[_3jh0]

> What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required.

Blockchain isn't required for this part and I answered why not certificates in this thread elsewhere. The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today. You also need to pay for memberships and that can be done through the same wallet. Arguably better UX.

> If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that?

Indeed. That's the point of storing membership data on blockchain. The user and community can go against the service provider. Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data.

Check out other commenter on the same thread too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862347

[WJW]

> more mainstream than pgp

This is the one of the most "damning with faint praise" comments I have seen this year.

[bawolff]

> The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today.

So what, the killer feature is its UI isn't as shit as the program world famous for having a shit UI

Besides if that is your metric, JWTs are definitely more mainstream than blockchain stuff.

>Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data.

Kind of hard to have a secret cabal channel if membership is public. Does this mean to ban someone from a channel you need to pay a transaction fee? That sounds fun from a channel op perspective.