There's a growing base of users who have reached the epiphany (by multiple paths) that both identities & content-addressing MUST be cryptographically-rooted, or else users' privacy & communications will remain at the mercy of feudal centralizers with endless strong incentives to work against their interests.
For such users, any offering without these is a non-starter, dead-on-arrival.
People with resistance to this epiphany sound like those who used to insist, "HTTP is fine" (even when it put people at risk) or "MD5 is fine" (long after it was cryptographically broken). Most will get it eventually, either through painful tangible experiences or the gradual accumulation of social proof.
A bolt-on/fix-up of an older protocol might work, if done with extreme competence & broad consensus. And, some in the ActivityPub world had the cryptoepiphany very early! Ideas for related upgrades have been kicked around for a long time. But progress has been negligible, & knee-jerk resistance strong, & the deployed-habits/technical-debts make it harder there than in a green-field project.
Hence: a new generation of systems that bake the epiphany in at their core – which is, ultimately, a more robust approach than a bolt-on/fix-up.
Because so many of those recently experiencing this cryptoepiphany reached it via experience with cryptotokens, many of these systems enthusiastically integrate other aspects of the cryptotoken world – which of course turns off many people, for a variety of good and bad reasons.
But the link with cryptotokens is plausibly inessential, at least at the get-go. The essentials of grounding identity & addressing in cryptography predate Bitcoin by decades, and had communities-of-practice totally independent of the cryptoeconomics world.
A relative advantage Bluesky may have is their embrace of cryptographic addressing behind-the-scenes, without pushing its details to those who might confuse it with promotional crypto-froth. Users will, if all goes well, just see the extra security, scalability, and user sovereignty against abuses that it offers. We'll see.
It was clear that MD5 didn't meet the goals it was designed for in 1994, when experts recommended it be phased out for its originally intended uses.
It's not fine here in 2023.
If you need a secure hash, it's been proven broken for 10 years now.
If you don't need a secure hash, others are far more performant.
Using it, or worse, advocating for its use, is a way to signal your thinking is years behind the leading edge, and also best practices, and even justifiable practices.
HTTP's simplicity could make it tolerable for some places where world-readability is a goal - but people, echoing your sentiments here, have said it was "fine" even in situations where it was putting people at risk.
Major browser makers recognize the risk, and are now subtly discouraging HTTP, and this discouragement will grow more intense over time.
For such users, any offering without these is a non-starter, dead-on-arrival.
People with resistance to this epiphany sound like those who used to insist, "HTTP is fine" (even when it put people at risk) or "MD5 is fine" (long after it was cryptographically broken). Most will get it eventually, either through painful tangible experiences or the gradual accumulation of social proof.
A bolt-on/fix-up of an older protocol might work, if done with extreme competence & broad consensus. And, some in the ActivityPub world had the cryptoepiphany very early! Ideas for related upgrades have been kicked around for a long time. But progress has been negligible, & knee-jerk resistance strong, & the deployed-habits/technical-debts make it harder there than in a green-field project.
Hence: a new generation of systems that bake the epiphany in at their core – which is, ultimately, a more robust approach than a bolt-on/fix-up.
Because so many of those recently experiencing this cryptoepiphany reached it via experience with cryptotokens, many of these systems enthusiastically integrate other aspects of the cryptotoken world – which of course turns off many people, for a variety of good and bad reasons.
But the link with cryptotokens is plausibly inessential, at least at the get-go. The essentials of grounding identity & addressing in cryptography predate Bitcoin by decades, and had communities-of-practice totally independent of the cryptoeconomics world.
A relative advantage Bluesky may have is their embrace of cryptographic addressing behind-the-scenes, without pushing its details to those who might confuse it with promotional crypto-froth. Users will, if all goes well, just see the extra security, scalability, and user sovereignty against abuses that it offers. We'll see.