How do you maintain identity in dgit? i.e how do I claim my user/org name in this decentralized manner? It isn't clear how it works, can you elaborate on this part a little bit?
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Sure. First, a little background. The Tupelo distributed ledger manages repo identities and permissions, while Sia persists the actual git objects.
Tupelo validates transactions against individual ChainTrees, and you can think of a ChainTree as an independent ledger (or blockchain) that represents the state of one independent real world (or digital) object. In this case, that object is a git repository.
Tupelo only allows the "owner" of a ChainTree to make modifications to that ChainTree (such as updating the current HEAD), and ownership is determined by control of a private key.
Each ChainTree has a unique DID (decentralized identifier) that is uniquely determined by the key that first created it, and the controller of that key is the initial owner. Tupelo also has a transaction type that allows the current owner to transfer a ChainTree to a different key maintained by the new owner, but its DID stays the same after that transfer.
Tupelo uses a strategy similar to the WarpWallet[1] to manage identities. We can deterministically create a private key from a string like a repo name, and use that private key to create a ChainTree with a DID derived from that key (and hence, the DID is derived from the string). This gives us a mapping from repos to Tupelo ChainTrees. Since the initial "private" key is deterministically derived from the repo name, that initial private key is insecure. The second step of the repo registration process is to submit a ChainTree transaction to transfer ownership of the repo ChainTree to a secure private key. That way, only the controller of the secure private key can make changes to the repo ChainTree, even if anyone can reproduce the original key from the repo name.
[1]: https://keybase.io/warp/warp_1.0.9_SHA256_a2067491ab582bde77...
So, two things I see here, 1) only one person is allowed to push changes to the dgit repo then? How are you supposed to collaborate on a remote dgit repo, in that manner it is very different than a github remote, or am I missing something? and 2) Someone can hoard all popular repos and make it seem that they are original versions, pointing people to clone them from dgit, when in fact they could have been modified with malicious code? How do you address these issues?
You could just use pgp to sign your commits as a starting point