Re:Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’
by acdha on Saturday November 05, 2022 @08:44AM
(#33480878)
> If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services.
You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?
I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.
One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.
Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.
That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.
Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?
You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?
I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.
One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.
Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.
That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.
Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?