Hacker News Reader

Comment by regnull | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a decentralized identity-based communications project. Think of this as an email (or instant messaging, social network, etc.) where your "account" is yours forever and cannot be taken away. We have email part functioning and there are some real users. At this point, I'm working on the decentralization part, where the identity registry will be put on a blockchain (likely custom Ethereum-based blockchain, to keep it free for users). Join us if you want to make the world a better place by fighting censorship and personal information collection. We are 100% open source:

https://ubikom.cc https://github.com/regnull/ubikom

View on HN

Great idea, I was wondering if someone had started working on something like this. My thought was to use the identity for distributed social media (blogging platform where you can easily restrict viewership of your posts by granting revocable keys to your contacts).

I see bits and pieces of this idea floating around, but I don't think anyone has combined them into a complete platform yet.

Are you at all interested in non-chain name registration? You could always allow nonunique names and just leave it up to users to verify .

One big advantage of P2P is partition tolerance and ability to work on isolated networks in an emergency.

Yes. In fact, we decided to go blockchain way (for now) with some hesitation. It just seemed like the best way to address the decentralized identity piece for now. But there are downsides, for sure.

I read through a few pages and didn't get the most important question I have answered. How does this system avoid my identity being the private key itself, a thing which can be taken away?

Your identity is your private key. It can't be taken away in a way how your Google account can be just disabled one day. We also have a way to retain control if your private key gets compromised - you can have a parent key, which can then be used to disable your compromised key and re-assign your name to another key. Since you never use your parent key (presumably kept in a safe offline place), it gives you some degree of protection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com