The author may have some points; I have not inspected the protocols or the source completely, but the arguments made in the post are misleading and inaccurate d

The author may have some points; I have not inspected the protocols or the source completely, but the arguments made in the post are misleading and inaccurate descriptions of keybase. Seems like there may be some subtle yet festering bias. 1. They are not "rolling their own" crypto. keybase seems to be an interesting wrapper around gpg that helps you establish links between accounts using "proofs of knowledge of secret keys." I haven't tried the service yet; but one can inspect the code: npm install -g keybase-installer keybase-installer grep gpg ~/.npm/keybase/0.0.43/package/lib/*.js 2. "Keybase's pitch is that rather than use a web of trust..." It is not mutually exclusive. Since you have it installed, try keybase -h keybase track <id> That seems to subsume web-of-trust "limits on that identification are two-fold...<security of twitter>...and...<soundness of tweeting>" So it is actually the same argument repeated. The first 3 Mission Impossible movies also demonstrate that when you meet someone in person, they might be Ethan Hunt instead of the person you think they are. For the paranoid, there are out-of-band mechanisms around this (that can also be used with keybase). Even without those, keybase is an out-of-the-box mechanism for linking identities that is weakly sound over the Internet. 3. "...doing this right" One of the founders, Max Krohn, was at RealWorldCrypto this year. He is an MIT phd and he certainly knows quite a bit about applied crypto. He is also a systems person and comfortable making tradeoffs between usability and security. If keybase allows 1m more people to easily create and use keys, even if their day-to-day workflow is not secure-against-state-adversaries, that would be progress.