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First Steps of the PLC Organization – Independent Public Ledger of Credentials

56 points · 25 comments · embedding-shape

ACCount39 · 1790627020 · focus · HN ↗
This might be one of the closest things I've seen to actually being able to own your account - instead of having it not just owned by a second party in every way that matters, but also beholden to a third party via an e-mail or a phone number you can't possibly own in any meaningful way.
That's pretty important in a world where the likes of Google can and will just reject your attempt to log in with a valid password on the grounds of "we don't like you", and force you to "confirm" yourself using a phone number that's defunct since 2009.
The issue is, as often is the case, adoption.
1. verdverm · 1790627458 · focus · HN ↗
  did:web is closer to owning your own identity, this is a central database controlled by an organization
  The PLC makes it easy for Bluesky to be a custodian and onboard new users
  1. cmjs · 1790631986 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobody owns a domain name. You rent it, subject to the whims of the registry. Miss a single payment and you loose it forever. Even if you always pay up on time, despite price rises etc, they can still decide to take it away: <a href="https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/" rel="nofollow">https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
    PLC is imperfect, like every solution to identity so far, but it's a lot better (in terms of ownership / control of your own ID) than DNS.
    idiotsecant · 1790652885 · focus · HN ↗
    I think ENS basically solved this already. Turns out nobody really cares about the problem much.
    tancop · 1790675404 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem with ENS is only Brave and Opera support it. That's less that 5% of users. If Chrome had a way to add custom domain resolvers in extensions it would be a lot more useful because you wouldn't need to tell people they have to install a whole new browser.
    idiotsecant · 1790683292 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess that is technically correct, but I'm not sure that's a weakness of the underlying protocol
    someonebaggy · 1790684003 · focus · HN ↗
    Permanent human-readable names are subject to squatting. Who owns microsoft.eth? I bet it's not Microsoft.

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