<story><title>Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is an extremely solved problem. Unless you have a dramatically interesting solution to the real hard problem, global account &lt;i&gt;recovery&lt;/i&gt;, ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that&amp;#x27;s how you reset a login. Since you&amp;#x27;re doing that already, &amp;quot;Sign in with Google&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Sign in with Apple&amp;quot; are perfectly cromulent solutions and likely to continue dominating.&lt;p&gt;The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the real market for Internet SSO is at companies, and one of the major reasons companies deploy SSO is to have policy control (particularly: onboard and offboarding) of who has access to what. A globally distributed authentication fabric is actually an anti-feature for those people.&lt;p&gt;The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn&amp;#x27;t control absolutely.&lt;p&gt;Part of what&amp;#x27;s happening with ideas like this, and the reason Internet identity has been such a tar pit for the last 20 years, is that there isn&amp;#x27;t one single service model for identity. Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mondoveneziano</author><text>&amp;gt; The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.&lt;p&gt;This is generally a concern I have about blockchain technology. What if it succeeds in its goal to play a major role in some sector, and something immensely important becomes attached to it.&lt;p&gt;Mistakes happen. Both by humans and by computers. Software having bugs, hardware failing, bits randomly changing in RAM, are all obvious and commonplace. Mitigations exist (ECC, signatures...), but never along the whole chain. For example, BTC addresses might have checksums, but if the wrong row in a database deciding the address is selected in the first place, through human, software, or hardware error, that will not matter.&lt;p&gt;Do we want to attach extremely important things to a system that is by design irreversible?</text></comment>
<story><title>Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is an extremely solved problem. Unless you have a dramatically interesting solution to the real hard problem, global account &lt;i&gt;recovery&lt;/i&gt;, ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that&amp;#x27;s how you reset a login. Since you&amp;#x27;re doing that already, &amp;quot;Sign in with Google&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Sign in with Apple&amp;quot; are perfectly cromulent solutions and likely to continue dominating.&lt;p&gt;The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the real market for Internet SSO is at companies, and one of the major reasons companies deploy SSO is to have policy control (particularly: onboard and offboarding) of who has access to what. A globally distributed authentication fabric is actually an anti-feature for those people.&lt;p&gt;The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn&amp;#x27;t control absolutely.&lt;p&gt;Part of what&amp;#x27;s happening with ideas like this, and the reason Internet identity has been such a tar pit for the last 20 years, is that there isn&amp;#x27;t one single service model for identity. Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonplackett</author><text>Anyone else wondering what cromulent means: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&amp;#x2F;words-at-play&amp;#x2F;what-does-cromulent-mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&amp;#x2F;words-at-play&amp;#x2F;what-does-crom...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>