For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
I don’t think you recognize how easy it is to generate trust with the methodology I laid out.
- Buy a standard-compliant offline wallet.
- Buy a second, standard-compliant, offline wallet that you know uses a different codebase, as much as possible.
- Generate a passphrase. Use it on #1 and #2 to generate your wallet/private keys.
- Is it the same private key? Success. Unless the wallets have fallen prey to the same flaw (unlikely, as they were manufactured from two separate companies and running two separate code paths), you’re probably good.
“The Standard-compliant” method is any algorithm that goes from hmac(passphrase) into seed -> generating the random numbers needed to build a wallet. (Prime numbers or whatever). As far as I can tell, this “standard method” doesn’t exist, not yet anyway.
