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Web3 is about having your own private keys. It's not about decentralization, it's about having control over your digital identity. If I log into HN and make com

by Sevii 5y ago

Web3 is about having your own private keys. It's not about decentralization, it's about having control over your digital identity. If I log into HN and make comments here, HN owns my identity. If I log into a web3 site and make comments there, I own the identity on that site. Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency. Web3 is about owning your identity, which is enabled by people having their own keys.

gitfan86 5y ago
You are describing "Login with Google" HN could easily support that, but one of the features of HN is that anonymity is optional.
- k__ 5y ago
  Login with Google is Login with Google, not login with your own private keys.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    You do have your own private keys when you enable authenticator on your mobile device for TWO-Factor auth.
  - acdha 5y ago
    How is that meaningfully different? Technically, yes, Google could give your account to someone else but that would have significant business impacts unless it was done following a court order or something similar, which would also apply to a blockchain key. Similarly, unless the plan is to tell people that one mistake or hardware failure means they irrecoverably lose their identity, the same process which allows replacing an old key with a new one can be used to replace you. Finally, there appears to be either no benefit or a big privacy impact mapping keys to profiles on sites. If I go to a website and see “J. Random User” I have to trust that the owner of that site verified their identity against the expected source; if I see something like a signature against a particular key, there's a privacy issue from making it so easy to link you across sites and other activity (yes, people can use ), and if you don't trust the site operator you still have the problem of them showing a different ID when they're doing something dodgy.
    - k__ 5y ago
      "unless it was done following a court order or something similar" I thought, this is one of the main points we want to avoid here, so why are you phrasing it as something so unimportant?
      - preseinger 5y ago
        Court orders and regulations and etc. are the manifestations of government, and the mechanism by which humanity establishes social order. We... don't want to avoid court orders. We don't want to skirt regulations. These things exist for reasons.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Because it's something which is exceedingly rare, and it's more often desirable than not — for example, if your business partner breaks their agreement with you, you probably want a way to have a court enforced turnover rather than just having to write it off forever. The larger point here is that there's no benefit to the user if the experience is replacing “Login with Google” with “Login with <large exchange>”, which is what it would be for the vast majority of users. If it's saying “Login with your private key”, it would be important to think about why OpenID/Persona didn't catch on or the already-supported x509 key support which has been available for decades.
        k__ 5y ago
        Okay, if you really think this is the case, then I understand the argument.
        acdha 5y ago
        I mean, you're the salesperson, sell the benefits — to the average person, how does this proposed system make their life better?
        DarylZero 5y ago
        It's about competition. You remove user lock-in and thereby create a market of competitors seeking to win users from each other.
pseudalopex 5y ago
How will it catch on where client certificates and OpenID didn't?
gatorcode 5y ago
I’ve always been interested but confused by these concepts mostly trying to understand people’s intent. On many websites with logins we create our identity, but have to “validate” it against an email one time token. Me claiming I’m someone famous on most websites is, mostly innocent, and mostly not trusted. However, how do we verify real world identity to key pair? By some centralized authority we have trusted to “validate” said identity, aka public key infrastructure. So, at best case we have some proof that our key is created/controlled by “me” via a trusted channel but not a centralized authority. Do I upload a video of me showing my public key to the world and upload to some hosting site? Could a deep fake me do that too? Then of course the gpg web of trust model comes to mind, if we attend key signing parties and sign each other’s keys we can verify through associative trust vs centralized trust. Or is really the point to not have a real world to key identity linkage at all, for “privacy reasons,” and we just all do our business online with full anonymity?
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Keysigning parties still rely on centralized trust -- physical IDs issued by governments.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
This sounds like “single sign-on.” The web site would still own whatever I post or contribute, wouldn’t it?
acdha 5y ago
> Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency. How is this different than the single-signon systems which people have been using for decades? In particular, why should we expect this to be more successful than, say, Mozilla's Persona was? It would be especially useful if the marketing materials covered the requirements for a serious system like recovering from a compromised or lost key, or how it would avoid the privacy impacts of the same key being used in many places including for purchases? It would be especially important to think about how this would work for normal people — it's not decentralization if you're simply saying that instead of everyone using Google/Facebook/Apple for SSO you're switching to e.g. MetaMask, so a key question would be how reasonable and safe it is for a normal person to operate independently.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  It should be obvious how it is different. Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
  - acdha 5y ago
    > Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar How do you think that works? Google can refuse to do business with you but that doesn't mean you can't use a different email provider. Similarly, if your particular identifier is on some kind of list, changing from an email address to another public identifier doesn't force anyone to allow you access they weren't otherwise planning to give you. If your email address ends up on a list of known spammers, etc. there's no reason why a blockchain address won't go the same way (and if the answer is “I'll keep making new ones”, ask how that's gone for email spam). > 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks I'm not assuming they're stupid and inflexible, I'm assuming they're not going to give you money to use a new system which doesn't give them something in return. For example, your conflation of losing a coin with losing control of a wallet is leaving out a lot: if I lose a quarter on the street, I'm out a tiny amount of money but I don't also permanently lose my life savings, mortgage, and ability to login to web sites as in your proposed alternative. Once you start thinking seriously about real-world usage, you see why even most cryptocurrency proponents pay companies to deal with those issues for them and those banks in all but name are going to be what most people end up using for compliance reasons.
pornel 5y ago
We've had that with OpenID. It was a fully decentralized protocol, and you were able to authenticate yourself with a private key (or any other method you wanted). The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access. We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part. Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".

by Sevii 5y ago

gitfan86 5y ago

You are describing "Login with Google" HN could easily support that, but one of the features of HN is that anonymity is optional.

k__ 5y ago
Login with Google is Login with Google, not login with your own private keys.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  You do have your own private keys when you enable authenticator on your mobile device for TWO-Factor auth.
- acdha 5y ago
  How is that meaningfully different? Technically, yes, Google could give your account to someone else but that would have significant business impacts unless it was done following a court order or something similar, which would also apply to a blockchain key. Similarly, unless the plan is to tell people that one mistake or hardware failure means they irrecoverably lose their identity, the same process which allows replacing an old key with a new one can be used to replace you. Finally, there appears to be either no benefit or a big privacy impact mapping keys to profiles on sites. If I go to a website and see “J. Random User” I have to trust that the owner of that site verified their identity against the expected source; if I see something like a signature against a particular key, there's a privacy issue from making it so easy to link you across sites and other activity (yes, people can use ), and if you don't trust the site operator you still have the problem of them showing a different ID when they're doing something dodgy.
  - k__ 5y ago
    "unless it was done following a court order or something similar" I thought, this is one of the main points we want to avoid here, so why are you phrasing it as something so unimportant?
    - preseinger 5y ago
      Court orders and regulations and etc. are the manifestations of government, and the mechanism by which humanity establishes social order. We... don't want to avoid court orders. We don't want to skirt regulations. These things exist for reasons.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Because it's something which is exceedingly rare, and it's more often desirable than not — for example, if your business partner breaks their agreement with you, you probably want a way to have a court enforced turnover rather than just having to write it off forever. The larger point here is that there's no benefit to the user if the experience is replacing “Login with Google” with “Login with <large exchange>”, which is what it would be for the vast majority of users. If it's saying “Login with your private key”, it would be important to think about why OpenID/Persona didn't catch on or the already-supported x509 key support which has been available for decades.
      - k__ 5y ago
        Okay, if you really think this is the case, then I understand the argument.
        acdha 5y ago
        I mean, you're the salesperson, sell the benefits — to the average person, how does this proposed system make their life better?
        DarylZero 5y ago
        It's about competition. You remove user lock-in and thereby create a market of competitors seeking to win users from each other.

pseudalopex 5y ago

How will it catch on where client certificates and OpenID didn't?

gatorcode 5y ago

I’ve always been interested but confused by these concepts mostly trying to understand people’s intent. On many websites with logins we create our identity, but have to “validate” it against an email one time token. Me claiming I’m someone famous on most websites is, mostly innocent, and mostly not trusted. However, how do we verify real world identity to key pair? By some centralized authority we have trusted to “validate” said identity, aka public key infrastructure. So, at best case we have some proof that our key is created/controlled by “me” via a trusted channel but not a centralized authority. Do I upload a video of me showing my public key to the world and upload to some hosting site? Could a deep fake me do that too? Then of course the gpg web of trust model comes to mind, if we attend key signing parties and sign each other’s keys we can verify through associative trust vs centralized trust. Or is really the point to not have a real world to key identity linkage at all, for “privacy reasons,” and we just all do our business online with full anonymity?

DarylZero 5y ago
Keysigning parties still rely on centralized trust -- physical IDs issued by governments.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

This sounds like “single sign-on.” The web site would still own whatever I post or contribute, wouldn’t it?

acdha 5y ago

> Moving authentication to the user removes the need for 3rd party websites to store passwords. It eliminates the need to sign up for websites. You just give websites access to your identity. Decentralization is a feature of cryptocurrency. How is this different than the single-signon systems which people have been using for decades? In particular, why should we expect this to be more successful than, say, Mozilla's Persona was? It would be especially useful if the marketing materials covered the requirements for a serious system like recovering from a compromised or lost key, or how it would avoid the privacy impacts of the same key being used in many places including for purchases? It would be especially important to think about how this would work for normal people — it's not decentralization if you're simply saying that instead of everyone using Google/Facebook/Apple for SSO you're switching to e.g. MetaMask, so a key question would be how reasonable and safe it is for a normal person to operate independently.

cblconfederate 5y ago
It should be obvious how it is different. Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
- acdha 5y ago
  > Google can block your email, while if eth wants to block you it will have to fork the Blockchain. Fair to say that is an enormously higher bar How do you think that works? Google can refuse to do business with you but that doesn't mean you can't use a different email provider. Similarly, if your particular identifier is on some kind of list, changing from an email address to another public identifier doesn't force anyone to allow you access they weren't otherwise planning to give you. If your email address ends up on a list of known spammers, etc. there's no reason why a blockchain address won't go the same way (and if the answer is “I'll keep making new ones”, ask how that's gone for email spam). > 'normal persons' will have to change habits. In the physical world, you can lose a coin , irreversibly. Same goes for the virtual. There are no ready made solutions. Lets not assume people are stupid and inflexible, they can adapt to new realities provided the benefits outweigh the drawbacks I'm not assuming they're stupid and inflexible, I'm assuming they're not going to give you money to use a new system which doesn't give them something in return. For example, your conflation of losing a coin with losing control of a wallet is leaving out a lot: if I lose a quarter on the street, I'm out a tiny amount of money but I don't also permanently lose my life savings, mortgage, and ability to login to web sites as in your proposed alternative. Once you start thinking seriously about real-world usage, you see why even most cryptocurrency proponents pay companies to deal with those issues for them and those banks in all but name are going to be what most people end up using for compliance reasons.

pornel 5y ago

We've had that with OpenID. It was a fully decentralized protocol, and you were able to authenticate yourself with a private key (or any other method you wanted). The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access. We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part. Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".