You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.
> Ownership in communities.... The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden
But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?
Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem for consumers and application developers. If you implement PGP as your sign-in method, it's unlikely that any consumers will adopt it unless they're developers. And you increase the barrier to entry for anyone who does not understand it.
In the case of MetaMask, this has already got significant traction at 21 million monthly active users (more if you count other EVM wallet solutions), because there's no other way to interact with a blockchain. It's also relatively user friendly. And there's an ecosystem now of applications that require it for interaction, so you're starting to see network effects grow for "Sign in With Ethereum/EVM".
> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens
This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.
For the same reason a Metamask extension to do so won't take off outside of specialized applications.
Since users have not yet authenticated, this is part of a conversation process of potential users to registered, authenticated users. Only options which will increase that will be supported.
People to some very high double-digit percentage understand what a "Sign in with Google" button does, what will happen if they hit it. Because of that, there is high likelyhood if someone hits that button that they will return successfully authenticated.
PGP never had a website-based authentication option. Mutual TLS did, but other than a few certificate authorities I've never seen it out of the enterprise space - the compatibility and user experience were never even close to sufficient to offer as a broader option.
As optimized as the sign in with Google experience is, there are still sites which will not support it because they want to make sure the user does not get 'lost' on another site if there are failures. They simply will not outsource their funnel.
brave already supports "login with ethereum"
adoption matters
Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it.
I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.
A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.
But something like Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap is fully on-chain. Every trade happens on chain, because the application is an immutable smart contract liquidity protocol, called an AMM, or automated market maker.
It does as much, if not more, volume than Coinbase ($1.98B in last 24H): https://info.uniswap.org/#/
False. MetaMask uses Infura as a default, but you can edit your RPC URL to whatever you want. You can even run your own node and sync the chain if you've got a couple hundred gigabytes to spare (no stake required to run a non-validating node).
They don't have to hit the blockchain all the time. Only when it makes sense. For everything else, there's off-chain signatures. That's the beauty of it. Hey, you don't want to use the chain, just use the sign-in with Ethereum feature, and that's totally cool!
Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a win for the bazaar.
Blockchain doesn’t really solve the whole “who is giving me this key” issue with PGP.
I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform. It’s not so great for centralized platforms.
You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely
I fee like a lot of these "cross platform NFTs" don't take the platform into consideration. A platform like Twitter or Reddit will have to opt-in to this blockchain and have to deal with reproducing whatever asset or relationship into their own systems. This will likely involve an API call to some datastore to retrieve that information.
1. For these platforms this is no different than integrating with any other 3rd party system. It's unclear how this is any different from Gravatar?
2. It's unclear why these platforms are motivated to supply such a feature. Why would I spent time integrating a blockchain for ownership rights over some in-game music, when CD Baby already exists?
A lot of these use cases are still solutions searching for a problem; they don't represent an actual material improvement for the platform (or worse, require economic investment that the platform cannot capture).
An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?
Because I can send a message to a public key, encrypted such that only the owner of the private key that pairs with that public key, can decrypt. Since the user actually owns the keys, they can't get rugged by Google or Microsoft because they find themselves on the wrong side of big brother. Public on-chain wallets as identity are also much more spam-resistant. Verifying a cryptographic signature is completely decentralized and does not require even internet access (could be done fully offline) whereas email is tied to a server by definition. Numerous possibilities open up with public-private keys.
I have dozens of wallet addresses. In fact, while typing this message, I just created 3 more, just for fun. It's really as simple as running an ECDSA function in the browser if you want to create separate identities for separate platforms. The beauty of owning your online identities is that you are in control. It's really that simple. But if you want to compose that identity, there is really no better way.
We've already seen deplatforming, censorship, financial exclusion for protesting in a democratic nation, shadow banning, and worse from the big tech cos. That's not the internet or the values I was raised on, and I'm working to push back on it, vis-a-vis tools like SIWE (https://docs.login.xyz/general-information/siwe-overview/eip...). Take ownership.
You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak.
And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.
> And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.
It is free to create a new identity on EVM. You just create a new public-private key pair. You can do it right now, in the browser, on the fly. If you want to have different accounts for different platforms (or multiple accounts for the same platform), you would have that ability (that is the case today, in Web3). But, if you want to integrate across platforms, it is far easier if those applications adopt an open, user-owned identity standard (rather than rely on Google or Gmail or Facebook or hotmail).
Web3/NFT etc doesn't solve this though.
Where is the list of followers going to be stored ? It isn't on chain.
Anything more data intensive than that can be stored on Ceramic/IPFS. https://ceramic.network/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://nft.storage/
That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.
Because otherwise you have gatekeepers and incompatible proprietary standards that don't interoperate or compose.
What does "owning your own assets" really mean, with regards to services such as Reddit, and where exactly do you see any problem worth fixing?
We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms. Successful internet communities become walled gardens to protect against competition, but they're limiting the growth of their community members and I believe the platforms themselves could capture more value. A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.
Greenfield projects are easy because they wave away the real complexities of integrating with existing systems. But those existing platforms already provide a lot of tangible value. If you want users, you can't just ignore that.
Patreon makes it pretty easy to give your subscribers early access to stuff, too. No blockchain involved. A lot of it happens over email.
That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.
Composability: sounds really bad for privacy. The entire concept of a permanent public record of transactions scares me for this reason
rewarding creator communities: we already have Patreon and advertising deals. Aren’t crypto transactions relatively slow and expensive, or has that changed?
Instead of the Security team at Google, their ddos service and OnCall experts we have whom now?
Some miners?
Perfectly written Blockchain code?
You sound like those things are just free.
Static HTML pages still exist today.
Google isn't the Internet, no matter how badly they want you to believe that.
that was not free either... what I'm trying to get at (and not very eloquently) is that a lot of that work is done by the computers. also, something about how the code is written once and then used by everybody at the same time. sure, writting the code may be expensive at first.
dunno, I doubt better written words will get you to agree with (or see) whatever it is I'm trying to get at.
Undersee cables for example.
Project Zero.
Secure by default.
2FA.
Google even gives you now the option of configuring your ads.
Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary motivation is solving hard problems for us.
Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what motivation?
If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should start trusting the etherium company instead of Google?
Or should I start trusting 1000 small companies than Google?
I'm quite happy what Google does and I don't know all of those other potential companies.
LOL
I'm not aware of any opensource community being happy at doing on call.
Or end customer support.
Or even marketing.
And if we look at successful opensource projects, than we have companies behind them.
So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.
Permissionless composability: Copyright ensures there will always be the need for permission if you wish to compose in a country that has copyright.
There are some good ideas here but there are also some very critical flaws. The problem is not so much web3 itself but that web3’s most vocal proponents—- particularly investors—- have refused to grapple with things like spam and copyright. It’s probably because they want to be middlemen who collect all the profits and are left without liability when the pyramid collapses.
Permissionless composability means you have no control over which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when they turn abusive
permissionless computing is also fine, but I think payments need to be somehow decoupled from this. endless ocean of tokens is stupid. we need some kind of distributed payment gateway built into the internet where you can use any currency on a list of supported currencies, and none should be supported that are "bad" ie planet killing POW.
tokenization I think is a dead end
Every service that might use blockchain based authentication will implement allow lists. As everyone in the history of the Internet has learned trolls and spammers will ruin services. So some sort of unblockable universal login is an impractical fantasy.
- Universal login: An alternative to "Sign in with Google/Apple/XYZ" that can't be denied by a corporation. There are countless examples of these companies deactivating accounts for questionable reasons.
- Permissionless composability: I'm not sure how to word this one better. If a developer wants to build on top of blockchain data, they can. No need to apply for API access, rate limits, etc. Not all data should be open/on a blockchain, but in the cases where it's appropriate this is a fantastic benefit.
- Ownership in communities: tokens (fungible or non-fungible) can represent ownership for communities. The next Reddit will reward its community and contributors. This isn't an unusual concept. YouTube and TikTok already reward their creator communities. The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden.
For balance, here are two concepts/terms I see co-mentioned with web3 that I believe are bullshit:
- Metaverse: I don't think this will come to anything. We're already living in the metaverse. We have online identities (yours is mouzogu!). I refuse to spend a significant portion of my life in VR or another 3D game.
- Micropayments: Consumers don't want the mental overhead of figuring out value for money every time they consume content.