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Re:Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hop... by UncleMeat on Friday September 24, 2021 @11:15AM (#28643572)
> People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).

I cannot possibly imagine a world where services will choose to only permit authentication via some expensive blockchain such that they deny themselves access to markets outside of the global rich.

And telling my grandma "don't worry, the coins you don't understand will go up in price" is not going to help.

This is the core question: why is signature-based authentication using public keys associated with BTC wallets superior to signature-based authentication using public keys not associated with BTC wallets? As far as I can tell, the only benefit here is that now my identity on my photo sharing service can be linked to my identity on my wine rating service. Why do I want that?

Re:Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hop... by cryptica on Saturday September 25, 2021 @04:33AM (#28651543)
The benefit is that many third-party services and many users don't want to have to trust a centralized auth provider. The blockchain provides redundancy and security guarantees which don't require trusting company employees. Not to mention the financial incentives which are associated with being an early adopter of a blockchain project and the network effects which come from that.

I'm convinced that decentralized communities will eventually corrupt and destroy all centralized services and agencies by manipulating their employees and members... Because they can. People will always find a way to create new problems to make themselves necessary. In these political games, decentralized anonymous communities have the upper hand. Unlike centralized projects, you can't corrupt decentralized projects. What can be corrupted, will be corrupted.

To understand why it's the future, you need to look at the big picture. You're assuming that centralized auth providers are secure and trustworthy. This is not going to be true in the future. Trust in institutions and organizations has been eroding and will continue to erode.

Re:Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hop... by UncleMeat on Saturday September 25, 2021 @08:09AM (#28652497)
OK let’s try again. What precisely is the difference between signature based auth that uses a key pair associated with a wallet and a key pair that the user submits the public key for when they sign up? Why would the latter be vulnerable to additional insider threats?

“Services will make more money because blockchains are trendy” isn’t a meaningful difference.