Show HN: An Ethereum-authenticated community on Web3, science and technology | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An Ethereum-authenticated community on Web3, science and technology

caches.xyz

41 pointsilovenerds116 comments

Hi everyone, we started developing Caches about a year ago and it's finally gotten to a stage that I believe it can be enjoyed by more people. Accounts are totally anonymous thanks to Sign In with Ethereum. You don't need to provide an email address or password to sign up.

Some communities groups on the site are NFT gated and some you can't even see unless you have the correct NFT in your wallet. If you have a community NFT token we would love for you to make Caches your home. Reach out to @CachesAdmin on the site.

Friends, countryhumans, lend me your brains! Leave behind the wreckage of Reddit and begin to migrate to greener pastures! Join a social community created for nerds, by nerds! Ok, ok ... no need to shove, I'm leavin!

Without the blockchain speak, what does "web3 authenticated" mean? I have to buy an account? (ie "NFT" that lets my "wallet" in, whatever?)

Looks like you just sign a login message with your address' private key, so even an address with nothing in it should probably work.

What's the point of the Blockchain then? Can't I just login with a key pair that does not use a public chain of blocks or anything else? Or a single shared key... eg a password?

"Don’t let the word cryptocurrency scare you! You don’t need any money in your wallet here at Caches. We won’t ask you to buy or invest in any cryptocurrency. You can totally create a brand new, empty wallet if you want."

Except for that whole “some communities groups on the site are NFT gated” part, which means that you must first buy a cryptocurrency to buy the NFT.

It’s just like a “free to play” game that will upsell you on in-app purchases at every opportunity. I can’t imagine anyone wants their reading experience to be more like that.

“Web3” really just means “the worst upsell shit from mobile gaming, in every aspect of your life — with the extra bonus that you get to risk losing your money on a scammy crypto exchange!”

You can also be given access NFTs, no different than someone would give you the password of a speakeasy.

Isn't an "admit one" ticket the very definition of fungible?

I don’t get it, Web2 constantly upsells you on stuff and HN complains, but doesn’t blame the underlying technology.

But far be it for someone to store their private keys in a wallet and sign transactions on their own behalf! Nooooo, that has no real applications!

> Friends, countryhumans, lend me your brains! Leave behind the wreckage of Reddit and begin to migrate to greener pastures! Join a social community created for nerds, by nerds! Ok, ok ... no need to shove, I'm leavin!

But only if you have the correct NFT.

What's the problem with an exclusive community? The website is decentralized such that people can form exclusive communities with whatever rules they want, with no concern that an overarching corporation will dethrone them.

Exactly! What's really cool though is that communities can have their hidden members-only groups on Caches but still interact with the public at large there too. Communities could have a hidden group, only for community members, and a public group to connect with the world. Of course you have your own personal profile to reach whoever you want also.

You can totally start a community here without a NFT! In fact, we want you to! Everyone is allowed to create 1 public, private or hidden group for free. But! If you have a community NFT we can create a hidden group for you, and when members of your community sign into Caches with a wallet containing that NFT, we can automatically add them to that group. Unless you have that NFT you'll never even know that group exists or how much activity is happening behind the scenes. We can also attach a badge next to community members names throughout the site showing they're a member of that community if desired.

For example, this guy is part of the Layer0 community, as you can see by the little L0 icon below his name. https://caches.xyz/members/25016e3c/

For you that may mean nothing, but for other members of Caches that little icon may bring increased trust to that member, or help him identify another member of his community in a sea of random usernames. Here's a blog post about WordPress and sign in with Ethereum that gives a broad overview of the idea.

https://caches.xyz/the-rostrum/wordpress-web3-and-ethereum-w...

What benefits does running this system on Ethereum provide compared to something like urbit?

I'm not familiar with Urbit, but a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation," which I have to assume is a for profit company. Ethereum on the other hand is guided, but not owned or controlled by a non-profit foundation. Ethereum is a public utility and they have a mechanism for community involvement and contribution via Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Hope that helps!

Urbit has always been open source—currently under the MIT license [1]—and same as Ethereum it's also guided by a non-profit foundation, the Urbit Foundation [2] established in 2021.

[1] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt [2] https://urbit.org/overview/people-history

>a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation,"

Where on the website do you see this?

https://urbit.org/privacy

https://urbit.org/terms-of-service

> Last Updated: September 24, 2018

This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.

Given Ethereum's network, I'd like to pose the inverse question back to you and ask why urbit would be better

Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead.

I don't think urbit is all that great, either, but this is coming from someone who decided to increase their investment in face to face conversations following social media starting to crumble.

>Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead

Ethereum operates perfectly smoothly, with zero downtime since launching 8 years ago. In any case, besides peripheral features like NFT-gated forums and Ethereum Name Service created proxy names, this doesn't use Ethereum's distributed network. Just the public key wallet software built for using Ethereum.

It's not very private if your Ethereum account is connected to it. Ethereum accounts should be considered PII. After all, KYC requirements on exchanges makes your accounts easy to link to your identity.

Logging in with Bitcoin (LNURL-auth) is much better implementation. It's just standard public key cryptography, which reuses your wallet seed to generate keys for logging in. Nothing about your addresses is shared or recorded anywhere.

With MetaMask it's trivial to create a new Ethereum account dedicated for this particular purpose, and not linked to any on-chain transactions.

CLI options, hardware wallets, lots of paths.

LN UI is crap unless you use custodial services. People can just use zk privacy to anonymize, and run their own nodes to connect their web3 wallets to.

Can't access this from Europe - why not?

Hi, sorry for the trouble. Accept my sincerest apologies. We did not properly unblock some regions that were restricted during our testing phase. It's been corrected and the responsible party has been properly flogged and then sacked. We hope you'll try again. Thank you for the feedback!

I still have a geoblock.

Which country do you hail from?

Very cool, but hosting isn't free. How do you plan on monetizing this?

They are partnering with NFT communities.

This offers a way for scammers to communicate with their marks without having any annoying outsiders posting. Other than that, is there a use case?

It's easier and more secure than using a password. Public key cryptography in general is a much better way to do authentication than usernames/passwords. This is just leveraging the existing public key infrastructure and wallet software suite of the Ethereum space to create a community with hopefully a critical mass of users able to authenticate themselves with public key cryptography.

Perhaps another minor additional benefit of making it Ethereum-based is that the Ethereum Name Service allows easy use and registration of human-friendly names as proxies for the public keys.

That's not the problem for something in the blog/message board/social network space. The problem is the ability to generate huge numbers of fake identities and spam. You can make all the Etherium wallets you want.

This is the standard spam problem.

That's a separate problem, and largely the same whether the sign up method is email or Ethereum account authentication. Spammers can always secure huge numbers of Facebook-accounts/email-addresses/etc.

What this does is make sign in easier and more secure, and obviate the need to keep track of passwords.

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