Comment by roca
4 years ago
I'm open to the idea that there are real problems that are best solved by PoW/PoS blockchains and smart contracts, so I was hoping this article would reveal one. It doesn't. As mentioned elsewhere, Persona was already a perfectly good technical solution to this, years ago. It failed for various reasons, none of which would be addressed by blockchains/smart contracts. Likewise, the problem of "conveniently and securely log in everywhere" is well solved by Webauthn.
Arguing that "web3" will help because it will improve UX is ludicrous. "web3" provides nothing directly to boost UX. "web3 hype means there's lots of money sloshing around which can be used to improve UX" is an admission of defeat; all the money being sucked into the crypto space could be better deployed to solve these problems directly.
If this is the best shot at "real problems web3 solves", then there really is nothing there :-(.
Have you actually used a web3 website? Once you have your wallet setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had.
Also, I find it funny whenever someone says something like "web3 doesn't actually solve anything that hasn't been solved by other technologies like X". Then why isn't anyone using X? Why is nobody using Persona or Webauthn despite being "superior"?
I haven't used a Web3 site. How is it more seamless than Webauthn's "go to the site and have it verify my identity without me doing anything (using my plugged-in Yubikey plus the browser-stored user credentials)"?
Persona failed for various reasons. Big companies didn't want to offer Persona logins because they wanted to control the user relationship, especially the barrier to getting an account, and were unwilling to delegate that to arbitrary third parties. There was also a chicken-and-egg problem: not many sites accepted Persona logins, so not many people bothered to sign up to Persona, so not many sites bothered to accept Persona logins. This latter problem could have perhaps been solved if Mozilla had worked harder to integrate Persona into Firefox, but mistakes were made.
For Webauthn, AFAIK it's mainly an implementation issue on the server side. Maybe not enough people have the required secure tokens, on some platforms.
Obviously, blockchains and smart contracts don't help with any of the above issues.
Yeah, it's actually almost the exact same UX to what you described down to the hardware key and browser-extension only there are also a lot of fun hexadecimal numbers, network selectors, and it's tied to a real money wallet (this part could really make payments UX better so it's too bad the IRS classifies every purchase from the wallet as a securities trade).
Have you actually used a web2 website with a Mac ?
For every website I can just press TouchID once, it will auto complete my credentials and click the login button for me. I can't see how web3 could possibly be faster.
Plus I can still access that website on any device e.g. public or work computer without needing to worry if I can install a Chrome plugin.
Have you actually used a OIDC website? Once you have your account setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had.
Sorry, there are plenty of standard ways to make logins seamless without a Blockchain.
Lots of people use and used X, for various X. Various auth only companies exist, like Okta. They don't care for your "data", they are just trying to log you in. Same for Ping, Oracle Identity (or whatever they are called these days), Amazon etc. Then there are services where you use a physical card for auth (many federal government jobs require people to auth using a card which basically just holds keys). There are many auth services with waaaaay more users than any web3 wallet.
The statement that web3 doesn't solve anything which hasn't already been solved wrt authentication... is about as close to a true statement as one can make.
> Also, I find it funny whenever someone says something like "web3 doesn't actually solve anything that hasn't been solved by other technologies like X". Then why isn't anyone using X? Why is nobody using Persona or Webauthn despite being "superior"?
I find it funny that you do not detect the irony in what you just said.
> Have you actually used a web3 website? Once you have your wallet setup it's the most seamless login experience I've ever had.
So much of the web3 discourse involves the same two tropes:
1) "If you ignore the hard parts and only focus on the easy parts, then it looks much easier"
2) Ignoring the fact that regular old solutions are actually even more streamlined. It's not like web3 invented the concept of storing credentials and auto-filling forms. These are basic features used by hundreds of millions of end-users on a daily basis. It takes mountains of effort to get web3 just to almost reach UX parity with what we already have.
The only way web3 can feel like a better UX is if you haven't bothered to try any recent UX advancements in regular, non-web3 technologies.
>Why is nobody using Persona or Webauthn despite being "superior"?
Because the use case itself is flawed and niche? I don't really want my entire digital life and spending history linked and especially not on a public ledger.