[Comevius]

The digital identity infrastructure space is already crowded, with players like Apple, Google and Microsoft working with governments and institutions, because they own the devices we use, and the entire point is that people will be able to use their phones to identify themselves everywhere. Apple ID is already like 90% there, despite having to trust Apple with your personal data, which nobody has a problem with. The Web3 approach of having to trust nobody is not really practical to begin with. Blockchains are slow and expensive. Worst yet it's still up to you to verify the client and whether it's connected to the authoritative version of the blockchain, since blockchains can be replaced by a fork. At that point you might as well trust Apple.

[whatisweb3]

In the long term I hope Apple does not win. The idea that we should just submit the world’s private data to Apple for the next century is… terrible.

Zero knowledge proofs are one of the more promising things starting to emerge from crypto and decentralized blockchain space. If desired, you can still trust Apple for the ZK proof generation and verification without having to store any private details on their servers.

[Comevius]

Practical ZK is coming from cryptography, like this decentralized gun registry by the Brown University.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/107.pdf

People in the crypto space are coming from a different angle, they are franctically trying to find a legitimate use for cryptocurrencies, so far unsuccessfully, by constantly rebranding blockchain technologies without being able to address the challenges. It's not that we desire to trust Apple, it's that they get things done. They have actual solutions that work, not just empty promises aimed at greater fools. People in the crypto space never deliver.

[whatisweb3]

I don’t see any reference to zero knowledge proof in there.

Look into modern research around succinct and generalized ZK proofs. SNARKs, STARKs, PLONK, zkVMs, MPC and secure setup ceremonies. All of this is coming from blockchain and crypto space and will transform some ways we manage privacy in the future. It does not need to be used with a blockchain but pairs well as the choices of arithmetic are often optimized to EVM.

“Apple is faster at delivering than a decentralized group of developers and researchers creating novel cryptographic protocols and open source software” - well, no shit.

[rektide]

> The Web3 approach of having to trust nobody is not really practical to begin with. Blockchains are slow and expensive.

I generally agree, for almost all uses blockchains are pretty bad.

But it has, so far, been an eventually consistent global write-only data store where reads have 100% uptime. I don't want a service layer on blockchain, don't want to be using the blockchain to transact, but if there's some small modicum of write-once globally-read-many datum (such as oh say, a cryptographic token I can use to sign things to prove my identity) where blockchain actually seems like a good match. The slow and expensive isn't a problem, if all I'm doing is proving an identity I made a long time ago.

I'm not super worried about people verifying me using a bad blockchain. These systems should be self-verifying & diverging for too long should trip systems.

[ngould]

Definitely possible that Apple will win the identity wars. That said, I don't agree with the characterization of web3/web5 as "having to trust nobody". If anything, all the efforts around identity are meant to allow for bringing IRL notions of trust onto the internet. In other words, the whole pseudonymity thing is not a result of using blockchain, but just the fact that nobody's bothered to add identity verification to a lot of stuff happening in web3. That's changing though.

[bawolff]

Sheesh, "web5"? I guess we blew right past web4.

Normally i try to avoid low quality complaint comments like the one i am making, but blockchain naming is frustrating.

[ngould]

It's a little bit tongue and cheek. (Read the post.)

[bawolff]

Maybe, but honestly in the article it seems less tounge in cheek, and more "its just a joke bro" to deflect criticism.

[baxtr]

> Blockchains are slow and expensive.

Yeah. In every other situation, people try to improve the speed and efficiency of software.

In this case, it’s like people prefer to do bubble sort even if there is quick sort available. And then sell it as the best thing ever invented.