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I'm still trying to understand the cryptocurrency space and its implications, but isn't digital identity a perfect use case for the blockchain? Decentralized tr

• icebraining 9y ago
  It's an interesting case. I looked at their architecture diagram and at first thought "WTF is the blockchain doing there", since their process is essentially the same as Mozilla Persona, except in the latter the attestations were delivered to the user, who then delivered them to the requester (therefore keeping the provider ignorant about who was the requester, from privacy reasons). But then they talked about revocability and yeah, that's true; if an attacker tricks the provider into giving them an attestation, then the provider has no way to alert the requester if they discover the attack, since the user is mediating the conversation. The blockchain serves as a kind of neutral proxy that allows the provider and the requester to talk without meeting each other. On the other hand, the requester still has to check the blockchain periodically to see if any revocation was issued, so it's not immediate. Rather than doing that, why doesn't the requester periodically require the user to provide a fresh attestation? So yeah, I'm still not seeing why the blockchain is actually needed.