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It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically

It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell. I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.

Shish2k 5y ago
> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    > inefficiency here can actually be useful Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
    - tata71 5y ago
      Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!
  - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
    > If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned. Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free. SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads). Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls. I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.
rsanheim 5y ago
We've had "auth without centralized authority" for decades, and 99% of people don't care and won't deal with the hassle involved. see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.
- ique 5y ago
  Most people don't care about X, so clearly anyone trying to build a product to address X is just a scam.
- yata69420 5y ago
  > see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. Yeah, but this actually works. Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public. This isn't theoretical. I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    > Yeah, but this actually works. Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.
    - danschuller 5y ago
      This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.
      - usrbinbash 5y ago
        People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique. How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information. So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
galaxyLogic 5y ago
I would like to create an online application which people could use by paying for its usage in bitcoin. I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet. No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  How do you inagine "giving you bitcoins" will work without you doing something equivalent to sending bills or charging credit cards? Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    I'm not very far on my project at all but I assume that a public ledger could tell me that somebody transferred money to the wallet associated with my application. I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it. I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application. There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      How would you deal with things like VAT?
usrbinbash 5y ago
> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. I do that without any involvement of a blorkchain on a daily basis. Everytime I use my ssh key to connect to a server that knows my public key.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node. Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?

Shish2k 5y ago

> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > inefficiency here can actually be useful Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
  - tata71 5y ago
    Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  > If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned. Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free. SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads). Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls. I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.

rsanheim 5y ago

We've had "auth without centralized authority" for decades, and 99% of people don't care and won't deal with the hassle involved. see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.

ique 5y ago
Most people don't care about X, so clearly anyone trying to build a product to address X is just a scam.
yata69420 5y ago
> see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. Yeah, but this actually works. Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public. This isn't theoretical. I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > Yeah, but this actually works. Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.
  - danschuller 5y ago
    This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.
    - usrbinbash 5y ago
      People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique. How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information. So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?

galaxyLogic 5y ago

I would like to create an online application which people could use by paying for its usage in bitcoin. I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet. No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.

tsimionescu 5y ago
How do you inagine "giving you bitcoins" will work without you doing something equivalent to sending bills or charging credit cards? Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I'm not very far on my project at all but I assume that a public ledger could tell me that somebody transferred money to the wallet associated with my application. I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it. I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application. There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    How would you deal with things like VAT?

usrbinbash 5y ago

> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. I do that without any involvement of a blorkchain on a daily basis. Everytime I use my ssh key to connect to a server that knows my public key.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node. Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?