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Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

We keep going through this cycle of attempting decentralization. Since the dawn of the internet. I wonder if it will stick.

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.

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> decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system.

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.

There's a lot of "this or that" in the technology space. I use OAuth and classic username/passwords for authentication. For really important services, if possible I use multiple methods. Some websites are smart enough to allow you to connect one login type to another, some don't.

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.

Yes, but then this takes away the idea of one private key to rule them all for identifying someone. The moment you've lost that key, you've lost access to all the services relying on it. Each might have their own backup mechanism to fall back on, but suddenly the UX really sucks.

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