Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization
by pornel on Thursday December 09, 2021 @05:36PM
(#29503967)
We've had that with OpenID. It was a fully decentralized protocol, and you were able to authenticate yourself with a private key (or any other method you wanted).
The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access.
We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part.
Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".
The problem was that approximately zero users cared, and sites had no incentive to support a login method that didn't have a good solution for account recovery in the inevitable cases of users losing their access.
We've also had TLS client certs with straight up private keys. We have SSH keys too. We have U2F/Webauthn. Using private keys for auth is the easy part. Key management (i.e. people being careless and losing/leaking keys) is the hard unsolved part.
Also, you don't need a blockchain system to have a private key. It's literally just a random number. Blockchains only happen to use them as one of their components. It's like cars have radios, and car wonks saying "cars are about having your own music player. You should put a car in your bedroom to listen to music".