2024-01-09
Verified Tweets
- A January 2024 whiteboard revisiting an idea he once pitched to Jack Dorsey: verified tweets using decentralized identifiers and cryptographic signatures.
- Walks through access control and authentication factors, then shows how registering a DID lets you drop passwords and cryptographically sign every tweet.
- A signed tweet renders differently and is client-verifiable, so even a Twitter insider who hijacks an account, as happened to Bill Gates and Biden, cannot forge your posts.
- Extends it to veracity bonds, Origin NFTs against deepfakes, and micro-tipped verification markets, urging Elon Musk and the AT Protocol to adopt the DID standard.
23 entries
Opens January 9th 2024 revisiting an idea he once pitched to Jack Dorsey about Twitter 2.0 and decentralized social networks, focusing on the concept of verified tweets.
The normal Twitter flow starts with login and access control, which can be multi-user with policies, like a manager Alice who can tweet for celebrity Bob but not read his DMs.
Lays out authentication factors: one-factor passwords, two-factor password plus a code, and three-factor in high-security SCIFs combining what you know, have (a CAC card), and are (a biometric).
Prefers a web-of-trust challenge-response where you register a public key and the server encrypts a challenge only your private key can decrypt, layering a YubiKey and biometric for near-unhackable security.
Frames the core problem: if an attacker bypasses access control, policy lets them tweet unauthorized things that everyone then sees and believes.
The fix is that at account creation Bob registers a DID, a decentralized identifier from the self-sovereign identity world and a W3C standard.
A verified DID can bind a real human identity and carry any cryptographic credential, from X.509 and PGP to secp256k1 or the Twisted Edwards curves Cardano uses.
A verified DID means you never need a password again via challenge-response, and enables multisig where Bob must approve every one of Alice's sign-ins.
Recalls the real Twitter hack where an insider escalated privileges through the admin dashboard to compromise the Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Biden accounts.
A verified tweet is signed by Bob's key, which even a smart Twitter insider would not have, so it renders visibly different in the interface.
Compares it to the browser padlock showing Twitter's certificate issued by DigiCert, the same verification view applied to individual tweets.
Subscribing to someone adds their DID and public key so your client can verify their tweets without trusting Twitter, while a forged tweet shows as unsigned and unverified.
Official communications need non-repudiation and message integrity by signing the message hash, giving non-malleability so the content cannot be altered.
Embracing the W3C DID standard the industry created, with DIDs stored on Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Cardano via SSI vendors, cleans up the internet's weak access control.
Crypto pioneered usable key management since over 100 million users handle keypairs, and wants an access-control DSL for painting granular permissions by numbers.
Beyond retweets, arbitrary co-signers enable vouching, so an endorsement by a news agency or a trusted person lets you infer a truth metric.
Introduces veracity bonds, what he wanted when eyeing CoinDesk, attaching funds to information that get slashed if it proves false, so journalists could stake money on their stories.
Hopes Elon Musk, Mastodon, and Jack Dorsey's AT Protocol adopt the DID standard for verified tweets to solve bots and impersonation.
The same concept adds an Origin NFT to any content showing its provenance and author, solving generative-AI deepfakes, since content with no such NFT reads as unsigned and unverified.
Verification-as-a-service truth markets where a micro-tip verification button funds an algorithm to build a community note.
Calls DIDs, non-repudiable signatures, and veracity bonds instruments of truth, warning that if X does not build this a competitor with a huge advantage against bots and deepfakes will.
Suggests segregating verified proper Twitter from an unverified no-man's-land to incentivize verification, with subscriptions bundling Grok, key recovery, and NFT minting rights.
Calls it a killer app he regrets never building, needing decentralized data storage via iagon, IPFS, and Filecoin, and praises the AT Protocol for upgrading the Fediverse beyond ActivityPub.