Miljan Braticevic [38:46]: “When you create an account on X let's say, you are given this account by this corporation, this is something that they give to you, and it's something that they can take away from you at any point. In contrast, when you are on an open protocol like Nostr, you claim your key/pair. You take this massive number out of the universe, and that's you're private key. So you have claimed some territory in this massively large namespace of numbers and then you've claimed something and this is yours and then you defend it. What a stark contrast between these two, and then everything is downstream from there.”
I thought this was a great explanation of one of the central paradigms of key/pair based systems. Somewhat surprisingly, because I really am all for independence and self reliance and the rest of it, I found that the new knowledge that it unlocked, was accompanied by a roughly equal amount of unease. Like somehow there might be a side to this that is not being covered. Might be a bad idea to push to get rid of the centralised systems so completely, at least for a little while. I guess that has been my opinion for a while now. It seems to me like it might be one of those hills that isn't worth dying on, like an asymptote stretching off into infiniti that you can never quite figure out.
I'm making a mental note that it might be worth revisiting the tractability vertigo of this whole thing some time again in the future. Analysis paralysis is a real so and so. #