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I had a few interactions with employees at Worldcoin. At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. HN is very anti

by axg11 5y ago

I had a few interactions with employees at Worldcoin. At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle. If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain. There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted. Given the interesting potential of the idea, someone was going to eventually work on it. Worldcoin should have approached the problem slightly differently. First, testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it. Since the idea is controversial, they would have gained more goodwill by initially launching in the EU/North America under the more strict legal frameworks. Second, make the orb look less dystopian. Third, launch with a non-economic use case. Worldcoin won't solve UBI or inequality in one shot, so why not launch with a lower stakes use case such as an online forum or community that requires proof of personhood to post? Sadly I think because of all the missteps, I can't see Worldcoin tackling the proof of personhood problem in the longterm. I hope another project comes along and makes an attempt more "sensitively".

runako 5y ago
> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?
- ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc., in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even easier.
  - runako 5y ago
    I can name a couple of other blocking issues: - political will - perceived lack of funds Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things. I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing. Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.
    - runako 5y ago
      Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.
      - tyrfing 5y ago
        > There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.
        AlexandrB 5y ago
        This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon. That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.
- axg11 5y ago
  I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud. Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.
  - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
    Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset. Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized. Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue. Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions. You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.
      - 5y ago
- merrywhether 5y ago
  Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and government money programs, so why would crypto be any different? The US’ Payroll Protection Program covid response paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program was still mostly effective; I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over a 90% success rate for instance. I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.
  - runako 5y ago
    Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a shell business than a personal bank account that does not map to a real person, at least in the US. I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible. In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.
  - lottin 5y ago
    > similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner Source? I find it hard to believe.
  - phphphphp 5y ago
    As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need. We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.
  - morelisp 5y ago
- colochef 5y ago
  It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the average person to distinguish real from fake computer generated images.
mistrial9 5y ago
IMO tragically naive to blur and equate legal framework definitions with market participation with fundemental life on earth. Whose legal framework and in what spoken language are the rules of personhood written? There is one and only one Oracle for personhood, in the possesion of some money-driven teams? There are more holes than Swiss Cheese once the assumptions are really examined. "Performance art intended to attract investment money" is more accurate and to the point here, than exposition on human personhood. run away...
phphphphp 5y ago
I’m glad you acknowledge the terrible missteps here, so I won’t focus on them, but I’d like to hear more about why you think this problem can be solved with biometrics. The missteps of Worldcoin highlight exactly why an arbitrary “personhood” claim is meaningless: anybody can go to a low income country and harvest personhoods! Personhood is arbitrary, I’d appreciate any insight into why personhood is a meaningful replacement for identity.
- gfodor 5y ago
  It's not, the point of personhood isn't that it's exploit-free, but it acts as a fundamental rate limiter. Certainly there will still be theft downstream of the verification, but (assuming the approach delivers on the goals) you will not be able to do anything to generate an arbitrary number of recipients.
  - phphphphp 5y ago
    There’s billions upon billions of people, any motivated actor could have access to millions of people (Worldcoin have access to 500,000 and it only cost them 25 WRLD each!). There’s already a black market for this sort of fraud, so this isn’t theoretical, Uber have a lot of problems with it.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Sure, but it's zero sum. It's a bounded amount of skew in the distribution that's innate in any system that is subject to vulnerabilities that have a high return on violence. This isn't the same as generating people, which is what I said is basically the main thing worldcoin is trying to prevent.
  - lottin 5y ago
    What is a fundamental rate limiter and why do we need one?
    - drdeca 5y ago
saurik 5y ago
At the end of the day, Worldcoin is just "proof-of-Worldcoin": the same people who make that little orb can forge the existence of any number of new "personhoods". I work in crypto, and I thereby also think this project is stupid: this goes against the entire point of a decentralized trustless platform.
a4isms 5y ago
> HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle A "word" of advice from someone with decades of experience writing and public speaking: Don't. This type of line has two problems with respect to making your point. First, it's not your actual point, so it invites debating the nature of HN rather than debating the ideas you spend the next three paragraphs discussing. And because it comes _before_ your ideas, it is planted in the reader's brain, taking up their attention. You gave it priority! Second, and more seriously, it can appear to be making excuses for a bad reception before you find out whether you get a bad reception. You may think this will condition people reading your post and its replies to discount any negative sentiment because of the bias you allege, but what it actually does is tell readers that there is social proof for resisting your thinking. You are literally tilting the playing field against your ideas. I may not agree with everything you say, but I believe your ideas deserve the fairest, most even reception. I recommend avoiding this practice in future.
- axg11 5y ago
  Thanks for the advice.
- JofArnold 5y ago
  I really appreciate this reply as a reader too. You are absolutely right. I've done the same in the past too and you've made me aware of this.
- unholiness 5y ago
  FWIW, in practice this type of disclaimer is shockingly effective in a comment forum. The point is to short-circuit the reactions of the average comment-reader, who is skimming, who has already mostly made up their mind, who is inclined to see comments which further reinforce their view as insightful, and comments which contradict their view as misguided or not worth reading. Obviously, if everyone read everything, and read it with the same temperament, it should be useless. How could something you can attach to any argument be persuasive? But people skim and skim with bias. It's really significant effect on places like reddit, where "this will get downvoted but mediocre insight" will get far more upvotes than "mediocre insight". It can be used and abused.
ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable, logical, and worthwhile goals a company that is bootstrapping themselves would take to ultimately solve a very complicated problem. Then, of course, there is the approach to announce some ridiculous, overarching, near-impossible goal and then do the YOLO "fake it till you make it" dance and hope for the best. Given the hype around Web3, I'm not entirely sure what their best route would've been. However creepy/problematic the shots of poor Africans looking at an Orb may seem, I think sadly there is a nontrivial amount of VC money that would follow that exact sort of approach for "moving fast and breaking things." Conversely, the unkind way to describe your approach is one of a very unambitious, slow, and "not investable" kind of way of running a company. Your approach is undoubtedly the saner route to try to build a successful, ethical, and sustainable business. I'm just not sure that, in the near term, for founders chasing after that VC money (especially how plentiful it seems to be in the web3 space now!), that it is the short-run optimal strategy.
edent 5y ago
Not everyone has eyes. Just like not everyone has fingerprints. Proof of Personhood is - like lots of ideas - ignorant about how people will abuse it. So you need to scan your retina to post? That doesn't stop someone stealing your laptop just after a scan. Or stop you scanning someone's eye when they're asleep / unconscious. Or any of a host of attacks. The UBI requirement is interesting - but it comes down to how much cost is lost to fraud vs the cost of fighting that fraud. If you need to spend a billion pounds to stop a million in fraud - is that worth it?
- gowld 5y ago
  > Not everyone has eyes. This is silly. The number of people without eyes is tiny, and so can be served with an alternate solution.
  - the_other 5y ago
    As someone who spends a lot of time with a deaf person, in a high-quality of life country with a social welfare system, I can tell you that these alternative systems to support off-mainstream modalities generally suck, if they exist at all. You can’t hand-wave these things aside as if some powerful faerie will come solve the problem for you. It hasn’t worked like that for centuries and even in my country, where we’re comparatively quite good with this stuff, we’re shit with this stuff. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to call someone to book tickets for something requiring deaf support, on their behalf, when I can use a web interface for my booking. It’s crazy.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  > Or any of a host of attacks. I imagine the truly ruthless/desperate gouging out other people's eyes to collect their payments :( This has all happened before: https://usafrikagov.com/how-belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-arms-and-killed-over-15-million-in-africa/ https://usafrikagov.com/how-belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-ar... > In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.
codedokode 5y ago
I don't see how an iris scan can be a "proof" of anything. One can simply generate any number of realistic-looking scans. There is a website that generates human faces, it should be possible to generate iris images as well. Also, I don't see why cryptocurrency is needed for UBI. Is real money unsuitable for this purpose?
- drdeca 5y ago
  The idea, as I see it, is that with government issued money, you either need to collect the money somehow first, or if the UBI is to be done by the govt, the govt has to be convinced to issue the money, whereas, with a cryptocurrency, it can just be issued exactly in accordance with the UBI payout, where the designers need no permission from the govt, and where recipients aren’t limited to a particular country. If the issuance produces too much devaluation of the token, well, then the experiment didn’t work, but it didn’t interfere with people’s existing savings or the like.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Even if it is not possible to fool the iris scan directly you could always take scans of animals. Just imagine farmers scanning their pigs or chickens to get a UBI.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Eh, "proof of personhood for crypto" is not part of the design by design. The whole idea of crypto was to establish a channel that is harder for one government to control. In that sense, it kinda succeeded. But with that success came attention of various interested parties, whose goals are anything but the original intent including compliance with KYC/AML laws, which crypto mostly ignores ( exchanges don't, but it is a separate story ). In short, "personhood" is not a problem.
tromp 5y ago
> proof of personhood for crypto How is any participant in Worldcoin able to verify that all funds in circulation are backed by unique persons? Should they just blindly trust Worldcoin and all their operators to be honest and not make up biometric profiles to generate extra unbacked funds for themselves? I don't see how to solve this problem in a publicly verifiable way...
- gfodor 5y ago
  You could read their website, which explains their concept in detail: https://worldcoin.org/ https://worldcoin.org/
  - detaro 5y ago
    And notably doesn't answer the GPs question how to verify the organization is honest, just how they protect the organization against user fraud.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Fair - I misread. It does seem that you'd need some kind of classic processes and/or auditing to de-risk a scenario where a bad actor who has access to the necessary keys prints themselves money. Maybe there is a way to also analyze the chain state for anomaly detection.
- gowld 5y ago
  Airdrop recipients don't suffer from monetary risk. Only people who accept the coin as money are taking a risk.
  - tromp 5y ago
    People divulging their biometric data do suffer, since in exchange they receive a coupon that's supposedly redeemable for Worldcoin in the future, which won't be worth its advertised value if there's no trust in the system's integrity.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. > There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted. Wait. Why is this a worthy problem if it has such extreme downsides? What good is UBI if you live in a panopticon? How would the resulting world be different than the former USSR where many things were paid for but you lived in fear of your neighbour ratting you out for "anti-government sentiment"?
gfodor 5y ago
This is good feedback. They can definitely still pivot out of any issues. It still seems to boil down to if they determine if the approach they're taking will actually work from first principles. You only need it to work once, because once known proof-of-human wallets are on chain then the rest of the ecosystem can build downstream from them.
Barrin92 5y ago
> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain. I love how we're almost twenty years into cryptocurrency yet people still produce these vague, literally zero content statements preceded by accusations of bias against anyone who has had enough of this vaporware talk. In the bitcoin whitepaper it started with a "peer to peer cash system replacing banks". Doesn't really seem to work but at least sounded straight forward. Nowadays we're at "eye scanning orb for proof of personhood" and monkey NFTs. It's not even getting better every year, it's getting more stupid
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BbzzbB 5y ago
  Two decades? You quasi-doubled the age of cryptocurrency, it's been 13 years since Bitcoin's chain started and (apparently [0]) 11 since the first alt-coin. I don't hold any crypto and am ambivalent about it (seems to have the equal potential of hardening money/tempering inflation as well as providing a backbone to dystopian regimes), so I'm not talking my book, but how much of the Internet's potential was figured out 13 years into it's creation? That barely gets you to TCP/IP going public if you start counting at DARPANET, doesn't even get you to the Dotcom bubble if you start from the former. I'd add, if you're gonna quote Satoshi about peer to peer cash not materializing (arguably disproved by Lightning) to discredit how far it's strayed off it's essence, you could paint a fuller picture and pick one of many quotes highlighting that hard money/digital gold is just as much of a core idea to Bitcoin (from the genesis block message, to inflation, gold and gold mining discussions), which has arguably manifested. 0: https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/ https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/
  - whymauri 5y ago
    Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, but the concept dates back a while when we consider centralized applications. The bit gold architecture dates back to 98' and is arguably a direct ancestor to the BTC whitepaper, but only existed in theory. In any case, I'm in the 'decentralized cryptocurrency is still relatively early in the grand scheme of things' camp. What's really going to matter, in my opinion, is Gen-Z and younger generation's adoption and iteration on the concept.
phh 5y ago
> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. Just as a FYI, there is already https://ubic.app/ https://ubic.app/ that does that using passports as source of zero-knowledgee identification.
morelisp 5y ago
> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto... There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. This is such a bad dumb framing for a bad dumb idea, I can't stop laughing. Godspeed you fucked up technofascists.
Jasper_ 5y ago
> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world Name one. Just one.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge...
  - hiq 5y ago
    These are used in blockchain technologies, but blockchain technologies are not necessary to obtain them, or am I missing something?
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      I don’t think a product exists that provides the benefits of blockchain technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and EVM broadly, and Monero. Not all blockchains have the same security properties or processing capabilities. That said, I don’t think you can get the same combination of functionality without using a blockchain. Do you have some examples of tech that delivers comparable features/functionality to blockchain tech, without using the blockchain? Do your above examples have usable products with market reach and availability, today? Because that’s the alternative. Warts and all, blockchain tech works when it’s implemented properly by good faith actors. Just like any enterprise involving assets you control, folks you don’t personally know, and being online. Modern day e-commerce didn’t spring whole-cloth from capitalism’s womb fully-formed. The status quo took time to be created and to get to what we have today.
      - hiq 5y ago
        You have to be more explicit about the properties you're referring to for us to have a meaningful discussion. The post you answered was looking for a "great idea", and it's not clear which one you have in mind in your comments.
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
My basic response to any KYC initiative is, you don’t have a right to know who I am.
colochef 5y ago
For a much more interesting and community led effort I suggest you see https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
nr2x 5y ago
"HN is very anti-crypto" Minor correction: "HN is full of people who understand the actual math and implementation of blockchain technologies, business models being tested, and have seen more than a few 'revolutionary' technologies come and go. This knowledge puts them miles ahead of lay people's understanding."
- dropnerd 5y ago
  hn is a privacy/piracy/(decentralization but not on the blockchain) enthusiasts. we produce gems such as this highly upvoted alternative to Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224: > getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem we are by no means business models experts
michaelgrosner2 5y ago
> solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto This is a problem? Like I have a SSN, a drivers license, and a birth certificate. These are tools developed already by my local and national government to prove personhood. They are used in a legal context, often. I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.
- trotro 5y ago
  > I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason. Worldcoin tries to solve this exact problem. There's already a way to involve your identity in crypto, namely centralized exchanges using KYC. I don't have data to back this, but I would guess most crypto accounts are in some way doxxed via links to KYCd exchanges. Worldcoin provides a way to prove you're a human (that doesn't already own an account) without having to provide any info about yourself, except a scan of your iris. I share the overall negative sentiments about Worldcoin, mainly due to it being a VC-backed for-profit project. But you cannot ignore that it solves a real problem in crypto: Sybil resistance without access to hardware (mining in PoW) or capital (staking in PoS).
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Like another user pointed out they could just use government issued ID and give out tokens based on that. There is no need to scan people's iris.
rchaud 5y ago
> If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. How about those who are simply skeptical that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have any interest in solving global poverty?
the_other 5y ago
> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. Crypto people keep saying blockchain will be great for managing digital assets, proving ownership and so on… but they can’t mint an NFT of my passport and use that?
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Sybil resistance/proof of personhood is a serious problem and interesting challenge to work on, not just in the cryptocurrency ecosystem but for the internet in general. I'm really surprised reading this thread and seeing that so many HN users apparently have never even heard or thought of this. The very website we use can be and probably is gamed by Sybil attacks. The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts. I am very skeptical of Worldcoin myself but you shouldn't simply dismiss the idea. As for minting an NFT based on your passport: Sure, that's absolutely possible. Sounds like a better idea than what worldcoin is doing. The hashing would also be a lot simply since all you'd have to do is check the validity of the passport and base the hash on the passport number which is unique. My guess is there are legal reasons to them not taking this more sensible approach. There are many other projects working on solving the problem. Check out Idena for a non-creepy idea, but that too comes with its own drawbacks imo.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    > The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts. I don't think I would ever be willing to use or recommend a service that could ban people for life in such a manner. Even with hashed biometrics, the difference between "doesn't currently have any accounts" and "not on our list of banned hashes" is minuscule.
    - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      I agree censorship is another issue but keep in mind language models are getting better and better, soon you wouldn't be sure if you're talking to a real human or bot used to influence your thoughts. Arguably on twitter where posts are limited in length and users don't interact as directly that threshold is already reached. We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online. What to do about sites silencing users is another issue. Imo these (social) media corps need to be regulated and forbidden from arbitrarily banning users. Same as water or electricity providers can't just cut off people they don't like. Users being given the option to block other users is enough. If there's anything actually criminal it's a matter for the courts.
bambax 5y ago
> proof of personhood for crypto But one of the promises of the blockchain is anonymous transactions, free from evil incumbent central authorities. If this needs a proof of identity then why not use existing government systems, such as passports, which incidentally, in most countries, already contain biometric information. > testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it Yes, that makes this especially disgusting. > HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle Well, it seems every single story about crypto shows it reinventing the wheel with worse tools, poor insights, and trying to make it square.
- tern 5y ago
  Crypto only really makes sense when it's tied to sovereignty. Using passports ties it to nation state sovereignty. It's worth keeping in mind Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list, which gave birth to all of this: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may That's what's at stake here.

by axg11 5y ago

runako 5y ago

> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc., in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even easier.
- runako 5y ago
  I can name a couple of other blocking issues: - political will - perceived lack of funds Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.
- pavlov 5y ago
  This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things. I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing. Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.
  - runako 5y ago
    Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.
    - tyrfing 5y ago
      > There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.
      - AlexandrB 5y ago
        This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon. That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.
axg11 5y ago
I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud. Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset. Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized. Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue. Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions. You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.
    - 5y ago
merrywhether 5y ago
Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and government money programs, so why would crypto be any different? The US’ Payroll Protection Program covid response paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program was still mostly effective; I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over a 90% success rate for instance. I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.
- runako 5y ago
  Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a shell business than a personal bank account that does not map to a real person, at least in the US. I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible. In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.
- lottin 5y ago
  > similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner Source? I find it hard to believe.
- phphphphp 5y ago
  As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need. We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.
- morelisp 5y ago
colochef 5y ago
It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the average person to distinguish real from fake computer generated images.

mistrial9 5y ago

IMO tragically naive to blur and equate legal framework definitions with market participation with fundemental life on earth. Whose legal framework and in what spoken language are the rules of personhood written? There is one and only one Oracle for personhood, in the possesion of some money-driven teams? There are more holes than Swiss Cheese once the assumptions are really examined. "Performance art intended to attract investment money" is more accurate and to the point here, than exposition on human personhood. run away...

phphphphp 5y ago

I’m glad you acknowledge the terrible missteps here, so I won’t focus on them, but I’d like to hear more about why you think this problem can be solved with biometrics. The missteps of Worldcoin highlight exactly why an arbitrary “personhood” claim is meaningless: anybody can go to a low income country and harvest personhoods! Personhood is arbitrary, I’d appreciate any insight into why personhood is a meaningful replacement for identity.

gfodor 5y ago
It's not, the point of personhood isn't that it's exploit-free, but it acts as a fundamental rate limiter. Certainly there will still be theft downstream of the verification, but (assuming the approach delivers on the goals) you will not be able to do anything to generate an arbitrary number of recipients.
- phphphphp 5y ago
  There’s billions upon billions of people, any motivated actor could have access to millions of people (Worldcoin have access to 500,000 and it only cost them 25 WRLD each!). There’s already a black market for this sort of fraud, so this isn’t theoretical, Uber have a lot of problems with it.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Sure, but it's zero sum. It's a bounded amount of skew in the distribution that's innate in any system that is subject to vulnerabilities that have a high return on violence. This isn't the same as generating people, which is what I said is basically the main thing worldcoin is trying to prevent.
- lottin 5y ago
  What is a fundamental rate limiter and why do we need one?
  - drdeca 5y ago

saurik 5y ago

At the end of the day, Worldcoin is just "proof-of-Worldcoin": the same people who make that little orb can forge the existence of any number of new "personhoods". I work in crypto, and I thereby also think this project is stupid: this goes against the entire point of a decentralized trustless platform.

a4isms 5y ago

> HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle A "word" of advice from someone with decades of experience writing and public speaking: Don't. This type of line has two problems with respect to making your point. First, it's not your actual point, so it invites debating the nature of HN rather than debating the ideas you spend the next three paragraphs discussing. And because it comes _before_ your ideas, it is planted in the reader's brain, taking up their attention. You gave it priority! Second, and more seriously, it can appear to be making excuses for a bad reception before you find out whether you get a bad reception. You may think this will condition people reading your post and its replies to discount any negative sentiment because of the bias you allege, but what it actually does is tell readers that there is social proof for resisting your thinking. You are literally tilting the playing field against your ideas. I may not agree with everything you say, but I believe your ideas deserve the fairest, most even reception. I recommend avoiding this practice in future.

axg11 5y ago
Thanks for the advice.
JofArnold 5y ago
I really appreciate this reply as a reader too. You are absolutely right. I've done the same in the past too and you've made me aware of this.
unholiness 5y ago
FWIW, in practice this type of disclaimer is shockingly effective in a comment forum. The point is to short-circuit the reactions of the average comment-reader, who is skimming, who has already mostly made up their mind, who is inclined to see comments which further reinforce their view as insightful, and comments which contradict their view as misguided or not worth reading. Obviously, if everyone read everything, and read it with the same temperament, it should be useless. How could something you can attach to any argument be persuasive? But people skim and skim with bias. It's really significant effect on places like reddit, where "this will get downvoted but mediocre insight" will get far more upvotes than "mediocre insight". It can be used and abused.

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable, logical, and worthwhile goals a company that is bootstrapping themselves would take to ultimately solve a very complicated problem. Then, of course, there is the approach to announce some ridiculous, overarching, near-impossible goal and then do the YOLO "fake it till you make it" dance and hope for the best. Given the hype around Web3, I'm not entirely sure what their best route would've been. However creepy/problematic the shots of poor Africans looking at an Orb may seem, I think sadly there is a nontrivial amount of VC money that would follow that exact sort of approach for "moving fast and breaking things." Conversely, the unkind way to describe your approach is one of a very unambitious, slow, and "not investable" kind of way of running a company. Your approach is undoubtedly the saner route to try to build a successful, ethical, and sustainable business. I'm just not sure that, in the near term, for founders chasing after that VC money (especially how plentiful it seems to be in the web3 space now!), that it is the short-run optimal strategy.

edent 5y ago

Not everyone has eyes. Just like not everyone has fingerprints. Proof of Personhood is - like lots of ideas - ignorant about how people will abuse it. So you need to scan your retina to post? That doesn't stop someone stealing your laptop just after a scan. Or stop you scanning someone's eye when they're asleep / unconscious. Or any of a host of attacks. The UBI requirement is interesting - but it comes down to how much cost is lost to fraud vs the cost of fighting that fraud. If you need to spend a billion pounds to stop a million in fraud - is that worth it?

gowld 5y ago
> Not everyone has eyes. This is silly. The number of people without eyes is tiny, and so can be served with an alternate solution.
- the_other 5y ago
  As someone who spends a lot of time with a deaf person, in a high-quality of life country with a social welfare system, I can tell you that these alternative systems to support off-mainstream modalities generally suck, if they exist at all. You can’t hand-wave these things aside as if some powerful faerie will come solve the problem for you. It hasn’t worked like that for centuries and even in my country, where we’re comparatively quite good with this stuff, we’re shit with this stuff. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to call someone to book tickets for something requiring deaf support, on their behalf, when I can use a web interface for my booking. It’s crazy.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> Or any of a host of attacks. I imagine the truly ruthless/desperate gouging out other people's eyes to collect their payments :( This has all happened before: https://usafrikagov.com/how-belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-arms-and-killed-over-15-million-in-africa/ https://usafrikagov.com/how-belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-ar... > In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.

codedokode 5y ago

I don't see how an iris scan can be a "proof" of anything. One can simply generate any number of realistic-looking scans. There is a website that generates human faces, it should be possible to generate iris images as well. Also, I don't see why cryptocurrency is needed for UBI. Is real money unsuitable for this purpose?

drdeca 5y ago
The idea, as I see it, is that with government issued money, you either need to collect the money somehow first, or if the UBI is to be done by the govt, the govt has to be convinced to issue the money, whereas, with a cryptocurrency, it can just be issued exactly in accordance with the UBI payout, where the designers need no permission from the govt, and where recipients aren’t limited to a particular country. If the issuance produces too much devaluation of the token, well, then the experiment didn’t work, but it didn’t interfere with people’s existing savings or the like.
imtringued 5y ago
Even if it is not possible to fool the iris scan directly you could always take scans of animals. Just imagine farmers scanning their pigs or chickens to get a UBI.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Eh, "proof of personhood for crypto" is not part of the design by design. The whole idea of crypto was to establish a channel that is harder for one government to control. In that sense, it kinda succeeded. But with that success came attention of various interested parties, whose goals are anything but the original intent including compliance with KYC/AML laws, which crypto mostly ignores ( exchanges don't, but it is a separate story ). In short, "personhood" is not a problem.

tromp 5y ago

> proof of personhood for crypto How is any participant in Worldcoin able to verify that all funds in circulation are backed by unique persons? Should they just blindly trust Worldcoin and all their operators to be honest and not make up biometric profiles to generate extra unbacked funds for themselves? I don't see how to solve this problem in a publicly verifiable way...

gfodor 5y ago
You could read their website, which explains their concept in detail: https://worldcoin.org/ https://worldcoin.org/
- detaro 5y ago
  And notably doesn't answer the GPs question how to verify the organization is honest, just how they protect the organization against user fraud.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Fair - I misread. It does seem that you'd need some kind of classic processes and/or auditing to de-risk a scenario where a bad actor who has access to the necessary keys prints themselves money. Maybe there is a way to also analyze the chain state for anomaly detection.
gowld 5y ago
Airdrop recipients don't suffer from monetary risk. Only people who accept the coin as money are taking a risk.
- tromp 5y ago
  People divulging their biometric data do suffer, since in exchange they receive a coupon that's supposedly redeemable for Worldcoin in the future, which won't be worth its advertised value if there's no trust in the system's integrity.

AlexandrB 5y ago

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. > There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted. Wait. Why is this a worthy problem if it has such extreme downsides? What good is UBI if you live in a panopticon? How would the resulting world be different than the former USSR where many things were paid for but you lived in fear of your neighbour ratting you out for "anti-government sentiment"?

gfodor 5y ago

This is good feedback. They can definitely still pivot out of any issues. It still seems to boil down to if they determine if the approach they're taking will actually work from first principles. You only need it to work once, because once known proof-of-human wallets are on chain then the rest of the ecosystem can build downstream from them.

Barrin92 5y ago

> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain. I love how we're almost twenty years into cryptocurrency yet people still produce these vague, literally zero content statements preceded by accusations of bias against anyone who has had enough of this vaporware talk. In the bitcoin whitepaper it started with a "peer to peer cash system replacing banks". Doesn't really seem to work but at least sounded straight forward. Nowadays we're at "eye scanning orb for proof of personhood" and monkey NFTs. It's not even getting better every year, it's getting more stupid

deleted 5y ago
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BbzzbB 5y ago
Two decades? You quasi-doubled the age of cryptocurrency, it's been 13 years since Bitcoin's chain started and (apparently [0]) 11 since the first alt-coin. I don't hold any crypto and am ambivalent about it (seems to have the equal potential of hardening money/tempering inflation as well as providing a backbone to dystopian regimes), so I'm not talking my book, but how much of the Internet's potential was figured out 13 years into it's creation? That barely gets you to TCP/IP going public if you start counting at DARPANET, doesn't even get you to the Dotcom bubble if you start from the former. I'd add, if you're gonna quote Satoshi about peer to peer cash not materializing (arguably disproved by Lightning) to discredit how far it's strayed off it's essence, you could paint a fuller picture and pick one of many quotes highlighting that hard money/digital gold is just as much of a core idea to Bitcoin (from the genesis block message, to inflation, gold and gold mining discussions), which has arguably manifested. 0: https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/ https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/
- whymauri 5y ago
  Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, but the concept dates back a while when we consider centralized applications. The bit gold architecture dates back to 98' and is arguably a direct ancestor to the BTC whitepaper, but only existed in theory. In any case, I'm in the 'decentralized cryptocurrency is still relatively early in the grand scheme of things' camp. What's really going to matter, in my opinion, is Gen-Z and younger generation's adoption and iteration on the concept.

phh 5y ago

> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. Just as a FYI, there is already https://ubic.app/ https://ubic.app/ that does that using passports as source of zero-knowledgee identification.

morelisp 5y ago

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto... There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. This is such a bad dumb framing for a bad dumb idea, I can't stop laughing. Godspeed you fucked up technofascists.

Jasper_ 5y ago

> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world Name one. Just one.

aspenmayer 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge...
- hiq 5y ago
  These are used in blockchain technologies, but blockchain technologies are not necessary to obtain them, or am I missing something?
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    I don’t think a product exists that provides the benefits of blockchain technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and EVM broadly, and Monero. Not all blockchains have the same security properties or processing capabilities. That said, I don’t think you can get the same combination of functionality without using a blockchain. Do you have some examples of tech that delivers comparable features/functionality to blockchain tech, without using the blockchain? Do your above examples have usable products with market reach and availability, today? Because that’s the alternative. Warts and all, blockchain tech works when it’s implemented properly by good faith actors. Just like any enterprise involving assets you control, folks you don’t personally know, and being online. Modern day e-commerce didn’t spring whole-cloth from capitalism’s womb fully-formed. The status quo took time to be created and to get to what we have today.
    - hiq 5y ago
      You have to be more explicit about the properties you're referring to for us to have a meaningful discussion. The post you answered was looking for a "great idea", and it's not clear which one you have in mind in your comments.

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

My basic response to any KYC initiative is, you don’t have a right to know who I am.

colochef 5y ago

For a much more interesting and community led effort I suggest you see https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

nr2x 5y ago

"HN is very anti-crypto" Minor correction: "HN is full of people who understand the actual math and implementation of blockchain technologies, business models being tested, and have seen more than a few 'revolutionary' technologies come and go. This knowledge puts them miles ahead of lay people's understanding."

dropnerd 5y ago
hn is a privacy/piracy/(decentralization but not on the blockchain) enthusiasts. we produce gems such as this highly upvoted alternative to Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224: > getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem we are by no means business models experts

michaelgrosner2 5y ago

> solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto This is a problem? Like I have a SSN, a drivers license, and a birth certificate. These are tools developed already by my local and national government to prove personhood. They are used in a legal context, often. I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.

trotro 5y ago
> I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason. Worldcoin tries to solve this exact problem. There's already a way to involve your identity in crypto, namely centralized exchanges using KYC. I don't have data to back this, but I would guess most crypto accounts are in some way doxxed via links to KYCd exchanges. Worldcoin provides a way to prove you're a human (that doesn't already own an account) without having to provide any info about yourself, except a scan of your iris. I share the overall negative sentiments about Worldcoin, mainly due to it being a VC-backed for-profit project. But you cannot ignore that it solves a real problem in crypto: Sybil resistance without access to hardware (mining in PoW) or capital (staking in PoS).
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Like another user pointed out they could just use government issued ID and give out tokens based on that. There is no need to scan people's iris.

rchaud 5y ago

> If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. How about those who are simply skeptical that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have any interest in solving global poverty?

the_other 5y ago

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto. Crypto people keep saying blockchain will be great for managing digital assets, proving ownership and so on… but they can’t mint an NFT of my passport and use that?

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Sybil resistance/proof of personhood is a serious problem and interesting challenge to work on, not just in the cryptocurrency ecosystem but for the internet in general. I'm really surprised reading this thread and seeing that so many HN users apparently have never even heard or thought of this. The very website we use can be and probably is gamed by Sybil attacks. The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts. I am very skeptical of Worldcoin myself but you shouldn't simply dismiss the idea. As for minting an NFT based on your passport: Sure, that's absolutely possible. Sounds like a better idea than what worldcoin is doing. The hashing would also be a lot simply since all you'd have to do is check the validity of the passport and base the hash on the passport number which is unique. My guess is there are legal reasons to them not taking this more sensible approach. There are many other projects working on solving the problem. Check out Idena for a non-creepy idea, but that too comes with its own drawbacks imo.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts. I don't think I would ever be willing to use or recommend a service that could ban people for life in such a manner. Even with hashed biometrics, the difference between "doesn't currently have any accounts" and "not on our list of banned hashes" is minuscule.
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    I agree censorship is another issue but keep in mind language models are getting better and better, soon you wouldn't be sure if you're talking to a real human or bot used to influence your thoughts. Arguably on twitter where posts are limited in length and users don't interact as directly that threshold is already reached. We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online. What to do about sites silencing users is another issue. Imo these (social) media corps need to be regulated and forbidden from arbitrarily banning users. Same as water or electricity providers can't just cut off people they don't like. Users being given the option to block other users is enough. If there's anything actually criminal it's a matter for the courts.

bambax 5y ago

> proof of personhood for crypto But one of the promises of the blockchain is anonymous transactions, free from evil incumbent central authorities. If this needs a proof of identity then why not use existing government systems, such as passports, which incidentally, in most countries, already contain biometric information. > testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it Yes, that makes this especially disgusting. > HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle Well, it seems every single story about crypto shows it reinventing the wheel with worse tools, poor insights, and trying to make it square.

tern 5y ago
Crypto only really makes sense when it's tied to sovereignty. Using passports ties it to nation state sovereignty. It's worth keeping in mind Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list, which gave birth to all of this: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may That's what's at stake here.