in a very pragmatic way, that being just a cynic is a choice.
The people that such cynics are criticizing are and were also cynics. The users on the other hand, go ahead and make fun of them, they don't know shit. The builders that led everything to the state it is were and are cynics. I'm only saying this is what people are doing and that's the choice they took, its available.
So its not really as divisive as you think when its cynics all the way down.
Find someone else to convince you why that choice is viable for you. Everyone knows your stance, I don't care about that axe you to have to grind, my role was what I said.
This is just ad hominem. You did indeed ask me to expend effort, whether you see it that way or not. If you want to build great things, you might want to learn how to listen to criticism and not just assume that anyone who disagrees with you is being mean.
I dont know if you make fun of users, its not ad hominem, I’m not looking at any of your other threads.
To me, this isnt a discussion about other technologies, thats why I’m ignoring your rebuttals if you would call them that, I know blockchains have tradeoffs and I dont care: Focus on what you can control and go where the customers are. I’m sticking with my supposition that cynics have a choice, thats the whole conversation to me.
Oh you mean based on the idea that people know their passwords? The password manager is a software too? How do you think people are using blockchains and their keys there? They may be using mnemonic phrases mentally and that also doesn't require using their phone to regenerate their private key (and also doesn't require the user having internet to sign something), seems to cover your criteria but if you can articulate what use cases you are imagining that might help. Mnemonics are supposed to be potentially catchier to memorize, but we/I/users can be realistic and back them up other ways.
All it does is send a request, get a random string, sign that with the private key, and send it back alongside with the public key and the signature.
Yes, it works. Yes, it is simple. No, it has nothing to do with blockchains. Websites like http://stacker.news are using this.
So what happens when you do? It sounds incredibly secure until you end up in a bad situation with no remediation.
Only web3 enthusiasts with a solution in search of a problem agree with this. Auth has been a solved problem for years. Use a password manager. No need for blockchain nonsense. Next.
Only web3 detractors with an allergy to blockchains agree with this.
You can mitigate the risks by using a password manager, but you can't argue that it's a solid system, come on now. You still have to trust websites to actually properly handle your credentials, and then hope for the best. Even with a password manager.
>Use a password manager.
If I need to use an external application to actually properly use the system, I might as well have that application use an actual proper system in the first place (public key cryptography), especially if that application also acts as your online de facto identity that only requires you to remember 12 words to access from anywhere.
>No need for blockchain nonsense.
Doesn't use blockchain. Next.