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Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing

Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing improvements. Or you can just write comments like this.

Uehreka 5y ago
OK, NOW WE’RE TALKIN. In years of talking to blockchain people about this stuff, no one has ever given me a use case description that succinct and concrete. A decentralized SSO is the kind of thing that would seem useful on it’s own, even without the other stuff. So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my username in the blockchain or does this basically work immediately? And what are some sites that support this?
- fastball 5y ago
  Decentralized SSO is a great use case for blockchain tech and there are so many ways you can do it. There has been a lot of hype around NFTs due to the crazy prices we've been seeing for "digital artwork NFTs", but you can also use them for auth and it's actually pretty slick. Here is a project[1] that a friend of mine is building that does exactly that. It's basically a collection of TailwindCSS components that he originally built in the "web 2.0" way, as in: buy a subscription (via Stripe) and now you have access to his collection of pre-built components. But then he realized this is actually a great use-case for web3. So instead of signing up for an account with an email + password then using your credit card to buy a lifetime deal, you can connect your MetaMask wallet to his website and "mint" a pass for 0.08 ETH (approx ~$350 atm) which is just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Then as long as that NFT is owned by your wallet you can use it to login to his website. The benefits are: it's actually faster for the user (your wallet is your identity and you access pass is attached directly to that wallet on the blockchain) and also pretty simple for him to integrate on his end. The other benefit is you can trade these passes at will without his oversight – so if he adds more and more Tailwind components to the collection the value of this lifetime access to them hypothetically goes up. But let's say you no longer are interested in building anything with Tailwind components – well you can just sell the NFT that gives you access to someone else via any of the 3rd party decentralized marketplaces. Anyway there are a lot of cool ideas and use-cases that aren't just decentralized lending (which I'm still pretty skeptical of) or generic gambling (still most of crypto). The main problem right now is that a lot of the coolest stuff has been built on Ethereum (due to the flexibility of its smart contracts) but the transaction fees and throughput are pretty terrible at the moment. Finally, it gets a lot of hate here on HN, but Brave Browser actually has a MetaMask-equivalent (I think it might actually just be a fork of MetaMask) that is built right into the browser, alongside best-in-class ad-blocking so I'd consider using that too. Though installing MetaMask is super easy as well. [1] https://rareblocks.xyz/ https://rareblocks.xyz/
  - markelliot 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing the NFT-as-access-token example, it's far and away the strongest example of a relatable use for NFTs that I've heard, and is compelling both in its value to the issuer (as a verifiable access token) and to the buyer (for both immediate use and due to its resale of residual value after having been used). I imagine that your friend's NFT contract stipulates he gets a cut of resales, but I'm also curious if/how your friend deals with potentially bad actors that, say, scrape the entire content then resell the token for most of what they paid for it having extracted the content it unlocks. Obviously the contract could help offset a part of that trade, but seems tricky nonetheless? Edit: I suppose part of the premise is that there are only 500 passes and content continues to be produced, so if you want access to the current library after all passes have been used trading the pass is actually a key attribute of others gaining access to the content.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  You can also do this with other decentralized tech like PGP for example: https://webauthn.guide/ https://webauthn.guide/
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    My understanding is that you could use that to auth with a site where you already have an account or where you’re signing up. But if blockchain enables me to go to a site I’ve never been to and be already signed in with a unique name I reserved on the blockchain, I’m pretty sure that would be a novel thing. Maybe not enough to swing me over to being a crypto-booster, but this is the first time that someone has shown me anything at all that makes sense.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      With WebAuthn you could signup with just the auth as well. It's basically the same thing as a wallet private/public key-pair so can do all the same things as a proxy for a universal ID.
- eric_cc 5y ago
  Setup a MetaMask wallet. That's it! You don't even have to fund it in order to authenticate on web3 applications. MetaMask will allow you to authenticate on all the different chains that have EVM-based dapps including Ethereum, Fantom, Avalanche, & Moonriver Polkadot.js for Kusama and Polkadot apps. You can also check out Fearless wallet on mobile for Polkadot & Kusama where you can participate in the ongoing parachain auctiona. Use the Phantom extension to authenticate on Solana dapps. Hope you have fun!

Uehreka 5y ago

OK, NOW WE’RE TALKIN. In years of talking to blockchain people about this stuff, no one has ever given me a use case description that succinct and concrete. A decentralized SSO is the kind of thing that would seem useful on it’s own, even without the other stuff. So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my username in the blockchain or does this basically work immediately? And what are some sites that support this?

fastball 5y ago
Decentralized SSO is a great use case for blockchain tech and there are so many ways you can do it. There has been a lot of hype around NFTs due to the crazy prices we've been seeing for "digital artwork NFTs", but you can also use them for auth and it's actually pretty slick. Here is a project[1] that a friend of mine is building that does exactly that. It's basically a collection of TailwindCSS components that he originally built in the "web 2.0" way, as in: buy a subscription (via Stripe) and now you have access to his collection of pre-built components. But then he realized this is actually a great use-case for web3. So instead of signing up for an account with an email + password then using your credit card to buy a lifetime deal, you can connect your MetaMask wallet to his website and "mint" a pass for 0.08 ETH (approx ~$350 atm) which is just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Then as long as that NFT is owned by your wallet you can use it to login to his website. The benefits are: it's actually faster for the user (your wallet is your identity and you access pass is attached directly to that wallet on the blockchain) and also pretty simple for him to integrate on his end. The other benefit is you can trade these passes at will without his oversight – so if he adds more and more Tailwind components to the collection the value of this lifetime access to them hypothetically goes up. But let's say you no longer are interested in building anything with Tailwind components – well you can just sell the NFT that gives you access to someone else via any of the 3rd party decentralized marketplaces. Anyway there are a lot of cool ideas and use-cases that aren't just decentralized lending (which I'm still pretty skeptical of) or generic gambling (still most of crypto). The main problem right now is that a lot of the coolest stuff has been built on Ethereum (due to the flexibility of its smart contracts) but the transaction fees and throughput are pretty terrible at the moment. Finally, it gets a lot of hate here on HN, but Brave Browser actually has a MetaMask-equivalent (I think it might actually just be a fork of MetaMask) that is built right into the browser, alongside best-in-class ad-blocking so I'd consider using that too. Though installing MetaMask is super easy as well. [1] https://rareblocks.xyz/ https://rareblocks.xyz/
- markelliot 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing the NFT-as-access-token example, it's far and away the strongest example of a relatable use for NFTs that I've heard, and is compelling both in its value to the issuer (as a verifiable access token) and to the buyer (for both immediate use and due to its resale of residual value after having been used). I imagine that your friend's NFT contract stipulates he gets a cut of resales, but I'm also curious if/how your friend deals with potentially bad actors that, say, scrape the entire content then resell the token for most of what they paid for it having extracted the content it unlocks. Obviously the contract could help offset a part of that trade, but seems tricky nonetheless? Edit: I suppose part of the premise is that there are only 500 passes and content continues to be produced, so if you want access to the current library after all passes have been used trading the pass is actually a key attribute of others gaining access to the content.
meheleventyone 5y ago
You can also do this with other decentralized tech like PGP for example: https://webauthn.guide/ https://webauthn.guide/
- Uehreka 5y ago
  My understanding is that you could use that to auth with a site where you already have an account or where you’re signing up. But if blockchain enables me to go to a site I’ve never been to and be already signed in with a unique name I reserved on the blockchain, I’m pretty sure that would be a novel thing. Maybe not enough to swing me over to being a crypto-booster, but this is the first time that someone has shown me anything at all that makes sense.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    With WebAuthn you could signup with just the auth as well. It's basically the same thing as a wallet private/public key-pair so can do all the same things as a proxy for a universal ID.
eric_cc 5y ago
Setup a MetaMask wallet. That's it! You don't even have to fund it in order to authenticate on web3 applications. MetaMask will allow you to authenticate on all the different chains that have EVM-based dapps including Ethereum, Fantom, Avalanche, & Moonriver Polkadot.js for Kusama and Polkadot apps. You can also check out Fearless wallet on mobile for Polkadot & Kusama where you can participate in the ongoing parachain auctiona. Use the Phantom extension to authenticate on Solana dapps. Hope you have fun!