Oddbean

Why are we all so concerned with securing our one-and-only nsec? Wouldn’t it be healthier for nostr if we could easily burn them and migrate to the next one? Key migration should be as easily possible as: “Hey, I’m Joe, Fred lost his phone, this is his new number.” Everyone can ask themselves then: do I trust Joe. How to set this up technically may be challenging assuming there’s no hard concept of absolute time in nostr which allows for the statement “key burned after”. But intuitively I feel there must be a pragmatic middle path with relative time as in “signed and referenced by”. We could make a DAG putting notes into timely relation to each other and drop out cheaters. A bit like proof-of-stake with social media: @Laeserin could for example make a statement now “schmijos seems legit and every interaction with him so far seems legit”. Others could judge this and say: ok, there this side of the DAG which seems non-meddled-with. A bit like a continuous key-signing party which doesn’t bring good security, but some security. This is a concept of time. And as soon as @Laeserin detects weird interactions, she makes a statement: “nah, doesn’t seem right, he’s been hacked”. It would be no different than me writing to a friend on facebook: “hey your account makes weird things, I consider it has been hacked” I’m aware this idea is neither very cypherpunk nor Bitcoiner-proof but on nostr we could maybe live with a very laax term of time? We’re still free to assume the worst anytime and can require perfect security when needed. But if I want to call Fred I’m probably grateful that Joe told me where to reach him.

It's a very hard problem. nostr:nevent1qqsqme66cuc5yzlm0w3f7yrnuxwsxaw69hyuyxzwkn2tkpnvv52eawspzamhxue69uhkzarvv9ejumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtczyrwkvn27gqtyxw5v660sqkhpfqyqgdgh3x6emed0qcnkmejkx0f3jqcyqqqqqqg93k5g2

I have my money on social recovery/rotation for what it's worth. If a few close friends report the account as compromised, for example, and say "this is their new npub" - clients could easily pick up on it.

also, my conservative instinct about using clients has been vidicated repeatedly losing your keys is just the tip of teh iceberg... having your follow lists and relay lists clobbered is another problem that comes up

Your suggestion works fine. There are no problems with it. It just works™ But, no joke, deep down I want an overengineered cypherpunk solution that crushes people who misunderstand the tech 😮‍💨

I don't see why you would have any sort of process to "burn" keys. We can have infinite amounts of them. Old keys would just become dormant. It's like a phone number but we have infinite amounts of the.