4 ms·

This reads like an obligatory post on the topic with no real substance. I’m on mobile so it’s a good opportunity to succinctly express what I view as the major,

by 58x14 5y ago

This reads like an obligatory post on the topic with no real substance. I’m on mobile so it’s a good opportunity to succinctly express what I view as the major, near-future positives for Web3: - identity and trustless SSO via things like ENS and “sign in with {client such as metamask}” - data sovereignty, or at least less platform lock-in, especially for low/no code users - grants, crowdfunding, and other financial support for useful open-source projects. This may be the most provably successful outcome to date in Web3; I’m confident I could cite enough sources here with a little homework. I encourage all readers to disassociate (or rather decouple) the terms “cryptocurrency” and “NFT” from Web3. Web3, while still fairly nebulous, in my current understanding, is mostly protocol-level implementations of web paradigms incorporating decentralized technologies. Like any growing technology, there will be many variations, and the unscrupulous outliers should not overshadow the constellation of fascinating things humanity can speedrun with these new building blocks.

tptacek 5y ago
The SSO thing has come up before. Trustless, decentralized, immutable databases are essentially the exact opposite of what you want in an SSO system; it's hard to think of an application where blockchain technology has less promise than SSO, which is about fine-grained policy control, out-of-band account recovery (the hardest problem in SSO), instantaneous revocation, and centralization of controls.
Zamicol 5y ago
Anytime the ENS sign in stuff is brought up, I feel obligated to point out the following: Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, posted in 2018 an interesting demo with UniLogin, "[Universal Logins demo for Ethereum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE)". [The project was abandoned in 2020](https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutting-down-unilogin-3b544838df1a https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutti...). This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve. Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions, not more problems. Others have already made progress down this road, and I don't see anything different from what has already been done before.

by 58x14 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago

The SSO thing has come up before. Trustless, decentralized, immutable databases are essentially the exact opposite of what you want in an SSO system; it's hard to think of an application where blockchain technology has less promise than SSO, which is about fine-grained policy control, out-of-band account recovery (the hardest problem in SSO), instantaneous revocation, and centralization of controls.

Zamicol 5y ago

Anytime the ENS sign in stuff is brought up, I feel obligated to point out the following: Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, posted in 2018 an interesting demo with UniLogin, "[Universal Logins demo for Ethereum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE)". [The project was abandoned in 2020](https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutting-down-unilogin-3b544838df1a https://medium.com/universal-ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutti...). This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve. Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions, not more problems. Others have already made progress down this road, and I don't see anything different from what has already been done before.