Great ideas, love your passion for hive.
There is a technological solution for hive that can help with onboarding, but it's currently still being debated and if it will ever be implemented it's not soon.
It consists of creating lite accounts that have only one private key, similar to other blockchains bitcoin and ethereum.
That way, we can let the whole crypto ecosystem educate users about private keys, and when they join hive, the experience is similar. This would only allow lite accounts to transact in hive, but it is better than the current one-click accounts for multiple reasons:
- lite accounts can access the whole ecosystem using a single account.
- more secure since people own their own private key. With the current model, if 3speak or leo get hacked, hackers could gain access to a lot of private keys, which would be disastrous.
- easier for dapps to reward lite accounts than creating custodial hive accounts.
- Lite accounts could theoretically be converted to full hive accounts in a trustless manner, without 3rd parties.
The drawbacks would be the following:
- for people who never heard of blockchains before, even one private key is complicated.
- a lite account would not be able to make real hive posts, so no censorship resistance.
- lots of complicated dev work to make this a reality.
However, I think that censorship resistance is a secondary concern for most people (sadly), what they really want is to earn tokens from the community they join.
If you have some ideas to add in the pros and cons to add would love to hear them.
Thanks for the background info about lite accounts.
Personally, I don’t know if requiring users to manage one key is all that different from four keys. All the required steps to safeguard and use the keys is the same.
Logically, you are correct. Whether you're looking after one key or four the actual process is the broadly the same.
However, if you're aiming for any sort of adoption at scale, you will be trying to encourage non technical folk into the ecosystem. The idea of being able to spin up specific communities for what could be small interest groups (and also affiliate them) is very cool (it's already sent my mind spinning off with possibilities in terms of community). But your audience will change. And it's their perceptions that will come into play. Regardless of what the actual, logical approach is - how they feel about it will inform their decision.
OK - I'm making the scenario fit the point - but I've come cross this in multiple places in the crypto sphere. Some awesome ideas and some incredible dev work - but the UX can sometimes be -er- challenging. 😉
I agree with your points about Mrs. Miggins. The difference being that she would be far better off if you simply handed her the posting key and told her to treat that like she does her facebook password. Also, let her know that once she accumulates some significant value in her account, she will need a different password to allow her to manage those funds. This is far better (imho) than giving her a single owner key that does it all (because of the risk that she will treat it like she does her facebook password and when it gets hacked she has lost far more than explaining to her friends why there are lewd posts on her facebook page).
Once she gets to that point (of having real value tied to her account), she will then recognize that the 'money password' needs to be more tightly controlled than the 'posting password' (and thus will be ready and willing and informed when it comes to accepting custody of that key).
Yeah - that makes sense to me. The language you use there is really good too.
Trying to put myself in Mrs Miggins head (there's a lot of soft sofas and fluffy cushions. With cat pictures on the wall), having a posting password that lets me manage my community, and then a separate money password to manage my funds not only feels understandable - but sensible.
👍
See my update to the original post (about how I am planning to handle key distribution for my class).
If a new person were to get a lite account, would he be able to upgrade for a premium full account? I mean, forget I said premium. But you know what I mean? Like, would there be a difference between lite accounts and regular accounts like the ones we have other than we have at least four keys? Also, what is the difference between giving a new user only one password and giving them their master password or the super secret 12-random-words passphrase key which is similar to that of Bitcoin, Ethereum, other cryptocurrency seeds?