KeyPears Is Coming to EarthBucks and You Can Set Your Password Now

KeyPears is coming to EarthBucks, and you can set a password on your EarthBucks account now. The account you already have is the one that gets the password, and it is the one that will get KeyPears. Sign in first, then use Password in the avatar menu or open the password page. Signed-out visitors to the password page are redirected to sign-in.

Set Your Password Now

Login with a password uses your full EarthBucks address and the password you choose, not a username. Your existing account is preserved; you do not create a new account.

The password encrypts the EarthBucks private key on the client, and signing in with it unlocks the same identity. Plaintext passwords are not sent to the server.

Passwords make login easier because you can memorize one instead of repeatedly handling a private key. The password page has Test password, with correct and incorrect counters, so you can practice recall before you rely on it.

Backup public and private-key sign-in remains supported, and those backup keys recover access if you lose the password.

The Direction Has Evolved

I treated key management as the central usability problem in EarthBucks 2.0, KeyPears, and Texas, developing KeyPears as a password manager and then evolving it into a wallet for EarthBucks and other cryptocurrencies. By TermSurf, KeyPears, and EarthBucks I was designing a federated end-to-end encrypted password manager with addresses like alice@earthbucks.com, cross-domain secret exchange, and client-controlled decryption, and I planned to put an EarthBucks wallet inside KeyPears.

The EarthBucks wallet belonged in EarthBucks, not inside KeyPears. The old EarthBucks-inside-KeyPears plan has become KeyPears-inside-EarthBucks. KeyPears will not be independently relaunched. Messaging, the password vault, and identity and secret exchange will come to EarthBucks instead, and existing EarthBucks accounts will simply gain those features. I am not planning a separate KeyPears account for existing EarthBucks users.

I described a vault plus encrypted messaging on federated domain-based addresses in KeyPears Is Coming Home to Astrohacker, with nodes exchanging ciphertext so a vault item could be sent privately and the recipient could save it re-encrypted into their own vault. Vault items, private messaging, and secret exchange will live inside EarthBucks.

The App and Protocol Roadmap

The EarthBucks protocol will be formally extended to include the whole KeyPears protocol, which goes beyond adding features to earthbucks.com. People running EarthBucks nodes will also serve the KeyPears protocol from those same nodes. An EarthBucks node will run messaging, identity and secret exchange, and the vault as part of the node.

Pay will be extended to support the full KeyPears protocol, including messaging with no payment attached and payments in other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash. The password vault will let EarthBucks be your password manager for other services, not only a wallet secured by a password. You will not need a separate password manager. EarthBucks will be your password manager.

Sign in and set your password.