Comment by accountofme
4 years ago
How does everyone know everyone's verified public keys? How are they verified? Who does the verification? How do you trust the verifiers? How do you know that person x in the real world has pubkey x?
4 years ago
How does everyone know everyone's verified public keys? How are they verified? Who does the verification? How do you trust the verifiers? How do you know that person x in the real world has pubkey x?
Verified probably isn't the right word here. Authentic would probably work better.
I as a person have accounts on lots of apps but no real way to prove I own all of them. When you use a public key as your identifier then everyone can verify that the entity that owns Sargos on HN also owns Blah on Reddit if I want them to. Essentially you can trust that the digital entity you are interacting with is the digital entity you knew and trusted on the rest of the web in the past.
If you are using a web3 app and see vitalik.eth then you know for a fact that it's Vitalik Buterin. Unfortunately we only know this for sure because he said that is his address in public but there are many identity protocols trying to solve this problem and if you were to tie your public key to your government's identity database then you would be able to prove real world provenance.
1. They can (theoretically) examine the whole ledger.
2. Your possession of the private key “verifies” your public key, if someone takes it they are now you.
3. Depends on the consensus mechanism but in the best case, “everyone” and in the worst case “coinbase.”
4. You don’t trust them, the system is supposed to be trustworthy with untrustworthy participants, and when that’s not true you will just have to trust the architects of the hard fork.
5. Magical off-chain oracle!