Re: Nostr Subkeys

st 26. 2. 2025 v 17:43 odesílatel Maximillian George <
maximillian.george@gmail.com> napsal:

> Hey Melvin, and everyone else.
>
> I’ve also been thinking about the possibility to issue certificates,
> proofs and child key on Nostr, and it is in fact the reason I joined this
> mailing list just a few days ago.
>
> However, I was thinking of the prospect of piggy-backing on this emerging
> standard that the W3C is working on called Decentralized Identifiers (or
> DID).
>
> I recommend digging into it, but on a high-level a DID is a URI  that
> references an entity (in this case a Nostr public key) like so:
>
> did:nostr:<nostr_public_key>
>
> Similar to a URI, the DID resolves to an index of associated *DID
> documents*. A *DID document* is simply a proof that is issued by the
> holder of the public key referenced in the DID itself, and it can be pretty
> much anything; for example an issuance certificate (or revocation
> certificate) for a child key to enable something similar to PGP. But it
> could also be other things, like a credential signed by multiple parties.
>
> What great about DIDs is that it’s already an emerging standard that can
> be used for a lot of different things. This way we don’t need to reinvent
> everything on Nostr, there can be one NIP to cover the whole world of DIDs.
> There is a class of applications called "DID wallets" that could be baked
> into a Nostr client.
>
> I had trouble wrapping my head around DIDs at first but I recommend
> checking out the specs here:
> https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/
>

Hi Maximiillian & welcome!

Thank you for the pointers.  I am familiar with DIDs, as I did some of the
original work on the protocol, and my name is on that spec :)

This could indeed be a logical way to go.  We've not yet registered a DID
method, but I put this together quite quickly a while ago:

https://nostr-labs.github.io/did-nostr/

It could do with fleshing out a bit and having some examples or a primer.
Especially regarding the GPG use case.

In a sense, nostr already does have native decentralized identifiers in
terms of the nostr pubkey and npub/nsec type system, and the nostr URIs.

So we might ask ourselves "do we really need a DID".  I have come to the
conclusion that it may be a useful thing to have, and an opportunity to add
some more documentation and help guide developers.

If you're interested we could do a round of work to update the work in
progress to cover things like the GPG common use cases.  There is also some
work going on at the W3C on schnorr signatures that I posted to the mailing
list last week.

Best
Melvin


>
> Also, this conceptual map really helped me understand things better:
>
> https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRSafX9vlENhX3mzpE4aYAfSuIc9fk9DkPE9w&s
>
> All the best,
> Max
> On 26 Feb 2025 at 14:58 +0100, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>,
> wrote:
>
> I've been playing around with the idea of Subkeys for nostr.  These are
> similar to GPG subkeys but could have several advantages as I have outlined
> below.  Subkeys themselves have multiple use cases, though, and GPG is just
> one.
>
>
> https://dev.to/melvincarvalho/could-nostr-subkeys-replace-gpg-a-simple-powerful-alternative-for-the-modern-web-aa0
>
>