Oddbean new post about login | logout Am I tripping or are digital signatures or some type of cryptographic signatures going to be extremely necessary where technology is headed? I’ve been obsessed with this lately. I think that the Biden announcement on Twitter really highlighted a need for it.
Verifiable authenticity and attribution in the age of AI will be crucial, yes.
Is it possible to do that without adding identification eventually?
You’re doing it now with this note and every other you create. 😀 Your identification is what you’ve chosen to add to your profile, but that could be blank, of course.
Let’s just say hypothetically that corporate tech is forced to age verify. Could it be helpful with that? https://cbs12.com/news/local/florida-attorney-general-ashley-moody-announces-new-rules-for-social-media-law-facebook-twitter-x-instagram-july-29-2024
Public-private key pairs enable cryptographic verification that the holder/owner of the private key created the artifact (text, image, note) in question. That’s all, but it’s immensely powerful. As for attributes or credentials, we then get into things like Decentralized ID (DID) and so-called Verified Credentials. These become considerably more complex. Some are bullish on these schemes, others not so much.
People use Biden's announcement as an example here, but can any tech convince us that it was indeed himself signing the message with his own keys? Single point of verification is a single point of failure. Multiple independent points of verification are needed, IMO. And that's why the sole Twitter announcement triggered the doubt's.
I learned about this digital id verification while attending a webinar on blockchain and cryptocurrency the other day. Don’t know anything about it and had never heard of it before. https://www.civic.id/
Lol, how very web3. #Nostr solves this much more simply and elegantly. Everyone busy trying to innovate blockchain when reapplying public/private keypairs was the hidden secret sauce.
They're already used all over the place, but for decades, getting end users comfortable enough to effectively use keypairs was too difficult. It's still necessary though so the complexities were hidden (somewhat greedily) away from the users, and replaced with "trust us bro" logic. Nostr & Bticoin, while relatively difficult compared to existing alternatives, definitely bump the usability of digital signatures in daily online interactions for typical users.
