What Is Scatter?
For those of you reading this who have not heard of Scatter yet, first of all, you are missing out, and secondly here is a little primer before we get to the new stuff.
Download link : https://get-scatter.com/
Who You Are Belongs To You!
Scatter puts the details of your identity back in your control (eat that FaceBook), only giving up information you approve when dApps try to access your information. When you setup an ‘identity,’ within Scatter, you enter only the information you are comfortable with that Scatter will then guard.
dApps will then have to ask Scatter to gain access to some or all of your information, at which point you will be presented with a pop-up or a new browser tab that tells you what information is being requested and if you approve the request. You can also use Scatter to interact with the EOS Chain indirectly, (Scatter is not a wallet), via sites such as https://eostools.io that allow a broad collection of actions to be sent to the EOS chain that then request approval via Scatter. It does this by using your EOS key pair to sign transactions which are as close to impossible to fake as anything else we have available today.
Setting up Scatter is a breeze, there are only two main components that need your attention, key pair(s) and an identity, you can of course include multiple key pairs and configure multiple indenties if you so wish. Scatter will never store your private key and it is therefore impossible to retrieve private keys directly from Scatter.
If you forget your password for scatter, which Is generally not a major issue if you do not use the RIDL system (more on that later), you can simply create a new ’Scatter.’ Obviously, the better option is to not forgot your password or at least write down the mnemonic phrase it presents to you when you first configure the app.
To summarize, scatter allows you to prove you are you without the need to store your password on a centralized server, NS James himself says it best
Scatter provides Single Sign On (SSO) using asymmetric encryption ( Key Pairs ) to log you into applications without passwords. This heightens your level of security, and gives you far more control. Your “private key” is never sent to any servers, so hackers don’t have a way of getting access to thousands of accounts at once.
What Is Next For Scatter?
There have been two fairly big Scatter announcements in the last week from NS James ( the creator of Scatter and the RIDL token/network). The first reveal was a desktop version of Scatter that is of course still open source with compiled executables on the Github repo for Windows and Linux (Mac OSX coming soon). The link to download these is here, but remember the desktop versions are still in beta so expected a few bugs if you download it now. I am not a fan of anything google, Facebook or Amazon related so I for one am really glad I can get away from using chrome when I need to use Scatter.
However, the chrome version is rock solid and makes authenticating with dApps incredibly easy. When scatter first launched, NS James also had a Firefox plugin available but that version was dropped due to the Mozilla dev team demanding an almost complete rewrite of the code for them to approve it. If you have spoken to NS James or watched any of his videos, you will know he says what he thinks, I would love to read the response from him to Mozilla :-).
The RIDL Token
RIDL stands for ’Reputation & Identity Layer’ and is also the name of token used by Scatter. If you held EOS tokens during the genesis snapshot, you will be awarded ’free’ RIDL tokens via the means of the newly coined term, the airgrab. Airgrabs differ from airdrops in that you will need to register with the dApp dev team via a method they decide, airdrops just appear in your wallet; no action is needed.
So far we have only experienced one air grab and that was a proof of concept put together by our friends at GenerEOS to combat the rising RAM price. To give a little perspective on the cost of airdropinf tokens to all genesis accounts, the Challenge had to spend a cool $200,000 dollars on RAM as you need to be able to hold all the accounts and balances in memory. So NS James will be performing the first true airgrab, and if you helped
get the EOS chain live by voting for block producers before the threshold of 15% was breached, you will receive extra RIDL tokens too. If you where not in the genesis snapshot but still want to use RIDL, you can now 'buy' RIDL tokens using EOS by clicking here.
What Is RIDL Used for?
RIDL is not just a token, it is also a network that runs ontop of a blockchain. The RIDL documentation describes it in the below summary
Users have a unique name which can not be impersonated on any application which is integrated with Scatter Identities and RIDL.
Users can give and get reputation from and to other entities such as domains, blockchain addresses, public keys and accounts, decentralized or centralized applications, other users, or any other type of entity known by a unique identifier / name.
Displays warnings inside of Scatter’s Signature Requests when interacting with problematic entities such as scam sites, exchanges which don’t release funds appropriately, and other malicious entities.
Allows users to gain tokens by making the internet and the blockchain safer.
Hope you enjoyed this article.
Cool overview, initially i was a bit worried initially, since the white paper and token distribution has changed completely, but pre-registered ridl names are still valid a hundred years, at 25$ yearly reg costs, I feel quite happy...
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Thank you for this write up - I was reading lots of info on scatter since i was trying to find a voting option for EOS, finally got a clear understanding on what is it for exactly :)
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