It's weird how the circle of life progresses for a developer or whatever.
- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment
- When I got a year or two of experience, I wrote tons of scripts and bash aliases and had a 1k+ line .bashrc the same as OP
- Now, as a more tenured engineer (15 years of experience), I basically just want a vanilla shell with zero distractions, aliases or scripts and use native UNIX implementations. If it's more complicated than that, I'll code it in Python or Go.
I use a dotfile with aliases and functions, mostly to document / remember commands I find useful. It's been a handy way to build a living document of the utils I use regularly, and is easy to migrate to each new workstation.
This is a simplified method for age verification:
I want to buy alcohol from my phone and need to prove I’m over 18. SickBooze.com asks me for proof by generating a request to assert “age >= 18”.
My phone signs this request with my own private key, and forwards it to the government server.
The government verifies my signature against a public key I previously submitted to them, checks my age data in their own register of residents, and finally signs the request with one of their private keys.
My phone receives the signed response and forwards it back to SickBooze.com, which can verify the government’s signature offline against a cached list of public keys. Now they can sell me alcohol.
- the “request” itself is anonymous and doesn’t contain any identifying information unless that is what you intended to verify
- the government doesn’t know what service I used, nor why I used it, they only know that I needed to verify an assertion about my age
- the web service I used doesn’t know my identity, they don’t even know my exact age, they just know that an assertion about being >= 18 is true.