Christopher Allan Webber

Distributed identity and storage system idea

Christopher Allan Webber at

I came up with an idea for a distributed identity and naming system that seems so stupid it might work, but I must be missing something?

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Yes, IPFS IPNS is a public key /ipns/iamakey that points to a hash /ipfs/iamahash.

If you add a hashchain activity feed to that, you get (secure-)scuttlebutt (except I think it doesn't do file trees, only blobs), and if you add a p2p network to keep those feeds updated, you get scuttlebot.

Also, I think Zot monadic identities uses a public key as user identifier.

[email protected] at 2017-07-19T04:19:22Z

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

s/monadic/nomadic/ :-D

Never realized before those are anagrams.

[email protected] at 2017-07-19T04:20:01Z

Mike Linksvayer, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

> Also, I think Zot nomadic identities uses a public key as user identifier.

Indirectly. They use a generated id and the signature of the id; which you need to obtain the public key to verify. Once verified, the id and sig are hashed to create a local identifier which is the "proven identity" and is a convenient local reference for that identity. Even though it hashes to the same thing on different sites, we never trust another site's hash and fetch the key and verify it ourself and then only store the hash we have verified. 

Then we do essentially the same thing for location, which is stored separately from the identity, and is what makes it nomadic. You can pair any location with any identity, as long as the location was signed by that identity.

macgirvin at 2017-07-23T03:36:21Z

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

@macgirvin So is an identity in this system paired with a keypair for life? Just trying to understand!

Christopher Allan Webber at 2017-07-23T13:57:14Z