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> Universal login

You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.

> Ownership in communities.... The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden

But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?

> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?

We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms. Successful internet communities become walled gardens to protect against competition, but they're limiting the growth of their community members and I believe the platforms themselves could capture more value. A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.

>We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms.

Greenfield projects are easy because they wave away the real complexities of integrating with existing systems. But those existing platforms already provide a lot of tangible value. If you want users, you can't just ignore that.

“I’m running a sale on Shopify for my supporters, check the latest Patreon post for the discount code!”

Patreon makes it pretty easy to give your subscribers early access to stuff, too. No blockchain involved. A lot of it happens over email.

>A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.

That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.

Blockchains are really just a shared public key cryptography system. It solves the key distribution problem and makes using keys easy for developers and users.

> what would Reddit gain

I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform. It’s not so great for centralized platforms.

But it's not like you can use assets/data from one website in another, unless it's something like a jpg... in which case it's not like you can't just upload that jpg

You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely

Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the commercial rights to use a pop song on a promotional video and then redistribute it among dozens of independent platforms? How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be integrated in any application)? Just a couple of off-hand ideas, but the composability that blockchains offer for ownership enables some powerful use cases. NFTs are data structures.

> Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market.

An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?

Not everyone wants their email public

Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the irreconcilable.

> Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the irreconcilable.

I have dozens of wallet addresses. In fact, while typing this message, I just created 3 more, just for fun. It's really as simple as running an ECDSA function in the browser if you want to create separate identities for separate platforms. The beauty of owning your online identities is that you are in control. It's really that simple. But if you want to compose that identity, there is really no better way.

We've already seen deplatforming, censorship, financial exclusion for protesting in a democratic nation, shadow banning, and worse from the big tech cos. That's not the internet or the values I was raised on, and I'm working to push back on it, vis-a-vis tools like SIWE (https://docs.login.xyz/general-information/siwe-overview/eip...). Take ownership.

> An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?

Because I can send a message to a public key, encrypted such that only the owner of the private key that pairs with that public key, can decrypt. Since the user actually owns the keys, they can't get rugged by Google or Microsoft because they find themselves on the wrong side of big brother. Public on-chain wallets as identity are also much more spam-resistant. Verifying a cryptographic signature is completely decentralized and does not require even internet access (could be done fully offline) whereas email is tied to a server by definition. Numerous possibilities open up with public-private keys.

> Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful.

You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak.

And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.

> You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak.

> And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.

It is free to create a new identity on EVM. You just create a new public-private key pair. You can do it right now, in the browser, on the fly. If you want to have different accounts for different platforms (or multiple accounts for the same platform), you would have that ability (that is the case today, in Web3). But, if you want to integrate across platforms, it is far easier if those applications adopt an open, user-owned identity standard (rather than rely on Google or Gmail or Facebook or hotmail).

>How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT.

I fee like a lot of these "cross platform NFTs" don't take the platform into consideration. A platform like Twitter or Reddit will have to opt-in to this blockchain and have to deal with reproducing whatever asset or relationship into their own systems. This will likely involve an API call to some datastore to retrieve that information.

1. For these platforms this is no different than integrating with any other 3rd party system. It's unclear how this is any different from Gravatar?

2. It's unclear why these platforms are motivated to supply such a feature. Why would I spent time integrating a blockchain for ownership rights over some in-game music, when CD Baby already exists?

A lot of these use cases are still solutions searching for a problem; they don't represent an actual material improvement for the platform (or worse, require economic investment that the platform cannot capture).

> How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be integrated in any application)?

That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.

> That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.

Because otherwise you have gatekeepers and incompatible proprietary standards that don't interoperate or compose.

The music owner would surely be a gatekeeper in either a blockchain-based or blockchainless solution because they would want to vet that the service providers were properly respecting the rights token. And whether or not the standard is open or proprietary seems orthogonal to whether a blockchain is involved.

> How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network

Web3/NFT etc doesn't solve this though.

Where is the list of followers going to be stored ? It isn't on chain.

Yes, it does, see Lens Protocol as an example: https://lens.dev/ (uses Polygon, an EVM compatible low-fee chain)

Anything more data intensive than that can be stored on Ceramic/IPFS. https://ceramic.network/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://nft.storage/

Yes, absolutely. This ("how can you transfer assets between platforms/context without interoperable protocols?", and the corollary "if the content is simple enough to have interoperable protocols, it's probably something uninteresting like an image rather than something valuable like a game asset") is one of the key counter-arguments that deflate a lot of web3 hype (along with "you don't need a blockchain for what you described" and "you are hyping decentralization, but the situation you've described still relies on (or is actively better with) a central authority"). A lot more detail on it here: https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...

it's not so great for centralised platforms, unless the centralised platform you are talking about is infura, in which case it's a huge win.

> I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform.

What does "owning your own assets" really mean, with regards to services such as Reddit, and where exactly do you see any problem worth fixing?

> You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.

For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?

Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem for consumers and application developers. If you implement PGP as your sign-in method, it's unlikely that any consumers will adopt it unless they're developers. And you increase the barrier to entry for anyone who does not understand it.

In the case of MetaMask, this has already got significant traction at 21 million monthly active users (more if you count other EVM wallet solutions), because there's no other way to interact with a blockchain. It's also relatively user friendly. And there's an ecosystem now of applications that require it for interaction, so you're starting to see network effects grow for "Sign in With Ethereum/EVM".

> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens

This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.

> Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?

Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it.

I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.

The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?

This is exactly what’s happening with crypto.

A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.

So... a dark pool? Oy vey.

Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Of course it runs in a SQL db or whatever. They only need to touch the chain when settling inflows/outflows.

But something like Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap is fully on-chain. Every trade happens on chain, because the application is an immutable smart contract liquidity protocol, called an AMM, or automated market maker.

It does as much, if not more, volume than Coinbase ($1.98B in last 24H): https://info.uniswap.org/#/

> MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains

False. MetaMask uses Infura as a default, but you can edit your RPC URL to whatever you want. You can even run your own node and sync the chain if you've got a couple hundred gigabytes to spare (no stake required to run a non-validating node).

They don't have to hit the blockchain all the time. Only when it makes sense. For everything else, there's off-chain signatures. That's the beauty of it. Hey, you don't want to use the chain, just use the sign-in with Ethereum feature, and that's totally cool!

Okay, but the login bit for MetaMask is "just" using public key cryptography though, right? You could strip out the blockchain stuff from MetaMask and that part would still work.

You could also do Web Authentication, which is based on Public Key cryptography and ships with every major browser and is integrated into many operating systems.

> For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?

For the same reason a Metamask extension to do so won't take off outside of specialized applications.

Since users have not yet authenticated, this is part of a conversation process of potential users to registered, authenticated users. Only options which will increase that will be supported.

People to some very high double-digit percentage understand what a "Sign in with Google" button does, what will happen if they hit it. Because of that, there is high likelyhood if someone hits that button that they will return successfully authenticated.

PGP never had a website-based authentication option. Mutual TLS did, but other than a few certificate authorities I've never seen it out of the enterprise space - the compatibility and user experience were never even close to sufficient to offer as a broader option.

As optimized as the sign in with Google experience is, there are still sites which will not support it because they want to make sure the user does not get 'lost' on another site if there are failures. They simply will not outsource their funnel.

chrome will never have a "login with pgp" function

brave already supports "login with ethereum"

adoption matters

Exactly! AFAIK client certificates have been in browsers for decades and almost no one uses them. Whereas, like you said, millions of people now the ability and basic know-how to generate and sign with public-private key pairs, adopted via incentives that keep the wallet ecosystem thriving.

> This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.

Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a win for the bazaar.

People only use Metamask to engage in speculative crypto schemes.

Blockchain doesn’t really solve the whole “who is giving me this key” issue with PGP.

Universal login: the third party services still need to accept your login and can still reject it. Service providers won’t vanish or decentralize, look how we got google on the open web

Composability: sounds really bad for privacy. The entire concept of a permanent public record of transactions scares me for this reason

rewarding creator communities: we already have Patreon and advertising deals. Aren’t crypto transactions relatively slow and expensive, or has that changed?

And who else will then operate the web3 infrastructure?

Instead of the Security team at Google, their ddos service and OnCall experts we have whom now?

Some miners?

Perfectly written Blockchain code?

You sound like those things are just free.

As a member of an open source community involved in one or more blockchain projects, I can attest that many of these things literally are indeed free.

An open source community can do a lot and not everything.

I'm not aware of any opensource community being happy at doing on call.

Or end customer support.

Or even marketing.

And if we look at successful opensource projects, than we have companies behind them.

Internet Service Providers? Hosting Providers? Literally anyone from their closet?

Google isn't the Internet, no matter how badly they want you to believe that.

From their closet? What? They develop web3 software in the closet?

Not sure if you’ve heard but, over the last two years, some of the most polished and well-produced voices on NPR were literally coming from someone under a blanket in a closet. I’m not sure how much web3 is happening in closets but I wouldn’t bet on zero.

I'm not sure I understand your question, genuinely. There are of course costs for the benefits that come with web3: protocols are slow to evolve, and infrastructure is less efficient when we require a distributed consensus. Anyone that thinks "Web 2" or centralized systems will disappear is silly, there will always be situations where the costs of web3 are greater than the benefits. On the other hand, it's equally silly to think that there are zero use cases where the benefits of web3 outweigh the costs. Both can and will coexist.

Static HTML pages still exist today.

The difference is there are relatively fewer static html pages. There wont be relatively fewer web2 deployments vs web3. Itll be mostly web2

I agree - misguided attempts to make everything "web3" shouldn't take away from the huge amount of value that future web3 services can bring, even if they are vastly outnumbered by web2 services forever.

have you considered how (not "why?") was google able to give away one gigabyte of email storage to anybody before 2010s?

that was not free either... what I'm trying to get at (and not very eloquently) is that a lot of that work is done by the computers. also, something about how the code is written once and then used by everybody at the same time. sure, writting the code may be expensive at first.

dunno, I doubt better written words will get you to agree with (or see) whatever it is I'm trying to get at.

I follow plenty of things Google as a company just does due to the money they have.

Undersee cables for example.

Project Zero.

Secure by default.

2FA.

Google even gives you now the option of configuring your ads.

Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary motivation is solving hard problems for us.

Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what motivation?

If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should start trusting the etherium company instead of Google?

Or should I start trusting 1000 small companies than Google?

I'm quite happy what Google does and I don't know all of those other potential companies.

> the etherium company

LOL

Not sure what you think is funny but did you check the contributor list here https://github.com/orgs/ethereum/people ?

Sorry, “foundation”

https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-basics/ethereum-foundation/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethereum-foundation/

Speaking of which…

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/

I get stuck at the point where I’m supposed to store the key material for my highly secure, persistent, web3-wide identity in … a browser extension? To which I then allow every web3 site I visit to access? I understand that it helps adoption, but there’s an enormous impedance mismatch there. Why isn’t there offline identify verification front and center?

The way you've described it, sounds like a cross domain cookie. That isn't technically a thing unless you consider one domain/company selling the tracking of their cookie for you to another domain/company or a data broker/aggregator.

So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.

Universal Login: while some corporate login controls are anti-competitive, most blocks are due to spam and phishing. Web3 / crypto has yet to provide an effective sell against fakes and whitewashing. Sure blockchain is cool, but the actual product is the design of the collision to stop spam.

Permissionless composability: Copyright ensures there will always be the need for permission if you wish to compose in a country that has copyright.

There are some good ideas here but there are also some very critical flaws. The problem is not so much web3 itself but that web3’s most vocal proponents—- particularly investors—- have refused to grapple with things like spam and copyright. It’s probably because they want to be middlemen who collect all the profits and are left without liability when the pyramid collapses.

All of those usecase are going to suck for handling fraud and abuse though, same as everything else crypto related.

Permissionless composability means you have no control over which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when they turn abusive

I like the distributed ID stuff and think its good or at least has potential.

permissionless computing is also fine, but I think payments need to be somehow decoupled from this. endless ocean of tokens is stupid. we need some kind of distributed payment gateway built into the internet where you can use any currency on a list of supported currencies, and none should be supported that are "bad" ie planet killing POW.

tokenization I think is a dead end

> that can't be denied by a corporation

Every service that might use blockchain based authentication will implement allow lists. As everyone in the history of the Internet has learned trolls and spammers will ruin services. So some sort of unblockable universal login is an impractical fantasy.