Although, after trying out different feeds and approaches. I must admit, I don't care about every item that is posted on a news site or someone's blog.
Anything interesting will get posted here.
So I figured I need a way to clean up HN stories that I don't find useful. I built an API server which does this using sentiment analysis.
Another problem I noticed is I tend to click on comments of stories I know won't be any useful (web3?) but it's hard to stop the urge so I check if comments are overly negative and return a score which is used to hide or show the see discussion button.
I also return all the urls from the discussion separately because those are usually good resources.
That said, I couldn't quite get what a startup city is supposed to capture. Still figuring out a consistent guidelines to apply before adding more entries.
> What's wrong with plain old digital signatures in this contrived scenario. If for some reason this was desired, hn signs an assertion that so and so is a member. Person presents this assertion as neccesary. No blockchain required.
Blockchain isn't required for this part and I answered why not certificates in this thread elsewhere. The simple reason is, wallet based authentication & authorization is more mainstream than pgp today. You also need to pay for memberships and that can be done through the same wallet. Arguably better UX.
> If hn is onboard with the transfer they could just issue a new signed assertion. So the only use case is if you want to transfer ownership against the service provider's will. But how does blockchain solve that?
Indeed. That's the point of storing membership data on blockchain. The user and community can go against the service provider. Think of freenode transfer a while ago, if the identity, moderation, ownership of channels, etc data was stored on the blockchain and controlled by the user. The community could migrate to another IRC service which fetched data from the blockchain and each user could get the same account they had on freenode by verifying they owned that data.
I'm not the one providing HN membership. That would be YC but I as a third party can verify whether someone has a valid HN membership and provide them perks based on their membership. That is the problem a distributed ledger solves. The data is public and usable by any service provider.
To verify you have a HN account (membership) today, a service provider need to build something like keybase. That is complicated and will be different for each service.
That is the problem unlock-protocol "solves". It defines the protocol for managing these memberships. To create, verify, deploy, etc.
You need some way to pay for membership without a middleman. This is solved by cryptocurrency part of the blockchain these nfts are stored on.
Memberships are also more complicated than a list of email addresses. They can be transferred, expired, and change depending on the action of the user. For example, some provider want their memberships to be reduced to half when transferred.
You still need to store that data on somewhere to verify if someone owns a membership and whether it is valid though (memberships can expire).
That data is stored on blockchain vs having a centralized database. Refer to an earlier comment for why having it public is useful.
As for why people didn't use certificates till now, I don't know. I know they use wallet connect more which operates on the same principle but with existing adoption.
> Who is the boogey-man trying to control your site memberships? The site operator? I highly doubt this system is robust against site operators trying to "moderate" you, but supppse it was, why would they sign up for it.
People use centralized platforms like patreon for memberships. They can kick you off and you will lose all your subscribers. Your patrons will lose access as well. That is what unlock tries to solve.
The membership data is stored on the blockchain publicly which everyone has equal access to. You can prove you own a particular nft stored on the blockchain by signing using your private key. So even if all data is public, authorization is secure and reliable.
> The main problem is that speculators become domain squatters, and buy all the popular domain names with the hope that they go up in price.
This is the worst part about any web3 project.
Though, there are some differences between namecoin, ens, and handshake.
Handshake lets you register the TLD while ens, namecoin, etc are limited to domain on a single TLD. The potential number of combination of domain + tld is enormous comparatively.
Secondly, handshake doesn't release all TLD at once. They are released slowly to stop speculators from gobbling up the initial supply.
I do agree speculation is a huge problem which happens in normal ICANN world as well. So nothing to miss except I can own the TLD for which I don't need to pay over 200k USD with chance of getting rejected from ICANN and ongoing cost.
What I like about handshake is that you can own the TLD. I own searchableguy/ top level domain. This is gated by ICANN right now and they charge huge fees for nothing.
This is decentralized root naming system. This is one of the most practical use of a blockchain where all records need to be public and verifiable. No need to depend on icann and registry owners for having a tld which you own.
2. Unlock
This is membership protocol powered by nft. People can buy a nft and then for authorization, service provider can check whether the wallet has the nft and is valid. This way, nobody controls your membership and you can move them around the web as you like.
They are all connected to a wallet you control.
3. Arweave
Permanent storage using incentives and built on the idea of storage getting cheaper. Of course, this may not scale but I like the potential.
I wanted a unique username that would let people find me on google and social media but whatever I entered, it was already taken so being frustrated - I typed in searchableguy and it was available.
https://searchableguy.com/
There are some tools I built which are not visible like timezone
https://searchableguy.com/timezone