Several years ago, Mozilla/Firefox created "Persona," which was an open-source federated identity system that provided all the benefits described here. The idea was that it would eventually be built into browsers. I used it on a commercial site myself for many years.
It failed to gain traction, and Mozilla eventually pulled the plug.
Persona had many advantages over the Web3 vision described in this article. It was painless for a new user to create an account, because Mozilla provided a default identity server. It was easy for a website owner to set up, because Mozilla provided a JavaScript shim that worked on any browser. And it didn't rely on a wasteful and slow distributed ledger.
Despite these advantages, Persona failed. I don't see how a blockchain-based approach, with so many disadvantages compared to Persona, could possibly succeed outside of the blockchain enthusiast community. And, on a technical level, a federated approach seems innumerably simpler and less wasteful than a blockchain-based approach.
It failed to gain traction, and Mozilla eventually pulled the plug.
Persona had many advantages over the Web3 vision described in this article. It was painless for a new user to create an account, because Mozilla provided a default identity server. It was easy for a website owner to set up, because Mozilla provided a JavaScript shim that worked on any browser. And it didn't rely on a wasteful and slow distributed ledger.
Despite these advantages, Persona failed. I don't see how a blockchain-based approach, with so many disadvantages compared to Persona, could possibly succeed outside of the blockchain enthusiast community. And, on a technical level, a federated approach seems innumerably simpler and less wasteful than a blockchain-based approach.