[rglullis]

Your cheap jab says more about your lack of imagination about potential use-cases than about whatever shortcomings the technology has at the moment.

Okta is a multi-billion business and could also be characterized as "an expensive way to replace JWTs". Authz/authn is one of the most common use cases that every application developer needs to implement. How much would you like to bet that in 5 years time NFT-based authn/authz will be bigger than Okta's market?

[jakear]

The value of Okta is in its centralization - the reputability of the brand and the existence of a conscious entity equipped with the power of reason that can use their centralized superpowers to resolve unexpected issues as they come up. And if there’s anything I know about software, it’s that unexpected issues always come up.

Remove that and you have all the existing scams of crypto, except now your personal information and account access is at stake in addition to your money.

As for bets, I’ll happily wager my expected future net worth against these projects by simply not investing in them. If you feel differently, do differently. I don’t care.

[shiohime]

Clearly you have a strong dislike for the tech, and that's fine I don't care of course, but do keep in mind that there are ways to isolate risk pretty easily. Even if the technology doesn't result in a huge change in how auth is done to scale in the way that Okta does, there is value in simplifying authentication / authorization workflows for users that decide they want to participate in the web3 ecosystem.

As a solo developer making applications in the ecosystem, it's a breath of fresh air to not deal with Oauth+OIDC workflows and utilize wallet connectivity + token authorization to very elegantly handle these scenarios on smaller projects. End user experiences are pretty great too, I quite enjoy being able to authenticate into a website without needing to associate everything with my email address and/or rely on 3rd parties to provide trust solutions such as SSO via Google/FB/Okta/whatever.

And yes, the risk is higher in a decentralized model because if my private keys are compromised on most wallet types, then I can lose my funds / identity. There are solutions to help lower this risk however.

[jakear]

Would you mind linking to some of these websites you mention so I can better understand the flow? Also links to major open source components used?

[rglullis]

- https://youtu.be/Ig1leAaAZn0?t=169 (Unlock Protocol being used to give access to a protected URL)

- https://pypi.org/project/django-web3-auth/ (Django authentication backend that authenticates you via your ethereum wallet, has an animation on the page)

[shiohime]

The best examples right now are honestly NFT marketplaces or DeFi, however you can authenticate with these services without needing to have any funds available on your wallet.

If you're curious and want to try out the flow, you can download a web3 wallet like MetaMask - https://metamask.io/ - this is a popular web wallet extension for Ethereum and EVM platforms. If you want to try out Solana, I recommend https://phantom.app/

I personally like Solana more than EVM chains at the moment but it doesn't cost anything for you to try either.

Once you have the extension and create your wallet, you can navigate to an NFT marketplace, and connect your wallet.

Ethereum: https://opensea.io/ - The most popular Ethereum NFT marketplace

Solana: https://solanart.io/ - One of the most popular Solana NFT marketplaces

You can then click on the connect / select wallet button, and it will allow for you to connect your wallet to the website. This will authenticate you into their website, there's some additional steps on Opensea IIRC if you want to construct a full profile, but the base authentication only requires this. And like I mentioned, you can authenticate in this manner without owning a single dollar worth of crypto.

For the projects that allow for you to interface with chains / wallets, I've used these:

For ethereum: https://github.com/ChainSafe/web3.js

For solana: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana-web3.js

Essentially what it comes down to is a user has a wallet, that is typically a web wallet via extension, but you can of course use hardware wallets if you'd like, however those do require you to own one, so if you just want to play around with the ecosystem, these extensions are the easiest to use. These above projects are javascript APIs that allow for interacting with wallets and onchain programs.

Note that both of these are frontend solutions. There are backend solutions for both chains.

EDIT - also there is this provided from solana labs as an adapter for many different wallet types: https://github.com/solana-labs/wallet-adapter

[rglullis]

> Remove that and you have all the existing scams of crypto, except now your personal information and account access is at stake in addition to your money.

No, precisely the opposite. It's only with crypto that you can have a system that can authenticate you and authorize you to access resources without caring about any of your "real world" data. And if you are worried that your "wallet" might be hacked, you can simply use different ones for each different purpose. Your "money" crypto wallet does not need to be the same as your "online identity" wallet.