4 ms·

Here's the thing though. Let's say, I want to provide special benefit to people who own membership on hackernews. In the model where this data is public, I ca

by _3jh0 5y ago

Here's the thing though. Let's say, I want to provide special benefit to people who own membership on hackernews. In the model where this data is public, I can query the wallet of people to check for HN nft and provide special discount or perks. If this membership data was privately backed up, I cannot do that. It fits nicely into the blockchain model, imo. Subscriber owns the membership and can prove to the service provider. Service provider has access to the membership and can check the validity.

csmpltn 5y ago
> "In the model where this data is public, I can query the wallet of people to check for HN nft and provide special discount or perks." How will you provide your "perks" if either you or your members have been kicked off the platform where those perks made sense in the first place? With this use-case you're describing - all you have is a list of wallets that were at some point relevant to you in some way. This is the equivalent of maintaining a mailing list. Why does any of this require a distributed ledger? What problem does this solve exactly? > "Subscriber owns the membership and can prove to the service provider. Service provider has access to the membership and can check the validity." How is this any different than signing up with an email-address as a username?
- _3jh0 5y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding something above. I'm not the one providing HN membership. That would be YC but I as a third party can verify whether someone has a valid HN membership and provide them perks based on their membership. That is the problem a distributed ledger solves. The data is public and usable by any service provider. To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service. That is the problem unlock-protocol "solves". It defines the protocol for managing these memberships. To create, verify, deploy, etc. You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on. Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred. This is the part smart contracts solve.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    > To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service. What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required. Memorizing hn's public key is no more hard than memorizing what their nft is. I suppose you'll say transfering memberships. If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that? Unless i missed some great advance in zkp, all transfers are public on the blockchain, and service providers can trace the transfers and not recognize transfers they don't like. > They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred. What's a real world example of someone wanting something like this? I can't think of any.
    - _3jh0 5y ago
      > What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required. Blockchain isn't required for this part and I answered why not certificates in this thread elsewhere. The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today. You also need to pay for memberships and that can be done through the same wallet. Arguably better UX. > If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that? Indeed. That's the point of storing membership data on blockchain. The user and community can go against the service provider. Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data. Check out other commenter on the same thread too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347
- fragmede 5y ago
  Well, you don't need to sign up for yet another service for one. People don't want to have yet another email and password to remember. That's what OAuth and all that machinery was invented to solve. AuthN is one of the few use cases where having a public shared database/blockchain and users authenticate using their private keys works out better in some respects because the alternative is to depend on a centralized user database owned by a private company (eg Facebook). What happens on all of the sites you used Facebook login on, if your Facebook account gets suspended?
sdenton4 5y ago
So we sacrifice member privacy for the sake of spam? Who would want this other than the spammer?

by _3jh0 5y ago

csmpltn 5y ago

> "In the model where this data is public, I can query the wallet of people to check for HN nft and provide special discount or perks." How will you provide your "perks" if either you or your members have been kicked off the platform where those perks made sense in the first place? With this use-case you're describing - all you have is a list of wallets that were at some point relevant to you in some way. This is the equivalent of maintaining a mailing list. Why does any of this require a distributed ledger? What problem does this solve exactly? > "Subscriber owns the membership and can prove to the service provider. Service provider has access to the membership and can check the validity." How is this any different than signing up with an email-address as a username?

_3jh0 5y ago
I think you are misunderstanding something above. I'm not the one providing HN membership. That would be YC but I as a third party can verify whether someone has a valid HN membership and provide them perks based on their membership. That is the problem a distributed ledger solves. The data is public and usable by any service provider. To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service. That is the problem unlock-protocol "solves". It defines the protocol for managing these memberships. To create, verify, deploy, etc. You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on. Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred. This is the part smart contracts solve.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service. What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required. Memorizing hn's public key is no more hard than memorizing what their nft is. I suppose you'll say transfering memberships. If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that? Unless i missed some great advance in zkp, all transfers are public on the blockchain, and service providers can trace the transfers and not recognize transfers they don't like. > They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred. What's a real world example of someone wanting something like this? I can't think of any.
  - _3jh0 5y ago
    > What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required. Blockchain isn't required for this part and I answered why not certificates in this thread elsewhere. The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today. You also need to pay for memberships and that can be done through the same wallet. Arguably better UX. > If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that? Indeed. That's the point of storing membership data on blockchain. The user and community can go against the service provider. Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data. Check out other commenter on the same thread too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347
fragmede 5y ago
Well, you don't need to sign up for yet another service for one. People don't want to have yet another email and password to remember. That's what OAuth and all that machinery was invented to solve. AuthN is one of the few use cases where having a public shared database/blockchain and users authenticate using their private keys works out better in some respects because the alternative is to depend on a centralized user database owned by a private company (eg Facebook). What happens on all of the sites you used Facebook login on, if your Facebook account gets suspended?

sdenton4 5y ago

So we sacrifice member privacy for the sake of spam? Who would want this other than the spammer?