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.

> 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.

> Yeah, but this actually works.

I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.

If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.

> Yeah, but this actually works.

Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.

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.

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?

> server (aka. a "centralized authority")

that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.

this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of non-custodial private key management. what you are describing is a custodial wallet.

This is not true. Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it. There is no central poin involved. You can connect to any chain node, yours including, and assert control over it. There is no central authority, that's the whole point. If you're referring to an NFT being a url hosted somewhere other tha. IPFS, nobody is arguing that.

> Your key serves as proof you own something and nobody else without your key can claim to it.

Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?

For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:

> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.

I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.

I like your vision. Definitely sounds easier to use than what we have here amd now.

I would say web3 works to the same level

Most people don't care about X, so clearly anyone trying to build a product to address X is just a scam.

those are ideas on a shelf. even stackexchange dropped openid years 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?

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.

> 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 ...

Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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?

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.

Yes, but how is this different from charging a credit-card or publishing an IBAN?

The webshop exposes some way of receiving value tokens, be that USD, EUR or BTC, and has some way to tell which user transferred how many tokens.

So technically there is no difference.

The difference is, I can be pretty sure that EUR won't lose 20% of their value overnight.

If you want to take a credit card, you need to open a bank account, sign up with a payment processor and integrate with them (stripe makes this easy, what if you can’t or don’t want to use stripe?), handle chargebacks, etc.

If you want to accept bitcoin, you run a piece of software and write a few lines of code.

Yes, and for these extra steps the money I earn is realistically not in danger of losing 20% of value overnight, can't be lost because the harddrive that held my password-safe got corrupted, the transactions are done instantaneously instead of whenever some miner feels like including them in his block, and the amount of energy required to process the payment, is probably not much more than I currently use to write and send this post.

I am okay with that.

Yep. Want to accept onchain bitcoin? When a customer wants to pay, generate a fresh address. Store that address in a dab associated with the customer id. When they come for the service, see if that address has received payment. Easy peasy. You can run your own node and do this all yourself, or you can use services that run the software for you and work on callbacks or api calls.

Want to accept lightning (bitcoin over a low cost and high speed payment network)? It’s an api call to generate an invoice and another api call to see if that invoice has been paid. Again you can run everything yourself or use a managed service. Bitcoin make programmatic payment processing SO MUCH EASIER than traditional payment rails.

How would you deal with things like VAT?

This. Building a webshop with crypto is the most trivial thing. Complying with all the legal regulation that buyer and seller are bound to is the actual complex part. Insanely complex.

this is the whole point of Ethereum and smart contracts.