Our excitement over this development has only grown since we first wrote about it in May of 2020.
Yo! Did you know almost 30% of @geyserfund users log in exclusively with lightning? For contributors, that number is closer to 50%!
— ⚡ Στεlios 🌊 (@steliosats) February 8, 2023
If you're a still wondering whether you should add lnurl-auth to your app/wallet, you may find these numbers interesting.
🧵👇
Almost three years ago we made you freaks aware of a little feature integrated into the Lightning Network that would change the way individuals would interact with the Internet moving forward.
At the time we wrote,
The particular innovation I'm talking about today is lnurl-auth, which allows individuals to sign in to websites and services using public keys derived from wallets they control. Completely flipping the table and reversing the current model of how usernames and passwords work for most of the Internet. Instead of having the website or service you are interacting with store your information on a centralized database that is susceptible to being hacked, users instead use the information they control on their personal devices to authenticate themselves so they can access their associated accounts.
Well, fast forward to today and it seems like lnurl-auth is gaining significant traction within the world of bitcoin products and the model it popularized is being adopted by other protocols, specifically Nostr. As you can see from the thread above from Stelios, who is building Geyser, they have a material amount of users who are using their Lightning wallets as log in credentials to access their platform. They are not the only company that has implemented lnurl-auth signins with great success. Off the top of my head I can think of Kollider, Bolt.Fun, Stacker News, and LN Markets as other companies that have enabled this feature for their users as well.
Wallets like Alby, Zeus, and Breez have made it very easy for their users to use their wallets as authentication tools when signing in to these applications. And, as mentioned above, the proliferation of Nostr and the nature of the private-public key pairs necessary to create accounts on that protocol makes it another viable solution for these type of sign in flows. Kollider seems to be a first mover in this regard.
On Nostr, your key pair is your identity.
— Kollider⚡ (@kollider_trade) February 8, 2023
So we want to help you keep that as safe as possible.
In the latest version of Kollider Wallet, we added the ability to generate and store Nostr keys. So you can easily use clients without having to entire your private key directly. pic.twitter.com/prc6Q79AxQ
Our excitement over this development has only grown since we first wrote about it in May of 2020. In a digital world built on end user access via email addresses and weak passwords that are often stolen in data leaks, a push-only solution like lnurl-auth or Nostr private keys is a very straightforward solution that would make digital products significantly more secure. Instead of attacking a company's database filled with all of their users' credentials an attacker would have to target individual targets and get their private keys.
Bitcoiners are building the more secure future right before our eyes.
Final thought...
Twitter has become a materially worse product since Elon took over.
