[bawolff]

I dont think web3 has really made any improvements in this area, so you got to ask what's different now.

Using public keys to log into things has been forever. It caught on with ssh (1995), it failed with client-certificates aka mTLS (1996).

Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986.

Anyways, i dont really think web3 has added anything. Most of these technologies are at least 25 years old and have not caught on. If it hasn't happened yet, i dont think crypto will change that.

[hedgehog]

Key-as-identity has a lot of problems and I don't think that model really works for most use cases. On the other hand I'm optimistic about being able to rework identity in the spirit what poster above describes. I've been around long enough to see the long arcs of experimentation and refinement that happen before technologies reach adoption. As an example widespread adoption of end-to-end encrypted messaging, biometrics, and hardware roots of trust took a while but that's here now in ordinary consumer gear. I could have looked at low adoption of PGPfone and and drawn the conclusion that encrypted video would never work but that would have been wrong.

[jlokier]

> Zero knowledge proofs also havent really caught on. And its not a new idea. The Fiat–Shamir heuristic is from 1986.

There's been a lot of advances in recent years in ZKPs, accompanied by a lot more interest. Fiat-Shamir is still used to turn interactive proofs into non-interactive, but the state of the art is far beyond just doing that. zk-SNARKs are less than 10 years old, zk-VMs are becoming more common, and the ZPrize competition is yielding some big steps forward in implementation performance. Probably blockchain applications are a major reason for recent increased interest and commercial R&D, even though that's not where the academics see the main applications.

If you're interested, the zkproof.org conference is currently still going, and the sessions can be watched live:

https://zkproof.org/events/workshop5/