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Comment by mvid | Hacker News Reader

I work in crypto, and even I ask, what makes this better than GPG?

Maybe it's that you can prove endorsement by a person who is wealthy in ETH, or in jpeg monkeys? Not totally sure.

At a super low technical level, probably nothing. At a higher level, obviously way more people use Ethereum and the MetaMask extension, than use GPG. It’s better because it’s way more popular and easier to use.

The chain of trust seems better with blockchain based domains than chain of trust often used with GPG. With blockchain based domains, they're secured by the same chain that has so far successfully secured billions of dollars. In the old system, at the top of the chain, the person trusting keys had to be confident that the keys at the top were correct, where in my opinion, it's harder to mistake having an incorrect version of Ethereum's chain.

The old system also provided a way for domains to be seized, which would be the equivalent of an identity being revoked. This can't happen with blockchain based identities, so it provides more certainty. Blockchain based domains are tie human rememberable names to identities well. Which while GPG is associated with email addresses, the association seems more difficult to fake, and provides non-technical people certainty of identity in a similar way to how they would normally trust a website.

Heck, I'm having trouble seeing what makes this better than a Facebook Like!

> @crote: Heck, I'm having trouble seeing what makes this better than a Facebook Like!

Yes it's pretty much the same as Facebook Like, except that the accounts are decentralized so could never be banned. Also you could have a group of people "like" an edit as a group (shared identity).

Is that like, meant to be a benefit?

This project feels a lot like “we could do things with blockchain because…we can do things with blockchain”

As mentioned elsewhere, there’s already PKI stuff for Wikipedia, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point, or benefit? Just because there’s some sort-of-convenient infra in ETH land doesn’t automatically make that inherently useful to anywhere else, and honestly comes across more like a veiled attempt to pump MAU’s on blockchains/meta mask.

Even as a skeptic, this wallet can be tied to a real identity, which would make signing transactions way more legit. And more importantly, the infrastructure for crypto is already established.

Still can’t shake the idea that this is a solution waiting for a problem, and this isn’t really it.

> @mvid: I work in crypto, and even I ask, what makes this better than GPG?

OP: two points.

1. It helps harness the help from EVM wallet's adoption. Most people don't know how to use GPG. Most GPG tools aren't built with mind of regular user as target audience.

2. We could soon see on-chain identities, and organizational relationships linked to it. E.g. one could use ERC-1271 to have a contract attest to a signature.

More people have an ethereum wallet than a gpg keypair.

Ah yes, newsflash straight from ass.

[Insert favorite crypto buzzword/phrase of the week], obviously!

Metamask has 10m MAU. I think this is a great idea.

I was just being tongue in cheek but I guess it didn’t register/I was too believable, my bad

GPG had 30 years to proliferate and didnt and only got the most rabid enthusiasts to use it.

Crypto made public private keys more ubiquitous, not completely, but much much more.

Speculation drives innovation.

That's simply not true. Even if the underlying mechanism is the public-private key pair most owners do not use it with signing in mind.

they have the software and are setup and are familiar with it which is all that matters

A signature is a signature whether or not you "have signing in mind" when you create the signature.

> oskarw85@: That's simply not true. Even if the underlying mechanism is the public-private key pair most owners do not use it with signing in mind.

OP: Society with and without "phones" are foundamentally different. The introduction and adoption of cryptography into daily life is at this level.

In the beginning, we probably could only attract a small group of adoptors. But the monthly active editors of Wikipedia is only O(100000) and the number of editors that actively review and "like" edits are even smaller, around O(1000). This is the scale of users that have made great impact on Wikipedia and the world's knowledge.

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