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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on launch!

Login button: 3 times I see the word "Nsec" without any explanation, that would lose a lot of youtubers from transitioning

But a bigger issue is that googling about nsec tells me it's a very bad practice: "Some argue that the user should never enter their nsec into an input field at the risk of being compromised by the service. Given the nature of nostr, users cannot recover from a leaked private key and must take greater precaution than they would with a username/password combination." https://nostrdesign.org/docs/how-to/sign-in-sign-up/

(also pip for some reason stops playing when I switch to another page on the site)

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> “Given the nature of nostr, users cannot recover from a leaked private key and must take greater precaution than they would with a username/password combination.”

This is a complete dealbreaker for any end-user product. I don’t understand why crypto/blockchain fans still think it can work.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted here. In any other context, "paste in the private key that your identity is irrevocably bound to" would get you laughed out of the room. It seems to be the default nostr UX nonetheless, and that's worthy of note.

I am aware of efforts to improve on this though, for example https://snort.social/e/note1crl44xk24yc2ym5xlyyfjdeumxueyguz... - essentially the equivalent of a custodial wallet, if I'm understanding correctly.

He’s getting downvoted because that’s a solved problem in the wider crypto-space. To log in you sign a message using your hardware wallet.

Nostr hasn’t grown up to that yet, and pointing out that pasting private keys is a bad idea is fair game.

But implying that public private key cryptography can’t be used to log into web apps is just silly given that value worth billions is being moved around daily using such web apps.

There's a reason why social logins, magic links and SMS login codes are so ubiquitous now - end users want 0 friction getting into their accounts. This increases friction beyond what is currently common practice. No, the public doesn't want nor care about using a key to log in.

Although i have heard of SQRL [1] which purports to be a frictionless way of securely logging in with public private key encryption. I've never seen it discussed here though so I'm unsure if there's significant downside

[1]: https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

This sounds a lot like passkeys https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys - I'd be interested to see a more thorough comparison of the two.

Both of these do a challenge-response style authentication with a particular website, and wouldn't really work as part of a decentralized system.

You could use the same signing key ordinarily used to sign authentication challenges to sign nostr notes, but then you're back to square 1 really.

Edit: slightly better passkey info here https://developers.yubico.com/Passkeys/How_passkeys_work.htm...

SQRL is indeed pretty similar to passkeys. It was just invented before passkeys (before WebAuthn even) and designed to work without requiring any new web standards or changes to the existing web browsers at the time.

That greater compatibility came with some UX trade-offs though. Now that passkeys exist and are widely supported by web browsers there's really no need for SQRL anymore; passkeys are a far more polished version of the same concept.

>end users want 0 friction getting into their accounts.

Why not offer both, the easy one for normal users and an option to use the more secure option.

Why not have the secure option also be easy so normal users will use it?

Does public key necessarily have to be high friction?

Couldn't there be a few-step UI similar to "Sign in with Google/Facebook/etc"?

For People who are already familiar with metamask, "Sign in with Ethereum" is so easy that makes people wish it was universal. It is even easy to generate new identities on demand: generate a new address/public key is literally a one-button operation.

The only thing that bugs me about is that is actually all your identities are still tied to same master passphrase, so if that gets compromised all of your identities get revealed.

You should try logging into a “web3” app to see what I’m talking about. No need to buy crypto or anything, of course. Just for the science.

A short guide, assuming a mobile device:

1. Install MetaMask, next, next, finish to create a wallet.

2. Open app.uniswap.org on your favorite browser. See if you can figure out how to ‘connect’.

You can of course use the MetaMask built-in browser, but that’d be cheating.

I’ve actually seen this used for non-crypto sites. I think… it was fetlife?

If you already have MetaMask/Phantom extensions installed it’s easier than email verification.

I am glad Zach posted here also, I think nostr devs need some reality pull from "non-crypto normies". To be clear it is (hopefully) becoming more common practice to use a nip-07 web-extension for signing (hardware or software) or other methods such as NIP-46. To be clear though, a user on nostr will HAVE to interact with cryptography in some way as every message on the network is signed.

Im working on https://github.com/VnUgE/NVault as an option for more paranoid users that want a self hosted networked approach. But there are others listed here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/07.md

Finally, I wholly dislike the practice of offering an option of entering an nsec. Use a signing extension!

the wider crypto space still has no empathy for normies. if you can't somehow recover or rotate your password, it's a nonstarter by virtue of being a worse UX

ah physical key has the same properties and end-users seems to have been accepting that just fine for hundreds of years

I can easily change my house keys. Even when someone makes a copy of it.

Plus, by design it's easy to prove that you have a private key without having to stick it in somebody else's lock.

I hate when I lose my house key and just have to leave it and go buy a new house somewhere else.

You would need to buy a new lock tough wouldn't you? Unless you had a spare key, but that would have worked with a digital key as well, right?

If someone stole your key, then they could've done anything to your house while your away, just like with a digital key, right?

Nobody with my house key can impersonate me in my house from anywhere in the world without me knowing. The signed and notarized documents involved give me a legal avenue to remove anyone who obtains a key, instead of just abandoning the house and the equity to identity thieves.

na but they can steal your belongings couldn't they. Obviously I didn't mean that they have all the same properties, because then they would be the same thing more or less, but that they share some properties...

literally not at all similar to a house key

similar in some aspects surely, you can't say that they there is 0% overlap can you?

It is correct that it is bad practice to paste an nsec, but a lot of nostr services allow it. The login DOES support "login with extension" which is far preferred and much safer. Your private key is stored in a browser plugin and is not transmitted.

Experienced Nostr users will understand this, but I totally agree with your point about making it easier for non-nostr users. Also, they should (at least) strongly encourage people to use a browser extension / wallet instead of pasting their nsec, and provide a guide on how to do that and why.

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