Re: [Bitcoin-development] Draft BIP for seamless website authentication using Bitcoin address

["Jan Møller" <jan.moller@gmail.com>]

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The reason why client side certificates have never gained traction because
it is a pain to safely store/backup secrets.
In bitcoinland we are forced to solve the problem of safely storing
secrets, and over the years we have come up with software and hardware
solutions to make this safer and easier to manage for ordinary people.
Solving this is paramount to the success of Bitcoin, and nobody has solved
it before on a grand scale.

I see no reason for forcing end users to use two different mechanisms for
safely managing secrets.

I agree that using a bitcoin address for authentication purposes might be
confusing and potentially linking your funds with your identity. So I am
all for using something else than bitcoin addresses and bitcoin private
keys.

With bip32 we have finally agreed on a mechanism for generating a hierarchy
of bitcoin private keys from a master seed. A similar approach can be used
for generating a parallel hierarchy for authentication purposes.

- Jan

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