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Are we self-sovereign PKI yet?

> The same key, in every app, for every recipient. Not assignable to anyone else, not revocable, not subject to suspension. Yours forever.

This is impractical and the opposite of what we want. It's a required ID to use the internet, monitored by governments, tracked by corporations, and forever unchanging.

What we need is a system that allows people to easily create new IDs, that updates contacts that people choose. Think of a contact book that sends new keys to all contacts on every change. (Contacts would need to be always online.) It could update the key used on a website or not, depending on the users choice.

Breaking tracking and required IDs means flux and churn.

a minute agoirq-1

Great concise description of the problem.

As for the solution, it seems to explicitly not address recovery of lost keys/identities, which is however exactly the part that makes this hard for regular users.

That, and general name confusion attacks, I suppose: "I'm lxgr17@key, yeah, don't ask about the first 16. Oh also make sure 'key' is not the one with the Georgian lowercase e in the middle, that one's an impostor. Wait, actually, let me quickly spell it out in hexadecimal Unicode points..."

At least blockchain addresses have that going for them: They're way too long to even try and remember or spell out on the phone.

an hour agolxgr

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