[scyclow]

This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.

[SkiFire13]

> smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked

How would that even work?

[TheDong]

If someone's account gets lost or hacked, the person with the most incentive to own that account is usually the original owner, so just give it to whoever is willing to pay the most, problem solved. We can call it "proof of stake", where you always stake a certain amount to keep owning your account, and when contested, whoever stakes the most gets it.

Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.

Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.

/s if it's necessary

[tarpitt]

I think you're right that transaction fees are a key problem. It's ultimately a bandwidth problem. You're bidding for the limited vbytes, and the bidding price only increases with traffic, kicking poor users out.

I think the key thing to recognise with petname systems is that there doesn't need to be this sort of "top-level consensus" as opposed to ecash systems.

You can have two instances of namecoin, say Namecoin1 or Namecoin2. You can just have different domains like alice.nmc1 and bob.nmc2 and have them interoperate properly. You can just keep forking blockchain-based petname systems to overcome the bandwidth/fee problem.

What this means is that Namecoin1 full nodes don't need to synchronize all the domain names on Namecoin2 and vice-versa. Similar to TLDs on DNS. We can imagine that there might be different petname TLDs for different global regions, and they might be merge-mined.

This isn't true for money applications like bitcoin or eth, because by forking BTC or ETH or something, you are creating new coins.

[tarpitt]

Perhaps some sort of namecoin or ENS-like petname system with multisig or some type of scripting that enables different recovery methods.

For example, you could set your petname up so it can be controlled by a single keypair, which can be overridden after a certain time by a ring signature based on keypairs held by friends, family, peers, and trusted computing devices you leave in a safe deposit box.

Or maybe you could trust your identity with some centralized entity, but only as part of a 2-of-3 multisig with yourself and another trusted entity.

Basicially namecoin with bitcoin-like scripting controls.

[AndrewStephens]

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain?

Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.

[tarpitt]

Good question, this made me think.

You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?

I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.

It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).

I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.

[vid]

What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.

[majorchord]

For me the incentive is being able to own an identity that nobody can take away from me. And the assumption is that services will support this type of identity, so I don't have to make accounts on other systems that people can take away and now I've lost all access to any data I had.

[AndrewStephens]

I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.

[tarpitt]

except for your domain registrar and your PKI certificate authority