
Designing a Permanent Personal Identity – Urbit - bronzejaguar
https://urbit.org/blog/pki-maze/
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bronzejaguar
first couple of paragraphs

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a
name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included.

Existing PKIs include PGP-style "web of trust", SSL certificates, ZeroTier,
Keybase, OpenID, Mozilla Persona, and Login with Google. These take unique
approaches to the problem and have achieved some degree of success, but none
provide globally consistent, permanent, and completely self-owned identities.
Exhaustive exploration and categorization is unfortunately out of scope for
this post, so we'll just describe Urbit's approach to achieving these
properties in our PKI.

In Urbit, a "name" is often called a "ship" or an "address" because we use the
metadata in the PKI to make names routable. The total data is two 256-bit
asymmetric keys, a cryptographic suite number (to allow changing crypto
algorithms), the revision number of the key, and the name of a ship that will
route for it. This sums to less than 128 bytes of data.

Each PKI trades off various properties. We chose a tripartite system so that
appropriate choices can be made for different use cases. Here, we explore the
various properties we chose by following a series of binary choices -- the
idea maze.

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4e1a
Got an invite? Hard spending money on an UrbitID when I cant access a demo or
anything. Logging in with MetaMask does nothing.

~~~
huevo5050
you still could be a comet, from FAQs:

Comets are 128 bits and have no parents. They can be launched by anyone. They
are temporary, disposable identities. Being disposable and essentially
unlimited, they will likely not be trusted by default by others on the Urbit
OS network, though you shouldn't have any problem until the network grows much
larger. They have long, hard-to-memorize names, like ~racmus-mollen-fallyt-
linpex-watres-sibbur-modlux-rinmex.

