It appears they are just using Ethereum accounts for authentication. Unlike email addresses, you don't need a third party to have one.
Is there anything more anonymous and less dependent on 3rd parties than "hi, welcome, please create a new user ID and password"?
Everything else, as far as I can see, ends up benefiting the provider in some sneaky shady way,as opposed to user.
Ethereum accounts are not tied to any service. They are just a public/private keypair so they can be used as portable usernames.
Meanwhile, Mr. John "bro trust me bro your wallets secure bro nobody's going to just drop a viral token into your wallet to fuck with you bro" Ethereum is a 3rd party to the transaction between me and a website. I trust Ashley Madison with my password more than I trust the Web3 ecosystem and cryptobros to not fuck me over using the rules of their own rigged game.
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant."
On the other hand, with the Ethereum protocol, you only have to rely on the public blockchain to attest/sign/prove ownership. You can choose the software and hardware that you use to secure your wallet too. You can even keep that wallet airgapped, totally offline and still authenticate using QR codes. If you were so inclined you could even run your own end point/node so you're not relying on any 3rd parties to attest/sign for you. It's a self sovereign online identity if you want it to be. It also has other benefits like the ability to store monetary value in the way of cryptocurrencies.
The ability to verify ownership of digital assets (tokens), like NFTs, and use those in creative ways like we have here. You can also use the Ethereum Name Service and tie a .ETH domain name to your public key, so people know that a message sent by frizlab.eth is really you, even if you have to get a new wallet address. It's your identity (frizlab.eth), your wallet, and with NFT's I think it could also verify and visualize your reputation or skillset online too, no matter what website you're on. Your identity owned by you and built on top of a world wide, immutable, distributed, consensus protocol. I wrote an article for Wordpress developers with my ideas, but I think it can apply to the web as a whole.
https://caches.xyz/the-rostrum/wordpress-web3-and-ethereum-w...
Again I haven't used this service and have no affiliation with them but do believe that we desperately need truly public digital infrastructure and I think Ethereum is a step in that direction.
Basically the difference is that the username and password can be used to authenticate with that specific site and that’s it, while a “wallet” browser extension or app can let the user sign transactions and manage value outside your site, so they don’t have to trust your site (they approve all major transactions) and your site can’t impersonate them. You may think you won’t but one of your devs could go in for example and salami-slice the balances of your members, or change all the votes in a stackoverflow election etc.
With the Ethereum approach, you can control this data about yourself. For example, with zero-knowledge proofs you could prove to a service that "I am over 18 and an US resident with a valid phone number" without sending any actual information about yourself to that party. Twitter shouldn't need your phone number. It just needs to know that you have one.
Logging in with your Google account everywhere is convenient because it contains all kinds of facts about you. But you have no control over what's done with that data, either by Google or the service you're logging into. With "Log in wit Ethereum" you could get the same conveniences, but you still own your data and have full control over what's being done with it or who can access which parts of it.
You do not need Ethereum for auth. You do not even need Ethereum for anonymous without a 3rd party provider.
I do not see what value this actually provides nor why it should come in this form. So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.
I get you have an axe to grind but it would be better in a thread about Ethereum tech rather than an application. You are being really annoying and against the spirit of HN.
Not all NFTs need to be bought or sold. They can just as easily be used as membership tokens that are given away.
Also, according to the website, only some of the communities will be locked behind NFTs. Others appear to be free to join just with an Ethereum account used as auth.
I haven't used the service so I'm not going to defend it but it makes sense for web3 communities to base their auth around the tech they're already using, and that is crypto wallets. Everyone in the community already has crypto wallets so the friction to join is very low.
Also, with the move to proof-of-stake, the winner-takes-all-ness of it is even worse. It is now even easier for early movers to continue reaping marginal rewards. It is a system designed to entrench and centralize power.
This is also a flaw shared by the actual real world economy used by big girls and boys. However, crypto has also innovated many many more flaws and insecurities. So I'd rather stick to the bad system we have now, vs the worse system designed by grifters who quite literally just do not understand fucking anything about sensible ways to organize people.
If you’re talking about the gas fees, that’s the pricing market at work, similar to toll fees for cars for highways. Layer 2s would be the train or megabuses on those highways - amortized gas costs by the number of people on them.
PoS ensures marginal rewards to everyone equally with the same percentage unlike Bitcoin. You either bought ETH at $8 a pop back in 2017, or you’re now buying it at $1850, but everyone will get ~3.3% rewards for staking. Not that much different from people buying stocks when it was lower and getting dividends.
Your understanding is imperfect. You use your private key on Ethereum to authenticate, not an NFT. It does seem like certain NFTs gate access to different parts of the site.
> NFTs are still wildly damaging to the ecosystem, with how much electricity they demand
Not really anymore. As others have pointed out, the switch to PoS massively reduced Ethereum's energy demands, by ~99.5%. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...
> Their sole purpose is to be traded as chits in a series of wealth extractions, until some unfortunate sucker is left holding the bag on a worthless blob of data that (rightfully) nobody wants.
Ya, unfortunately the space is rife with grifters and hype in weird places, but that doesn't seem relevant to this specific project though.
> So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.
Or they're trying to make something legit within this space. The Internet's early use cases were largely a bunch of scams and over-hyped projects that failed miserably. That didn't exactly hold for long though.