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That’s a primary component of cryptocurrency that my apps use: standardization of cryptography signing tools. You don't need cryptocurrencies for that, but its

That’s a primary component of cryptocurrency that my apps use: standardization of cryptography signing tools. You don't need cryptocurrencies for that, but its a big market with standardized utility and protocols even if you are never sending anything to the blockchain. And then all the user’s clients are also wallets so you can stay in that ecosystem for more. GPG/PGP had 20 and 25 years, respectively, to proliferate but without a financial incentive it just petered along. The version for the OSX mail client is pretty bad in 2020 and just as niche as ever. A lot of people undervalue this aspect of crypto-assets: Standardized signing protocols and tools, standardized large namespace with no collisions for account creation and state, the lower amount of programming needed because you aren't making your own account creation and state framework and database since you can just differentiate users by address or signature. For anyone passing by: “But the low transactions per second are my final goto argument and I get to express my hate because of it”, again these aforementioned use cases don't send a transaction to the p2p network and are therefore not constrained by the bandwidth of the p2p network / blockchain. There is no way to tell how many projects use cryptocurrency infrastructure this way and how many users or how much activity they have.

adkadskhj 6y ago
That's an interesting take on this! I often work on small projects for mildly decentralized / storage stuff. Often i have the need to encrypt this stuff in various ways and i am disappointed by the tools available to me. I feel like i have so many tools for amazing feats of engineering with minimal understanding required (which may not be a good thing lol), but Crypto tools and/or advice always seems to suggest you shouldn't use crypto at all if you don't know what you're doing. Eg if i write some storage application that fits my needs, and i want to add encryption for the data at rest - i often find the environment (crypto tooling and communities) hostile. Hostile to encrypting something without knowing enough to be competent. I get why crypto communities/tooling are afraid of informed-idiots (as i self describe), but i view it as a failing of the environment not the informed-idiot. Do you see your angle on this as something that could lower the barrier to entry for informed idiots just wanting to _use_ crypto? Ie the fact that Crypto Wallets/Coins have standardized and simplified a lot Crypto-related UXs, do you see that impacting common software usecases for encryption / signing?
- vmception 6y ago
  yes crypto wallets can help, although if you want to go deeper this direction, I would say it is important not to use crypto in "encryption" and "digital asset" contexts without further elaboration on which one you are talking about. reason being that its not clear if you are confusing the contexts or if the reader is. to the delight of cryptography aficionados who may not like the newer asset-based context, it looks like you did it correctly, but people in the crypto-asset space have abstracted the cryptography aspect so well that they would be confused. the downside is that you will likely be relegating yourself to just the crypto-asset market, which has its own nuances as well as being a general anathema to some of your potential supporters who just want to ramble incoherently against crypto-assets. fortunately, in crypto-assets your small project with just a few hundred users will probably make orders of magnitude more money than your big project with hundreds of thousands of users. could you have just used a database? maaaaybe could you have just made a lot of money while lowering your overhead costs by offloading your entire backend to the wallet and blockchain? definitely
jerry1979 6y ago
I appreciate the thrust of this argument. Reminds me a bit of keybase.io. Signatures as identity seems obvious in hindsight.

adkadskhj 6y ago

That's an interesting take on this! I often work on small projects for mildly decentralized / storage stuff. Often i have the need to encrypt this stuff in various ways and i am disappointed by the tools available to me. I feel like i have so many tools for amazing feats of engineering with minimal understanding required (which may not be a good thing lol), but Crypto tools and/or advice always seems to suggest you shouldn't use crypto at all if you don't know what you're doing. Eg if i write some storage application that fits my needs, and i want to add encryption for the data at rest - i often find the environment (crypto tooling and communities) hostile. Hostile to encrypting something without knowing enough to be competent. I get why crypto communities/tooling are afraid of informed-idiots (as i self describe), but i view it as a failing of the environment not the informed-idiot. Do you see your angle on this as something that could lower the barrier to entry for informed idiots just wanting to _use_ crypto? Ie the fact that Crypto Wallets/Coins have standardized and simplified a lot Crypto-related UXs, do you see that impacting common software usecases for encryption / signing?

vmception 6y ago
yes crypto wallets can help, although if you want to go deeper this direction, I would say it is important not to use crypto in "encryption" and "digital asset" contexts without further elaboration on which one you are talking about. reason being that its not clear if you are confusing the contexts or if the reader is. to the delight of cryptography aficionados who may not like the newer asset-based context, it looks like you did it correctly, but people in the crypto-asset space have abstracted the cryptography aspect so well that they would be confused. the downside is that you will likely be relegating yourself to just the crypto-asset market, which has its own nuances as well as being a general anathema to some of your potential supporters who just want to ramble incoherently against crypto-assets. fortunately, in crypto-assets your small project with just a few hundred users will probably make orders of magnitude more money than your big project with hundreds of thousands of users. could you have just used a database? maaaaybe could you have just made a lot of money while lowering your overhead costs by offloading your entire backend to the wallet and blockchain? definitely

jerry1979 6y ago

I appreciate the thrust of this argument. Reminds me a bit of keybase.io. Signatures as identity seems obvious in hindsight.