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40four | 2 years ago

I mean, to your point, why in the world would anyone use a ‘hot wallet’ or any wallet with anything valuable in it for this purpose. You wouldn’t. You would make a dedicated wallet for signing Wikipedia transactions.

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duskwuff|2 years ago

> You would make a dedicated wallet for signing Wikipedia transactions.

Then why does it need to be linked to the Ethereum blockchain -- or, indeed, to any blockchain -- at all?

justsomeadvice0|2 years ago

Trying to be fair here - it's technically not linked to any blockchains. It's just (ab)using the cryptographic primitives provided by the Metamask wallet app to sign things with a key stored in the wallet. That key might (probably) also be used to sign things that end up on any sort of blockchain, e.g. ETH.

The reason to do this is some people do indeed have Metamask (a browser extension, yuck) already installed and a wallet set up - so technically this might be an easy way to enable signing for them.

The reasons not to do this, I already detailed above. It is a neat hack, that would fare tragically when applied to the masses.

peyton|2 years ago

Because that’s where the users are. Metamask alone has 10 million MAU.

8organicbits|2 years ago

Can I create 1000 empty wallets and endorse bogus edits 1000 times? It's really easy to create empty wallets at scale. What value does an endorsement like that have?

xinbenlv|2 years ago

> @8organicbits: Can I create 1000 empty wallets and endorse bogus edits 1000 times? It's really easy to create empty wallets at scale. What value does an endorsement like that have?

In a centralized setup, e.g. facebook and twitter, that's what they have suffered from.

In decentralized setup, however, it's possible that different reader will use different algorithm provider. If an algorithm provider uses something like PageRank/EdgeRank kind of graph-random-walk based reputation algorithm, 1000 empty wallets who doesn't have reputation will not increase any reputation of the edits they endorse.

justsomeadvice0|2 years ago

Because they clicked a button in this incredibly intuitive UX that said "Sign wiki edit", and then clicked "Confirm".

I think you massively overestimate most users' grasp on cryptographic primitives...