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Comment by thesuperbigfrog

4 years ago

Why can't this be done with existing public key cryptography?

There’s even a standard for doing this with WebAuthn.

  • WebAuthn is exactly what I thought of too... and hardly anyone is supporting it. In fact the only place I've seen it was Best Buy's website, oddly enough! Having yet another way to do this sort of authentication isn't going to magically make people start using it.

It can. The biggest success of crypto has been putting public/private key pairs in the hands of 10s of millions of people.

  • >> The biggest success of crypto has been putting public/private key pairs in the hands of 10s of millions of people.

    I would argue that the biggest successes of crypto are selling GPUs and facilitating malware ransom payments.

    GPUs have sold like crazy and you are lucky to get a high end one with the current demand. Everybody and their pets are running mining rigs. Good luck getting a nice GPU for machine learning or graphics rendering.

    Previously malware authors had to rely on gift cards or similar means to get paid. Now they have variety of cryptocurrencies to choose from and they can even trade cryptocurrencies to launder the paid ransom funds.

It can. It just happens that the easiest way to achieve this is using web3, even if there is no blockchains involved. The article is about login methods, not cryptos or web3

  • > It just happens that the easiest way to achieve this is using web3

    Is it? U2F is actually rolling out to more and more websites but I've never seen any website offer to log in with a dropdown for cryptocurrencies

  • > The article is about login methods, not […] web3

    It’s literally titled “ Real Problems That Web3 Solves, Part 1”