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Why can't this be done with existing public key cryptography?

• meheleventyone 5y ago
  There’s even a standard for doing this with WebAuthn.
  • iskander 5y ago
    ...which has effectively neither adoption not momentum to achieve adoption: https://sec.okta.com/articles/2020/04/webauthn-great-and-it-sucks https://sec.okta.com/articles/2020/04/webauthn-great-and-it-... For better or worse, there are a large (and ever growing) number of Metamask users these days...
    • meheleventyone 5y ago
      Absolutely, but let’s not pretend this is some magic technology that only cryptocurrency can solve. Nor is it clear cut that we’ll see adoption of wallet logins outside of crypto circles.
      • codehalo 5y ago
        The web3 solution is significantly easier than webauthn, if what I read in the above article is to be believed.
        • meheleventyone 5y ago
          There’s a trade off there though. There are also other standards. People should probably want their cryptowallets to be better secured than they are. But crypto is facing the same UX challenge which leads to a worse model with the same attendant risks as phishing passwords. The point still is that logging in with public-key cryptography is not exclusively a technology supported by cryptowallets.
  • ziml77 5y ago
    WebAuthn is exactly what I thought of too... and hardly anyone is supporting it. In fact the only place I've seen it was Best Buy's website, oddly enough! Having yet another way to do this sort of authentication isn't going to magically make people start using it.
• cle 5y ago
  The author discusses this explicitly in the article.
• dylkil 5y ago
  It can. The biggest success of crypto has been putting public/private key pairs in the hands of 10s of millions of people.
  • thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    >> The biggest success of crypto has been putting public/private key pairs in the hands of 10s of millions of people. I would argue that the biggest successes of crypto are selling GPUs and facilitating malware ransom payments. GPUs have sold like crazy and you are lucky to get a high end one with the current demand. Everybody and their pets are running mining rigs. Good luck getting a nice GPU for machine learning or graphics rendering. Previously malware authors had to rely on gift cards or similar means to get paid. Now they have variety of cryptocurrencies to choose from and they can even trade cryptocurrencies to launder the paid ransom funds.
  • Sargos 5y ago
    Here is a good thread with more information on why giving everyone a public private key pair is a big deal and the kinds of use cases it unlocks: https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1389270115884097536 https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/13892701158840975...
• spinny 5y ago
  It can. It just happens that the easiest way to achieve this is using web3, even if there is no blockchains involved. The article is about login methods, not cryptos or web3
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    > It just happens that the easiest way to achieve this is using web3 Is it? U2F is actually rolling out to more and more websites but I've never seen any website offer to log in with a dropdown for cryptocurrencies
    • spinny 5y ago
      websites that are related to cryptos do it, others generally don't. try dappradar.com/ for example
    • alisonkisk 5y ago
  • MBCook 5y ago
    > The article is about login methods, not […] web3 It’s literally titled “ Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1”