How do I enable users on my website to verify their blockstack id?

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#1

Hello everyone,

I am new to blockstack and am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I have a small website with about 1500 users and am trying to figure out how to enable users to verify their blockstack id. Are there any tutorials that anyone can point me to?

Background info: it’s just a plain old fashioned website, powered by joomla. It has educational content (epilepsy). I have not yet built up the social network aspect to it but plan to do so in the future. I know a fair amount of pgp and javascript (although am not a professional web dev). I am not yet as familiar with how blockstack works as I will need to be, but I do have enough crypto knowledge that I was able to enable users to subscribe to premium services and pay in bitcoin, using an HD wallet to automate bitcoin address generation for payment.

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#2

Hey @drdave, thanks for posting about this.

You have a couple of options:

  1. Use your existing identity system and create a two-way link between identities on your site and Blockstack ID’s.
  2. Use “Login with Blockstack” and replace your identity system with the Blockstack identity system.

With the former option, let’s use Twitter as an unofficial case study. To link your Twitter with your Blockstack ID, you’d post on Twitter and make a claim about your Blockstack ID, then you’d include a message in your Blockstack ID profile that makes a claim about your twitter handle. When a script parses the two claims together, it can be assured that both accounts are owned by the same person. You can do this same thing on your site.

With the latter option, you’ll need to integrate blockstack.js. An official release and accompanying tutorial are both in the works. Stay tuned for this option.

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#3

Cool, I’ll be interested in blockstack.js and option #2 once it’s available. As for option #1, I’ve built something similar with OpenBazaar - sign in to my site, enter your OB id, then paste a code into the about section of your OB account, and my side uses the OB API to verify that that has been done.

Edit: for clarity

#4

@ryan For the former option, is there a tutorial or sample script somewhere on how to do this?

#5

There isn’t a tutorial at the moment but I can whip some steps up soon and post them here.

In the meantime, you can start looking into how the Blockstack proof system works. It’s all in the repositories at https://github.com/blockstack.

#6

Cool, thx.

Once I do that my next question will be this: suppose I build a custom bulletin board. Can I enable users to sign their messages with their blockstack ID? That way, the bulletin board database could be stored by a third party or parties without the possibility of message alteration.

(For that matter, is there a way to sign a message like “My www.website.com user ID is foo” using blockstack?)