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@ Keychat
2025-05-10 15:21:05
Here’s ChatGPT o3’s take on the history of using public keys as user IDs.
Since the invention of public-key cryptography in the 1970s, several consumer-facing applications have used the user’s public key directly as their ID:
• PGP / GPG (1991) – Users share a short PGP fingerprint (a hash of their public key) as their email identity.
• Bitcoin addresses (2009) – A Base58-encoded hash of a public key acts as the account for sending/receiving funds.
• Bitmessage (2012) – The “BM-…” address is a Base58 public-key hash used for encrypted mail and broadcasts.
• Tox ID (2013) – The long Tox string embeds the full public key; add it to start an E2E-encrypted chat.
• Tor .onion v3 / Ricochet IM (2014) – A 56-character .onion address is derived from an Ed25519 public key and serves as the chat ID.
• Secure Scuttlebutt (2014) – Feed IDs look like @.ed25519; the key is the permanent identity.
• Ethereum-style addresses (2015) – 0x… hashes of public keys function as login/payment accounts across smart-contract chains.
• Nostr npub (2021) – An npub is a Bech32-encoded 32-byte public key; any client can verify signatures from it.