Comment by roca
4 years ago
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).