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1st you shouldn't trust any site with anything.

BUT if you trust it with anything it's a password so that only you can prove that you are you. And then you use server side nonce hashing to ONLY compute that part securely wasting only the required cycles one each end to proove you are you period!

Then, if for some reason you need additional security on some ulterior action, say a payment, you just do the same trick again. That way you save your servers and the electricity grid from encrypting every meaningless cat picture in the world just because you are paranoid.

Electricity is not an energy source, we are going to pay a very high price for it soon. It's the most liquid energy form we have and therefor when oil becomes illiquid (both litteraly and economically because the quality of oil is degrading at a rapid pace) prices in electrons (which have no quality properties that differ) will explode!

Again read the RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289, and think about where you want to spend you energy, more customers or less energy for your own kids.

1st you shouldn't trust any site with anything.

Okay, so your proposal is to never use any private info, anywhere, ever on the internet?

Again read the RFC

Page 2 of that RFC says

It does not prevent a network eavesdropper from gaining access to private information and does not provide protection against either "social engineering" or active attacks

How do you propose to prevent MITM attacks? How do you propose to be able to send private data to a server in a way that is readable by the server?

Nothing is private if you send it somewhere.

Embrace the chaos, hide in the noise and save energy!

Nothing is private if you send it somewhere.

You've reduced your own argument to a non-answer.

Surely you understand that there are different types of "privacy":

  - things that only you know (that aren't sent anywhere and maybe even are encrypted at rest)
  - things that only a set of trusted parties are supposed to know
The latter is what HTTPS allows you to achieve, alongside making it so that there's no possibility of a "man in the middle", which could not only read the contents of your request, but also alter it (or do the same for the server side response). OTP, TOTP and JWT are lovely for authentication, but they do not address the above concerns, as pointed out by the poster that you're replying to, before discarding your own argument.

Suppose that you have no encryption but have the best authentication system in the world. What's to prevent some hacker from setting themselves up in the middle between you and the e-commerce site that you're on and messing with requests however they please, showing both you and the site what they want you to see? You tried to buy an HDD for 50$? They just bought themselves a laptop for 500$.

The fact that there's a very secure bit of information somewhere in the request does not protect you from the rest of JSON being changed to say whatever they want it to (unless you are signing the contents of every request, but at that point you're reinventing HTTPS in some capacity). Or even the fact that they could set themselves up in the middle, presenting themselves as you to the site and presenting themselves as the site to you, albeit with more effort.

Of course, an e-commerce site is a silly example, but what about you receiving a bill that tells you to send money to a different account than you should? What would your banking site look like without encryption? Is your suggestiong for no one to do online banking because "nothing is private", even though we already have HTTPS which addresses this very issue ALONGSIDE various authentication methods?

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