Having had a few converations about Inkan here on Nostr, I think there may be a worry in some quarters that key rotation proposals represent a distraction from the work of growing adoption of Nostr and building a community. I'd like to address that worry using Inkan as a case in point, because I think that this worry may be inhibiting further conversations that it would be useful to have.
Inkan is a system for binding an online identity to keys that are held in cold storage. For those who'd like to have such an identity, it provides a way to create one. It does not require new users coming to Nostr to be persuaded to create an Inkan identity, or even to know that the option exists. Of course, for some new users, that option may itself be part of what draws them to Nostr.
Inkan is built on top of Nostr and does not replace it. Having an Inkan identity does not conflict with having a regular Nostr identity. In fact, the signing key inside an Inkan identity is just an ordinary Nostr key. It can be used as any other Nostr key would be, with no Inkan infrastructure involved, and other Nostr software treats it as perfectly normal. So holding an Inkan identity and holding a regular Nostr key are not mutually exclusive alternatives that one is forced to choose from. An Inkan identity *contains* a regular Nostr key as a part of it, and that key can be used indepently of Inkan. In fact, any currently existing Nostr key can be made part of an Inkan identity without any disruption to the key's functionality.
Now I hope people realize that providing a cold storage identity for online authentication is, at least in principle, a fairly fundemantal piece of infrastructure. It can be debated in what places and to what extent such infrastructure should be used, or whether Inkan is a good implementation of it. But it is less debatable that such infrastructure has important uses, and there is something not quite credible about a stance that dismisses the underlying approach out of hand. My guess is that a dismissive attitude just reflects the worry I mentioned above, namely that a discussion of key rotation would be a distraction from the broader project of growing Nostr. As I said, I think this worry is misplaced, and it prevents a conversation about decentralized public key infrastructure which the Nostr community is well-placed to have. Noone outside Nostr is going to have this conversation.
