bcmillegan
Re the fact the DAO controls the pricing and registration parameters of .ETH names, it's true that it would be possible for the DAO to change them to something that targets a specific user or name. The DAO cannot take away a .eth name that is registered (it could only make it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register anew). To guard against this, a user can pay ahead for as many years as they want, ensuring they have the name for that period (e.g. 100 years). Given that DAO proposals have required voting periods, it wouldn't be possible to surprise this on someone, and they'd be able to simply extend their registration for 100 years (or whatever period they want) before it went through. As you mention, the ENS constitution also prohibits it. I find this attack vector extremely unlikely to be attempted and near impossible to carry out successfully.
There's more I could say, but I think these were two main points.
ENS isn't needed strictly speaking, but highly useful to make everything human-friendly. It's like saying DNS isn't useful because you can just input a website's IP address.
For .eth names, you can pay ahead as many years as you want, so you can pay once and forget it about it.
The you likely got to $120 is that there is also Ethereum network gas fees to pay to registration a name. That's a one time thing and fluctuates a lot. Since you can register for many years at a time, you can pay the gas fee once and get the name for many years. We're also working on putting parts of ENS on L2s to cut down on gas fees dramatically.
Yep, I agree SSO by itself isn't enough of an incentive to use something. A key part of the thread is that that's not what's happening. People are getting Ethereum accounts and even ENS for other reasons, and the fact that this is being used for SSO is a side-effect.
>This one is hilariously complicated; Yes, but this is getting simpler over time. Better than it was a few years ago, still clunky, getting better over time. That is what crypto incentives is doing to pub/priv key management and related things. Again, this is a key part of the thread: crypto is incentivizing adoption and improvements in tech that existed previously but people didn't have a strong enough incentive to adopt or improve.
Yep. Note that ENS is an open source self-running protocol, i'm really the dir of operations of True Names LTD, the non-profit that de facto manages. Funds raised from .ETH name registrations/renewals don't even go to TNL but to an Ethereum community multisig (never spent, but plan is to use it for long-term ENS dev funding). I'm thinking about these things precisely because I'm working on the project.
>'Average' people aren't into crypto. They increasingly are
>Anyone want to try to explain asymmetric keypairs to mother-in-law who's in her 70s and needs help applying Windows patches?
You don't have to, just like you don't have to explain to her how TCP/IP works. You just have an account and it works.
> This is an extremely solved problem.
Not with the properties of Sign-In with Ethereum (SIE), which is single, user generated authentication credentials, a self-custody portable username in a naming system that isn't reliant on a trusted-third party, and that people are already getting for other reasons (to use Ethereum, so extra incentive to get set up, not just SSO incentive).
> ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that's how you reset a login
Yep, and I don't expect that to change very much anytime soon, but there is a small but growing community of people tethered to their Ethereum wallets and ENS names and using those instead. Given the advantages and crypto incentives, I expect it to continue to grow. Note also that service can always require a user to also provide an email address, it just wouldn't be used for authentication.
> The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.
Doesn't have to be. Three things on this point:
1) Depends on how your wallet provider works. There are already some wallet providers with social recovery (multisig under the hood), etc.
2) Crypto incentives (unrelated to sign-in) mean that the private key management industry ("wallets") is already highly incentivized to make it very difficult for people to totally lose access to their accounts (because then lost money). That's a key part of my point: private key management has never been good enough for average people, but crypto incentives have spurred on a massive industry to solve this problem. And while it's not totally solved (still needs lots of improvement), it has improved rapidly in the last five years to be much better than ever before, and I expect it to continue to improve.
3) What I've described is just on the user side. If a web2 service adopted this (not aware of any right now, it's pretty much just web3 services that use it), they can always do things like require you provide an email address or other information, and they can still have a process for reassigning your account with them to a different Ethereum account.
> The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn't control absolutely.
Again, depends on what you want, you can make it so that you have access to all of your company's employees Ethereum accounts.
> Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.
Yep. I don't expect this to replace everything else immediately, but I do expect overtime for this to become a ubiquitous option, such that a user could use their one Ethereum account everywhere if they wanted to.
Also, re the need for multiple identities: as I point out in the thread, a person can generated as many Ethereum accounts and have as many ENS names as they'd like, using their real name or pseudonym, or whatever they'd like.
Anyway, sorry for long comment, thanks for engaging!
> This is an extremely solved problem.
Not with the properties of Sign-In with Ethereum (SIE), which is single, user generated authentication credentials, a self-custody portable username in a naming system that isn't reliant on a trusted-third party, and that people are already getting for other reasons (to use Ethereum, so extra incentive to get set up, not just SSO incentive).
> ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that's how you reset a login
Yep, and I don't expect that to change very much anytime soon, but there is a small but growing community of people tethered to their Ethereum wallets and ENS names and using those instead. Given the advantages and crypto incentives, I expect it to continue to grow. Note also that service can always re
> The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.
Doesn't have to be. Depends on how your wallet provider works. There are already some wallet providers with social recovery, etc.
Note two other key things:
1) Crypto incentives (unrelated to sign-in) mean that the private key management industry ("wallet" industry) is already highly incentivized to make it very difficult for people to lose access to their accounts (because then lost money). That's part of my point: private key management has never been good enough for average people, but crypto incentives have spurred on an massive industry to solve this problem. And while it's not solved (still needs improvement), it has improved rapidly in the last five years to be much better than ever before, and I expect it to continue to improve.
2) What I've described is just on the user side. If a web2 service adopted this, they can always do things like require you provide an email address or other information, and they can still have a process for reassigning your account with them to a different Ethereum account.
> The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn't control absolutely.
Again, depends on what you want, you can make it so that a third-party has access to all of your company's employees Ethereum accounts.
> Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.
Yep. I don't expect this to replace everything else immediately, but I do expect overtime for this to become a ubiquitous option, such that a user could use their one Ethereum account everywhere if they wanted to. Also, re the need for multiple identities: as i point out in the thread, a person can generated as many Ethereum accounts and have as many ENS names as they'd like.