Problem: Crypto is hard.
Managing keys is one of the biggest hurdle to using Hive. Imagine if you could just log on with an account from another platform and post, vote and do everything as normal on Hive.
Third Party Authenticated Accounts
All accounts on Hive today are represented by a set of keys that prove ownership with varying levels of authority (owner, posting, active, memo). What if we could create accounts that didn't need cryptographic keys?
The basic idea of a TPA account is to allow accounts from other services to post on Hive. Instead of proving ownership of the Hive account directly, a TPA account is associated with a token proving ownership of an account on another platform which implements OAuth (eg. Twitter, Reddit). A transaction would be considered valid if it was signed by a certain minimum number of the top 20 witnesses, all of which would need to verify using OAuth. Perhaps 11 of 20 would need to vouch (the appropriate number can be debated).
The inspiration for this idea comes from this post on Reddit and this explanation but I don't think we require the exact same implementation, although it would be similar.
It would be up to the witnesses to decide which OAuth implementing third party social networks should be supported.
Possible Issues to think through
TPA accounts would not be as secure as regular accounts. Ideally it should be possible to delink a TPA account from another platform and take ownership with regular crypto keys. There's also the issue of who pays for RC costs of new TPA accounts, someone would likely need to provide a service of delegating RC's to new such accounts, or perhaps the witnesses should provide the RC's for creating TPA accounts. This system might also work better with RC delegation (for both TPA account creation and helping new TPA accounts to post). Spam control would need some thinking through, since it is easy to have unlimited Reddit and Twitter accounts. Whomever provides the RC's would likely also need to do some basic bot checking on the account or they waste their RC's.
We might also want to limit the accounts to posting authority only until they set up keys, in order to mitigate the reduced security.
Bonus
This feature could even be expanded to allow users to transfer Hive to Twitter, Reddit users etc before they have even created an account on Hive.