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Choose a passcard Registrar: * ONENAME * NAMECOIN * NOPE I'm not interested in this rehashed blockchain crap. Why do people think this is the future?

by feld 11y ago

llamataboot 11y ago
Because it provides a decentralized mechanism to verify things without a central authority? It may or may not be the future, but it's pretty much what we have right now.
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  Well, in those terms, how does this solve anything that the PGP web-of-trust fails at?
  - jude- 11y ago
    (Disclaimer: I work part-time for Onename). The key difference is that Passcard requires a quorum of mutually-distrustful blockchain peers that attest to the validity of your public keys. We believe this is a much stronger guarantee than a web-of-trust, since it (rightfully) does not assume that trust is somehow transitive.
    - fluidcruft 11y ago
      I guess I don't understand specifically why a distrusted "blockchain peer" is superior to a distrusted peer's digital signature. The way I see it, blockchains use proof-of-work to enforce/record transaction sequences. It not clear to me what use transaction sequence is for establishing identity. If I'm looking for a quorum of distrusted endorsements, I just want to know how many endorsements exist, right? Where's the use of the transaction sequencing? Proof-of-work doesn't make one endorsement more trustworthy than another, does it? Blockchains don't look at how many transactions an address has performed except to compute available funds for the transaction--otherwise they just check the signature validity. It's just not at all clear to me what's even trying to be achieved here.
      - jude- 11y ago
        The intuition is that the cryptocurrency miners act as a large decentralized first-come first-serve notary for the transactions they append to the blockchain. If a peer submits a valid transaction and it gets included in the blockchain, it means the majority of the other peers have accepted the transaction as valid and will continue to serve it to other peers. As a side-effect, any data within a transaction gets included and served as well, and (this is where the proof-of-work comes in) it cannot not be retroactively altered without first retroactively altering the blockchain itself. Onename leverages this fact to bind your human-readable username to the hash of your passcard in a first-come, first-serve basis. When you sign up for a passcard, the (username, passcard_hash) tuple gets submitted to the blockchain as part of a valid transaction, so that once the transaction gets accepted, the peers will continue to preserve this information. There's similar process for changing name ownership and revoking names and credentials. The trust you place in the validity of Onename records on the blockchain comes from the steep cost of silently altering it. You have to launch a 51% attack to alter it at all, and you have to alter every local copy of the blockchain without drawing notice to do so silently (otherwise, a fork will be observed). This means once you're committed the requisite information in a transaction, there's a good chance it will persist. The situation is much more fluid with PGP, since the number of endorsers can be somewhat smaller than number of miners, and there's no guaranteed "paper trail" of what bindings have have processed (thereby making silent alterations easier to come by). Moreover, trust is not transitive--Alice trusting Bob and Bob trusting Charlie does not imply that Alice trusts Charlie--so the degree of trust you get from a web-of-trust is hard to quantify even in the absence of malicious behavior. This in turn makes it hard to reason about the strength of your endorsements, as compared to the strength of your adversary's claims against you. At the end of the day, Onename gives me the ability to say "I am jude-, and my passcard is ..." in a non-repudiable manner, and I can quantify how strong of a testament it is by measuring the blockchain's hashing power versus my adversary's hashing power. The passcard itself is stored elsewhere (but its hash is incorporated into the blockchain), but the passcard can include information like your public keys, your identities on other services, hashes of digital assets you created (e.g. pictures, documents, etc.), and so on.
        fluidcruft 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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Choose a passcard Registrar: * ONENAME * NAMECOIN * NOPE I'm not interested in this rehashed blockchain crap. Why do people think this is the future?

by feld 11y ago

Choose a passcard Registrar: * ONENAME * NAMECOIN * NOPE I'm not interested in this rehashed blockchain crap. Why do people think this is the future?

llamataboot 11y ago

Because it provides a decentralized mechanism to verify things without a central authority? It may or may not be the future, but it's pretty much what we have right now.

fluidcruft 11y ago
Well, in those terms, how does this solve anything that the PGP web-of-trust fails at?
- jude- 11y ago
  (Disclaimer: I work part-time for Onename). The key difference is that Passcard requires a quorum of mutually-distrustful blockchain peers that attest to the validity of your public keys. We believe this is a much stronger guarantee than a web-of-trust, since it (rightfully) does not assume that trust is somehow transitive.
  - fluidcruft 11y ago
    I guess I don't understand specifically why a distrusted "blockchain peer" is superior to a distrusted peer's digital signature. The way I see it, blockchains use proof-of-work to enforce/record transaction sequences. It not clear to me what use transaction sequence is for establishing identity. If I'm looking for a quorum of distrusted endorsements, I just want to know how many endorsements exist, right? Where's the use of the transaction sequencing? Proof-of-work doesn't make one endorsement more trustworthy than another, does it? Blockchains don't look at how many transactions an address has performed except to compute available funds for the transaction--otherwise they just check the signature validity. It's just not at all clear to me what's even trying to be achieved here.
    - jude- 11y ago
      The intuition is that the cryptocurrency miners act as a large decentralized first-come first-serve notary for the transactions they append to the blockchain. If a peer submits a valid transaction and it gets included in the blockchain, it means the majority of the other peers have accepted the transaction as valid and will continue to serve it to other peers. As a side-effect, any data within a transaction gets included and served as well, and (this is where the proof-of-work comes in) it cannot not be retroactively altered without first retroactively altering the blockchain itself. Onename leverages this fact to bind your human-readable username to the hash of your passcard in a first-come, first-serve basis. When you sign up for a passcard, the (username, passcard_hash) tuple gets submitted to the blockchain as part of a valid transaction, so that once the transaction gets accepted, the peers will continue to preserve this information. There's similar process for changing name ownership and revoking names and credentials. The trust you place in the validity of Onename records on the blockchain comes from the steep cost of silently altering it. You have to launch a 51% attack to alter it at all, and you have to alter every local copy of the blockchain without drawing notice to do so silently (otherwise, a fork will be observed). This means once you're committed the requisite information in a transaction, there's a good chance it will persist. The situation is much more fluid with PGP, since the number of endorsers can be somewhat smaller than number of miners, and there's no guaranteed "paper trail" of what bindings have have processed (thereby making silent alterations easier to come by). Moreover, trust is not transitive--Alice trusting Bob and Bob trusting Charlie does not imply that Alice trusts Charlie--so the degree of trust you get from a web-of-trust is hard to quantify even in the absence of malicious behavior. This in turn makes it hard to reason about the strength of your endorsements, as compared to the strength of your adversary's claims against you. At the end of the day, Onename gives me the ability to say "I am jude-, and my passcard is ..." in a non-repudiable manner, and I can quantify how strong of a testament it is by measuring the blockchain's hashing power versus my adversary's hashing power. The passcard itself is stored elsewhere (but its hash is incorporated into the blockchain), but the passcard can include information like your public keys, your identities on other services, hashes of digital assets you created (e.g. pictures, documents, etc.), and so on.
      - fluidcruft 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

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