Lessons from 10 Years of the Ethereum Identity Stack

on YouTube ↗14m

" summary

History and practical lessons from a decade building the stack: ENS starts development in 2016 and launches 2017 and by 2021 becomes ENS is a username and profile, proving wallets plus DNS-like names drive adoption; EIP-4361 Sign-in with Ethereum provides a decentralized SSO supported in major wallets; the Ethereum Follow Protocol runs an onchain social graph with tens of thousands of users; ethidentitykit.com is a React library wiring these parts. Identity is 20 hard problems unbundled so each part can stand or fall independently.

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" chapters (35)

1. 0:00Introduction
2. 0:35Brantly's Onchain Profile and ENS Name
3. 0:47Going Back 50 Years to Public Key Cryptography
4. 1:09What Public Key Cryptography Is
5. 1:38Why the US Government Classified It
6. 1:52The Cypherpunks Make It Legal in the 1990s
7. 2:07Why It Powers E-Commerce and HTTPS
8. 2:28Cryptography as the Basis for Digital Identity
9. 2:48Why PGP Never Broke Out
10. 3:14Bitcoin, Namecoin, and Early Naming
11. 3:33Identity in the 2014 Ethereum White Paper
12. 4:06How Crypto Spread Private Keys at Scale
13. 4:38Why Wallets Keep Getting Better
14. 5:12Why Early Identity Projects Failed
15. 5:37Why Decentralized Is Harder Than Centralized
16. 6:12The Ethereum Name Service Breakthrough
17. 6:30Realizing ENS Was a Username and Profile
18. 6:59Why the Username Is the Meta Use Case
19. 7:15Why ENS Has Succeeded Where Others Failed
20. 7:39Not Competing Directly With DNS
21. 8:04Great Engineering and Long Time Horizons
22. 8:36Why ENS Is Extremely Lindy
23. 8:58Accidentally Solving Single Sign On
24. 9:26The Vision of a Decentralized Account for the Internet
25. 9:44Sign in with Ethereum and EIP-4361
26. 10:07The Ethereum Follow Protocol Social Graph
27. 10:36Other Parts of the Identity Stack
28. 10:58Ethereum Identity Kit for Developers
29. 11:18What Ethereum Identity Really Is
30. 11:39Why the Stack Is Decentralized, Not Vertically Integrated
31. 11:58Why Each Part Can Stand or Fall on Its Own
32. 12:17Why This Makes the Stack Resilient
33. 12:40Why We Should Not Take This for Granted
34. 13:06The Hard Work Behind the Stack Today
35. 13:25Closing

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