The fact that you're creating a user ID on a service is already third party. That service owns your username and you also have to trust them to store your password securely.

Ethereum accounts are not tied to any service. They are just a public/private keypair so they can be used as portable usernames.

I am party #1. I go to a website to make an account. They are party #2. I do not see a third party.

Meanwhile, Mr. John "bro trust me bro your wallets secure bro nobody's going to just drop a viral token into your wallet to fuck with you bro" Ethereum is a 3rd party to the transaction between me and a website. I trust Ashley Madison with my password more than I trust the Web3 ecosystem and cryptobros to not fuck me over using the rules of their own rigged game.

That's dark bro https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36637736

Dark story, bro

This is not correct based on the laws of the United States. Other people's web servers are third parties, and when you use them, your data is not protected under the Fourth Amendment.

  "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

What is the benefit of Euthereum vs using Webauthn/passkeys?

WebAuthn is a web standard created by the w3c. Passkey is an extension of that spec created by a consortium of tech corps. Using Ethereum is like signing a message with a GPG key. It just proves that you control the private key pair to that public address on the blockchain. WebAuthN does something similar, but instead of using the public Ethereum blockchain and private/public key pairs to verify it, it uses your TPM, an authentication key (yubikey), manufacturer metadata and a "Relying party" to make attestations. The relying party is a third party, like the FIDO metadata service, and it's specified in JavaScript so the end user can't change it.

On the other hand, with the Ethereum protocol, you only have to rely on the public blockchain to attest/sign/prove ownership. You can choose the software and hardware that you use to secure your wallet too. You can even keep that wallet airgapped, totally offline and still authenticate using QR codes. If you were so inclined you could even run your own end point/node so you're not relying on any 3rd parties to attest/sign for you. It's a self sovereign online identity if you want it to be. It also has other benefits like the ability to store monetary value in the way of cryptocurrencies.

The ability to verify ownership of digital assets (tokens), like NFTs, and use those in creative ways like we have here. You can also use the Ethereum Name Service and tie a .ETH domain name to your public key, so people know that a message sent by frizlab.eth is really you, even if you have to get a new wallet address. It's your identity (frizlab.eth), your wallet, and with NFT's I think it could also verify and visualize your reputation or skillset online too, no matter what website you're on. Your identity owned by you and built on top of a world wide, immutable, distributed, consensus protocol. I wrote an article for Wordpress developers with my ideas, but I think it can apply to the web as a whole.

https://caches.xyz/the-rostrum/wordpress-web3-and-ethereum-w...

I'd say probably familiarity by the community. It's meant to be a web3 social platform. Everyone in web3 already has a crypto wallet, already knows how to use it, and has used it for this purpose before. So it seems like a natural fit.

Again I haven't used this service and have no affiliation with them but do believe that we desperately need truly public digital infrastructure and I think Ethereum is a step in that direction.

Old grouch is far better than the disingenuous people running around saying “stop using this technology!! It has no value, I have never seen it and it cant have any value!!”

Basically the difference is that the username and password can be used to authenticate with that specific site and that’s it, while a “wallet” browser extension or app can let the user sign transactions and manage value outside your site, so they don’t have to trust your site (they approve all major transactions) and your site can’t impersonate them. You may think you won’t but one of your devs could go in for example and salami-slice the balances of your members, or change all the votes in a stackoverflow election etc.

Oh I'm not being disingenuous, and I'm not telling people to stop using the technology. Using Ethereum is certainly one of the choices of all time. I don't agree with it, but I am happy that people choose to engage with it. I love watching clowns.

With one Ethereum account you can have endless passwords that you don't need to remember

Which is a hilariously awful proposition, especially given how truly security unconscious most wallet applications actually are, along with the... questionable... security policies baked-in to the blockchain.

If you think it's so vulnerable then go hack Ethereum, there's a $225B bounty waiting for you

Nah, I'm not an unethical shyster that aims to steal from others. Couldn't you tell by how I'm not bought into crypto?

oh, like a password manager? or any number of other private key based authentication schemes that aren't attached to a distributed system which spends a lot of time, effort, and complexity, not to mention cost on ensuring double-spends don't appen?

In this case, there is nothing more anonymous about the Ethereum approach than a simple username/password. But there are some benefits in terms of data privacy. Most websites, especially social media, don't let you get away with just an anonymous username/password these days if you want to use their full functionality. They may want all kinds of other information from you, e.g. email address (3rd party), your phone number, ID verifcation, linked Google account with certain permissions to access private data, and so on. This data will be sent to their servers (as well as ad providers / Google) and linked with your identity. You have little control over this and can't remove it from their servers either.

With the Ethereum approach, you can control this data about yourself. For example, with zero-knowledge proofs you could prove to a service that "I am over 18 and an US resident with a valid phone number" without sending any actual information about yourself to that party. Twitter shouldn't need your phone number. It just needs to know that you have one.

Logging in with your Google account everywhere is convenient because it contains all kinds of facts about you. But you have no control over what's done with that data, either by Google or the service you're logging into. With "Log in wit Ethereum" you could get the same conveniences, but you still own your data and have full control over what's being done with it or who can access which parts of it.

The wallet ID and public, immutable transaction logs still allows for entity resolution. There is, of course, a limit to the entity resolution that can be thus performed... much like there is with Web2 advertisers. In fact, it is the same limit. That limit is the ability of the user to prevent the system from resolving their identity based on their activities within the system. I'd dare say that it's probably even easier to dodge ER today than it would be in some hypothetical mega-dystopia where literally any blockchain is the default currency paradigm.