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My personal worries about keybase are more about the coin-bs and unwanted features creeping in. There's no way keybase can be a contender to CAs if it has chat

My personal worries about keybase are more about the coin-bs and unwanted features creeping in. There's no way keybase can be a contender to CAs if it has chat and file sync, it just needed to be a barebones toolkit that can be integrated and that can eventually get specified. But that wouldn't get you millions.

WorldMaker 5y ago
My personal worries were always more about Keybase's business model. I respected the feature creep hustle. It's why the comparisons in the article here and the article it is a critique of use OpenPGP versus Signal as the comparatives. "Barebones toolkit" doesn't work, as we've never seen high, general user adoption of OpenPGP (or GPG or whatever), but Signal as a "messaging app first" has refined the PKI on-boarding enough that even some of my least technical friends can and do have Signal accounts. The "messaging app" is the front door that made sense to them. A regular user isn't going to think "I need to encrypt some stuff, so I'll pick up a toolkit like OpenPGP and then figure out how to use it, and then eventually figure out how to integrate it into my email or SMS client", a user is going to first want to "send a message to someone I know" and if it's secure that a beautiful bonus, but if it's convenient is general the bottom line. (Most users are not looking for Ikea/Lego solutions, they just want to go to the big box store and grab it off the shelf.) From that perspective, all of Keybase's features made a certain amount of sense. Maybe they had a few too many "front doors" (file sharing, [group] chat, git repo sharing, etc), but that's potentially more ways to get new users, more ways to explain to users why they might want good PKI in their lives without first explaining what PKI is or how it works. (Even the cryptocurrency BS has kind of sense to it from that perspective. Cryptocurrency wallets have been a lot of users' first introduction to PKI and how easy it is get wrong [all the variations on "I lost X Bitcoin because I didn't know the silly numbers mattered"]. With so many untrained users [badly] experiencing PKI for the first time with cryptocurrency, it does make a kind of sense for a PKI tool to try to show how to do it right/safely/user-friendly and integrate it with other PKI functions. [Regardless of whether or not you think encouraging general use of cryptocurrencies is a good idea in the first place.]) I just wish Keybase had gone into it with a business model that was tightly user-focused, strongly revenue generating, and less likely to get them acquihired into an entirely unrelated parent company.

WorldMaker 5y ago

My personal worries were always more about Keybase's business model. I respected the feature creep hustle. It's why the comparisons in the article here and the article it is a critique of use OpenPGP versus Signal as the comparatives. "Barebones toolkit" doesn't work, as we've never seen high, general user adoption of OpenPGP (or GPG or whatever), but Signal as a "messaging app first" has refined the PKI on-boarding enough that even some of my least technical friends can and do have Signal accounts. The "messaging app" is the front door that made sense to them. A regular user isn't going to think "I need to encrypt some stuff, so I'll pick up a toolkit like OpenPGP and then figure out how to use it, and then eventually figure out how to integrate it into my email or SMS client", a user is going to first want to "send a message to someone I know" and if it's secure that a beautiful bonus, but if it's convenient is general the bottom line. (Most users are not looking for Ikea/Lego solutions, they just want to go to the big box store and grab it off the shelf.) From that perspective, all of Keybase's features made a certain amount of sense. Maybe they had a few too many "front doors" (file sharing, [group] chat, git repo sharing, etc), but that's potentially more ways to get new users, more ways to explain to users why they might want good PKI in their lives without first explaining what PKI is or how it works. (Even the cryptocurrency BS has kind of sense to it from that perspective. Cryptocurrency wallets have been a lot of users' first introduction to PKI and how easy it is get wrong [all the variations on "I lost X Bitcoin because I didn't know the silly numbers mattered"]. With so many untrained users [badly] experiencing PKI for the first time with cryptocurrency, it does make a kind of sense for a PKI tool to try to show how to do it right/safely/user-friendly and integrate it with other PKI functions. [Regardless of whether or not you think encouraging general use of cryptocurrencies is a good idea in the first place.]) I just wish Keybase had gone into it with a business model that was tightly user-focused, strongly revenue generating, and less likely to get them acquihired into an entirely unrelated parent company.