9 ms·

What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

51 points by Multiset 3y ago

JW_00000 3y ago
The link doesn't work for me. It does work with the "www." prefix: https://www.vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html https://www.vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html
eli 3y ago
It's rare to find a technology that's so creepy & exploitative, yet also so fundamentally without utility.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Not that rare in the crypto space.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  It really checks every possible box for a list of “things that are terrible ideas for humanity to try”
  - xvector 3y ago
    It's more private than literally any other existing form of proof-of-personhood. Why is it a terrible idea for humanity to try?
- schaefer 3y ago
  The technology isn’t creepy or exploitive. That’s us. Humans.
  - turtles3 3y ago
    This is a 'guns don't kill people' argument, which historically has been a bit more complicated than that. Humans are not context-free actors independent of their environment - our environment shapes us. And the argument here is that this technology would create an environment that would have a tendency to bend us into a shape we may not like.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      If you'd like to ask anyone in the Human Factors space for literature on this topic they'd be happy to load you up with so many books it'll break your arms. Not to mention philosophers.
- xvector 3y ago
  Meh, it sounds creepy, but the article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private. I suspect the media and uninformed commenters will far overblow concerns about this, without actually learning how it works and why it's private enough.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    You can be informed on the subject and still think this is an awful idea. Even if I took their word that it’s “private enough”, it’s still a world-scale project to solve a vague problem with a broken-on-the-face-of-it-literally gimmick.
    - worksonmine 3y ago
      I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.
        worksonmine 3y ago
        I don't eat pork, I don't like the taste (except bacon but that's beside the point). That doesn't mean I think pig farmers are solving a vague problem. I hadn't heard of this coin before today, and as mentioned I don't like this specific solution but I don't think the problems are vague at all. You might trust your current bank, but are you confident that you can start any kind of legal business you want? Payment providers have shutdown completely legal customers for political reasons. Would it be nice to anonymously sign a vote? Or change it after the fact? Verify that a vote (as opposed to paper ballot) is valid? Absolutely. UBI shouldn't need an explanation for what problem it solves. I mention other problems something like this could solve in another comment[1] if you're interested. I think many people today are quick to dismiss good ideas just because it involves crypto, it's a shame. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850769
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  It’s been good for consolidating votes around a crypto crackdown, engaging the evangelical right and privacy-sensitive left in a focussed manner.
  - eli 3y ago
    This conspiracy theory presumes WorldCoin becomes a big enough deal for anyone to even care.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Thats a bold claim, especially when TFA has this quote: >Proof of personhood is valuable because it solves a lot of anti-spam and anti-concentration-of-power problems that many people have, in a way that avoids dependence on centralized authorities and reveals the minimal information possible. >If proof of personhood is not solved, decentralized governance (including "micro-governance" like votes on social media posts) becomes much easier to capture by very wealthy actors, including hostile governments. Many services would only be able to prevent denial-of-service attacks by setting a price for access, and sometimes a price high enough to keep out attackers is also too high for many lower-income legitimate users. Now you could say and then what, but I remember about 10 years ago when all discussions about how to fix email got shutdown by counter posts with that form letter, nothing changed in the open source world and then Google went ahead and solved the problems by doing some of the things that went against the consensus of the letter and today its so hard to run your own email that most nerds don't. If we do not get a handle on the fake-person situation, how knows if it will even be possible to run your own Mastodon in 10 years? Now I really hope that it isn't the case that WorldCoin is going to solve this problem (personal preference: the govenments of the world solve this by signing keys of citizens, enabling key rotation and the ability to ban keys signed by countries that abuse your service), but don't kid yourself that there aren't people who would want to use such a service or that it doesn't solve an actual problem.
simbolit 3y ago
"a decentralized proof-of-personhood solution" Why and how is Worldcoin able to prove 'personhood'? Just spend five second thinking about if that is really what this is about. Why this phrasing?
- xvector 3y ago
  It's in the article. Fuzzy iris hashes made with specialized hardware.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    So why not call it 'biometric identity' just like everyone else?
    - ackfoobar 3y ago
      Last sentence of the first paragraph: > ideally without revealing which real person it is I'm not an native English speaker. When I hear "identity", I think that entails identifying the person doing the action.
- notahacker 3y ago
  In theory, the biometric data collected and hashed is unique to a particular person, and therefore non-matching hashes of biometric scans validates that 57 accounts represent 57 unique people rather than one person signing up with a lot of different monikers, email addresses or phone numbers or bank cards Like a social security number, except relying on the worthlessness of the handout "currency" and other perks to defend against subversion instead of the long arm of the law.... The particularly awkward phrasing is inevitable in a subculture that already has "proof-of-work" and "proof-of-stake" and claims that the proof doesn't reveal your "identity". Of course, the reality is that most people won't feel the need to prove their "personhood" to a VC backed crypto startup by getting their eyeballs scanned, not even for daily handouts of tokens with no purchasing power
  - hinkley 3y ago
monero-xmr 3y ago
There needs to be decentralized ID using an open protocol with any vendor able to join. The quality of those vendors will be based upon which firms trust them. I do think blockchain makes sense here, because the trust layer is decentralized and the native cryptographic signing primitives means it can’t be spoofed nor manipulated in a proprietary database locked from the public. No idea if world coin is a workable solution, but I would like to be able to conduct KYC a single time and then selectively reveal my information to necessary parties, ideally only as a confirmation rather than data transfer. Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  I share the sentiment. It's sad that given the tools available to securely verify someone without exposing PII we still scan people's ID and shrug when they get leaked/resold/etc. (By design, of course)
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd. What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Paypal, ebay, robinhood, vanguard, various crypto exchanges. I guess it's mostly financial stuff. But that's my most sensitive info.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Interesting. Of those services, I use Paypal and eBay, but I never had to provide ID. Perhaps because I'm not a vendor?
    - eli 3y ago
      Do you think that's because those companies need to verify personhood and this is the best solution? Or is there maybe something else at play?
rglover 3y ago
I defer to my favorite comment I've ever made on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947742
rqtwteye 3y ago
Buterin reminds me a little of string theorists in physics. There is a lot of intellect but they have chosen to chase something that doesn't produce anything really useful despite a ton of effort.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  I remember a long time ago, on a talk by Benoit Mandelbrot, who visited my university in what may have well been a "Farewell Tour" that towards the end he says: but the only "practical" application is gaming financial markets, and proceeded to talk about his work in this area; or something like this, my memory is a bit vague. I remember feeling disappointment.
- xvector 3y ago
  On the other hand, we have seen an infusion of cash into modern cryptography thanks to this space, which is fairly positive. I personally don't mind.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Ethereum may not be useful to you but it is very useful to me and many others. It will become even more useful in the future as people learn what happens when your money is centralized to one particular government, based on nothing at all, and just keeps getting printed more and more of. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement I think crypto solving this issue is definitely of value. How many wars were started by a government debasing their currency and having to start a war to fix it? I'd say a lot of them.
  - kinakomochidayo 3y ago
    Yup. One thing that I find respectable about Ethereum, contrary to what many Bitcoiners say, is that it’s always trying to find the minimum viable issuance, with less and less issuance, that makes the chain work effectively. Bitcoin on the other hand, was a one time deal with the 21 million, but the original economics thought up by Satoshi was forever changed after the blocksize was constrained in 2017, and now, there’s a high risk that there won’t be enough transaction fees in the future to support Bitcoin, even with Lightning Network.
elif 3y ago
I still haven't seen anyone address the question of how the orb will determine that I am one person, and not two one-eyed persons. It seems like by chosing something that most people have two of, people can easily create a left and right identity. maybe it should be a nose orb
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Primary and backup accounts is a feature not a bug.
buildbuildbuild 3y ago
Complete reliance on biometrics to establish “personhood” is not only ableist but also opens some really frightening doors to future bad actors, like the removal of eyes as a means to revoke access/rights. Let’s reduce an oppressor’s canvas of options rather than extend it further into our bodies.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Tom Cruise films are prescient as ever.
kstrauser 3y ago
I think that’s dead on arrival in the US. Having been raised in a conservative evangelical church, there’s the notion that in the “end times”, this kind of thing (referred to as the “mark of the Beast”) would be required to buy and sell goods, at the cost of eternal damnation for getting the mark. The linked webpage is nightmare fuel for the many tens of millions of Americans in such churches. Everything about it is a giant “here come the end times!” dog whistle, even if it wasn’t meant to be. Also, why do we suddenly need to prove who’s an actual human? Is that going to change how I talk to chatbots on company websites? Is there the laughable notion that this won’t be immediately subverted by social media bot accounts so they can prove that they’re real people? What exact problem does this solve? Also also, sucks if you’re blind, I guess. Now having eyes is new our fundamental definition of being a human. I’ll snag a few of these for my pets, who’ll be happy to know they can be official people on the Internet.
- xvector 3y ago
  > What exact problem does this solve? Voting on a decentralized platform. Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. > Also also, sucks if you’re blind, I guess. Blind people tend to have irises. Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans.)
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    > Voting on a decentralized platform. That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. I can parse those words, but I don’t see how they’d depend on the widget from the article. > Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans.) “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason).
    - xvector 3y ago
      > That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. Governance on decentralized platform can typically be approached via a few ways: - weighting votes by compute power - weighting votes by volume of ownership (eg of a coin) - weighting votes by number of identities/wallets The first two only serve the rich (the people that can afford GPU farms or equity), and will lead to an oligarchy. The last doesn't work because one person can create infinite accounts (eg public/private key pairs.) The last, however, can work if one person can only ever be linked to one account. > “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason). You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this. You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.
pstorm 3y ago
I have only read about Worldcoin from comments on Hackernews so I was surprised by such a balanced take on it from Vitalik. I'm not necessarily in favor of it now, but it doesn't seem quite as evil as I had previously believed. I'm not ready to scan my iris or anything, but I'm pretty interested to see how this will go.
evbogue 3y ago
What this technology needs to succeed is some kind of scary worldwide disinformation plot that scares everyone into adopting it. I don't think the Internet filling up with AI spam is scary enough, we need to dream bigger on this one. Whatever the plot is, I think people should remain indoors while it's going on and watch their televisions or iPhones. Next, we could make people scan their eyeballs before they eat at restaurants, go to the gym, or perhaps even visit the mall or ride the subway. We could have a greeter at every door who points the orb at you before you go in. This will create jobs, and also drive up the price of stanchions and someone can at least profit from that. Finally in a few years we could relax the restrictions because the human population will be accustomed to KYC before every transaction.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I think that the Unabomber was a few decades too early in his thesis.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Even at the time, I don't remember that many people disagreeing with his thesis. It's what he did in response to it that was the problem.
eis 3y ago
It always comes down to trust. With WorldCoin you have to trust a private company which in turn trusts random "Orb Operators" to operate the Orb devices which you again have to trust. For a system which wants to be used for UBI and voting the incentives are too strong to not to abuse this big amount of required trust. It doesn't matter if the source code and hardware plans of the Orbs are made public if we can't inspect a given Orb. Who's to say if that Orb doesn't generate 10% more IDs for someone than real ones. You think those concerns are theoretical? Well there has been already abuse before the project officially was launched: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... And then there is the inflationary nature of the coin itself due to the weekly issueance of coins for each user. This gives an incentive for the people behind the project like Sam Altman and Andressen Horowitz to cash out their part. They allocated 20% of the whole supply to themselves. A quarter billion dollars was put into the project and you can bet they'll want a good return on it while trying to portrait it as something like a charitable project. I remain very sceptical.
worksonmine 3y ago
Interesting, I didn't know the space was thinking about proof-of-personhood. I've been entertaining the thought of something similar for years, to solve a lot of the problems we face. A rough and very simplified version of the way I see it working is: - When someone is born a private-key is created just like an SSN today and a fixed amount of coins are created on that "wallet" - The amount would be based on the actual resources of the planet that are reasonable to spend during a life (inspired by Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project) - The protocol would have a negative income tax set at a threshold where basic needs are met, so the broke would get UBI, the rich pay taxes - Progressive tax to prevent ridiculous hoarding where the top 0.1% own almost everything (hoarding finite resources is a work around still to be solved) - When someone dies that money could still be inherited, or when no next of kin and no will exists distributed to the poor as UBI - Exploiting global resources would and should be costly - There could still be corporations but they wouldn't create new coins I see this solving a lot of problems: - No more printing money to solve short term problems - Everyone starts their adult life with some coin that could go towards education, drivers license etc - No more tax havens since taxation is built into the protocol - No more need for many of the government agencies we have today, reducing need for taxes - Encourages a more circular economy with less waste It's not perfect but I think it would be a nice compromise between the endless discussions of socialism vs capitalism.
Analemma_ 3y ago
Part of me wants to snark at just how far the crypto people have fallen, from “we are going to build a completely private and anonymous economy free from government control” to ”of course you have to be subject to mandatory retinal scans to engage in commerce”, but that wouldn’t really be true. The sad truth is that they don’t really have a choice and neither does anyone else: basically everu web technology will have to implement something like this eventually, because the space is just so overrun with bots and spammers. And it’s only going to get worse as LLMs get better.
- kinakomochidayo 3y ago
  > how far the crypto people have fallen People are free to build whatever they want on permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, which is way more open to experimentation and new things (like zero-proof knowledge) than Bitcoin ecosystem, which has more cypherpunk roots.

51 points by Multiset 3y ago

The link doesn't work for me. It does work with the "www." prefix: https://www.vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html https://www.vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

eli 3y ago

It's rare to find a technology that's so creepy & exploitative, yet also so fundamentally without utility.

adastra22 3y ago
Not that rare in the crypto space.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
It really checks every possible box for a list of “things that are terrible ideas for humanity to try”
- xvector 3y ago
  It's more private than literally any other existing form of proof-of-personhood. Why is it a terrible idea for humanity to try?
schaefer 3y ago
The technology isn’t creepy or exploitive. That’s us. Humans.
- turtles3 3y ago
  This is a 'guns don't kill people' argument, which historically has been a bit more complicated than that. Humans are not context-free actors independent of their environment - our environment shapes us. And the argument here is that this technology would create an environment that would have a tendency to bend us into a shape we may not like.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    If you'd like to ask anyone in the Human Factors space for literature on this topic they'd be happy to load you up with so many books it'll break your arms. Not to mention philosophers.
xvector 3y ago
Meh, it sounds creepy, but the article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private. I suspect the media and uninformed commenters will far overblow concerns about this, without actually learning how it works and why it's private enough.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  You can be informed on the subject and still think this is an awful idea. Even if I took their word that it’s “private enough”, it’s still a world-scale project to solve a vague problem with a broken-on-the-face-of-it-literally gimmick.
  - worksonmine 3y ago
    I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.
      - worksonmine 3y ago
        I don't eat pork, I don't like the taste (except bacon but that's beside the point). That doesn't mean I think pig farmers are solving a vague problem. I hadn't heard of this coin before today, and as mentioned I don't like this specific solution but I don't think the problems are vague at all. You might trust your current bank, but are you confident that you can start any kind of legal business you want? Payment providers have shutdown completely legal customers for political reasons. Would it be nice to anonymously sign a vote? Or change it after the fact? Verify that a vote (as opposed to paper ballot) is valid? Absolutely. UBI shouldn't need an explanation for what problem it solves. I mention other problems something like this could solve in another comment[1] if you're interested. I think many people today are quick to dismiss good ideas just because it involves crypto, it's a shame. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850769
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
It’s been good for consolidating votes around a crypto crackdown, engaging the evangelical right and privacy-sensitive left in a focussed manner.
- eli 3y ago
  This conspiracy theory presumes WorldCoin becomes a big enough deal for anyone to even care.
tomjen3 3y ago
Thats a bold claim, especially when TFA has this quote: >Proof of personhood is valuable because it solves a lot of anti-spam and anti-concentration-of-power problems that many people have, in a way that avoids dependence on centralized authorities and reveals the minimal information possible. >If proof of personhood is not solved, decentralized governance (including "micro-governance" like votes on social media posts) becomes much easier to capture by very wealthy actors, including hostile governments. Many services would only be able to prevent denial-of-service attacks by setting a price for access, and sometimes a price high enough to keep out attackers is also too high for many lower-income legitimate users. Now you could say and then what, but I remember about 10 years ago when all discussions about how to fix email got shutdown by counter posts with that form letter, nothing changed in the open source world and then Google went ahead and solved the problems by doing some of the things that went against the consensus of the letter and today its so hard to run your own email that most nerds don't. If we do not get a handle on the fake-person situation, how knows if it will even be possible to run your own Mastodon in 10 years? Now I really hope that it isn't the case that WorldCoin is going to solve this problem (personal preference: the govenments of the world solve this by signing keys of citizens, enabling key rotation and the ability to ban keys signed by countries that abuse your service), but don't kid yourself that there aren't people who would want to use such a service or that it doesn't solve an actual problem.

simbolit 3y ago

"a decentralized proof-of-personhood solution" Why and how is Worldcoin able to prove 'personhood'? Just spend five second thinking about if that is really what this is about. Why this phrasing?

xvector 3y ago
It's in the article. Fuzzy iris hashes made with specialized hardware.
- simbolit 3y ago
  So why not call it 'biometric identity' just like everyone else?
  - ackfoobar 3y ago
    Last sentence of the first paragraph: > ideally without revealing which real person it is I'm not an native English speaker. When I hear "identity", I think that entails identifying the person doing the action.
notahacker 3y ago
In theory, the biometric data collected and hashed is unique to a particular person, and therefore non-matching hashes of biometric scans validates that 57 accounts represent 57 unique people rather than one person signing up with a lot of different monikers, email addresses or phone numbers or bank cards Like a social security number, except relying on the worthlessness of the handout "currency" and other perks to defend against subversion instead of the long arm of the law.... The particularly awkward phrasing is inevitable in a subculture that already has "proof-of-work" and "proof-of-stake" and claims that the proof doesn't reveal your "identity". Of course, the reality is that most people won't feel the need to prove their "personhood" to a VC backed crypto startup by getting their eyeballs scanned, not even for daily handouts of tokens with no purchasing power
- hinkley 3y ago

monero-xmr 3y ago

There needs to be decentralized ID using an open protocol with any vendor able to join. The quality of those vendors will be based upon which firms trust them. I do think blockchain makes sense here, because the trust layer is decentralized and the native cryptographic signing primitives means it can’t be spoofed nor manipulated in a proprietary database locked from the public. No idea if world coin is a workable solution, but I would like to be able to conduct KYC a single time and then selectively reveal my information to necessary parties, ideally only as a confirmation rather than data transfer. Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd.

intelVISA 3y ago
I share the sentiment. It's sad that given the tools available to securely verify someone without exposing PII we still scan people's ID and shrug when they get leaked/resold/etc. (By design, of course)
JohnFen 3y ago
> Why I have to constantly scan my ID for various vendors is absurd. What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Paypal, ebay, robinhood, vanguard, various crypto exchanges. I guess it's mostly financial stuff. But that's my most sensitive info.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Interesting. Of those services, I use Paypal and eBay, but I never had to provide ID. Perhaps because I'm not a vendor?
  - eli 3y ago
    Do you think that's because those companies need to verify personhood and this is the best solution? Or is there maybe something else at play?

rglover 3y ago

I defer to my favorite comment I've ever made on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947742

rqtwteye 3y ago

Buterin reminds me a little of string theorists in physics. There is a lot of intellect but they have chosen to chase something that doesn't produce anything really useful despite a ton of effort.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
I remember a long time ago, on a talk by Benoit Mandelbrot, who visited my university in what may have well been a "Farewell Tour" that towards the end he says: but the only "practical" application is gaming financial markets, and proceeded to talk about his work in this area; or something like this, my memory is a bit vague. I remember feeling disappointment.
xvector 3y ago
On the other hand, we have seen an infusion of cash into modern cryptography thanks to this space, which is fairly positive. I personally don't mind.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Ethereum may not be useful to you but it is very useful to me and many others. It will become even more useful in the future as people learn what happens when your money is centralized to one particular government, based on nothing at all, and just keeps getting printed more and more of. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement I think crypto solving this issue is definitely of value. How many wars were started by a government debasing their currency and having to start a war to fix it? I'd say a lot of them.
- kinakomochidayo 3y ago
  Yup. One thing that I find respectable about Ethereum, contrary to what many Bitcoiners say, is that it’s always trying to find the minimum viable issuance, with less and less issuance, that makes the chain work effectively. Bitcoin on the other hand, was a one time deal with the 21 million, but the original economics thought up by Satoshi was forever changed after the blocksize was constrained in 2017, and now, there’s a high risk that there won’t be enough transaction fees in the future to support Bitcoin, even with Lightning Network.

elif 3y ago

I still haven't seen anyone address the question of how the orb will determine that I am one person, and not two one-eyed persons. It seems like by chosing something that most people have two of, people can easily create a left and right identity. maybe it should be a nose orb

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Primary and backup accounts is a feature not a bug.

buildbuildbuild 3y ago

Complete reliance on biometrics to establish “personhood” is not only ableist but also opens some really frightening doors to future bad actors, like the removal of eyes as a means to revoke access/rights. Let’s reduce an oppressor’s canvas of options rather than extend it further into our bodies.

hooverd 3y ago
Tom Cruise films are prescient as ever.

kstrauser 3y ago

I think that’s dead on arrival in the US. Having been raised in a conservative evangelical church, there’s the notion that in the “end times”, this kind of thing (referred to as the “mark of the Beast”) would be required to buy and sell goods, at the cost of eternal damnation for getting the mark. The linked webpage is nightmare fuel for the many tens of millions of Americans in such churches. Everything about it is a giant “here come the end times!” dog whistle, even if it wasn’t meant to be. Also, why do we suddenly need to prove who’s an actual human? Is that going to change how I talk to chatbots on company websites? Is there the laughable notion that this won’t be immediately subverted by social media bot accounts so they can prove that they’re real people? What exact problem does this solve? Also also, sucks if you’re blind, I guess. Now having eyes is new our fundamental definition of being a human. I’ll snag a few of these for my pets, who’ll be happy to know they can be official people on the Internet.

xvector 3y ago
> What exact problem does this solve? Voting on a decentralized platform. Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. > Also also, sucks if you’re blind, I guess. Blind people tend to have irises. Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans.)
- kstrauser 3y ago
  > Voting on a decentralized platform. That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. I can parse those words, but I don’t see how they’d depend on the widget from the article. > Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans.) “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason).
  - xvector 3y ago
    > That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. Governance on decentralized platform can typically be approached via a few ways: - weighting votes by compute power - weighting votes by volume of ownership (eg of a coin) - weighting votes by number of identities/wallets The first two only serve the rich (the people that can afford GPU farms or equity), and will lead to an oligarchy. The last doesn't work because one person can create infinite accounts (eg public/private key pairs.) The last, however, can work if one person can only ever be linked to one account. > “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason). You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this. You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.

pstorm 3y ago

I have only read about Worldcoin from comments on Hackernews so I was surprised by such a balanced take on it from Vitalik. I'm not necessarily in favor of it now, but it doesn't seem quite as evil as I had previously believed. I'm not ready to scan my iris or anything, but I'm pretty interested to see how this will go.

evbogue 3y ago

What this technology needs to succeed is some kind of scary worldwide disinformation plot that scares everyone into adopting it. I don't think the Internet filling up with AI spam is scary enough, we need to dream bigger on this one. Whatever the plot is, I think people should remain indoors while it's going on and watch their televisions or iPhones. Next, we could make people scan their eyeballs before they eat at restaurants, go to the gym, or perhaps even visit the mall or ride the subway. We could have a greeter at every door who points the orb at you before you go in. This will create jobs, and also drive up the price of stanchions and someone can at least profit from that. Finally in a few years we could relax the restrictions because the human population will be accustomed to KYC before every transaction.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

I think that the Unabomber was a few decades too early in his thesis.

JohnFen 3y ago
Even at the time, I don't remember that many people disagreeing with his thesis. It's what he did in response to it that was the problem.

eis 3y ago

It always comes down to trust. With WorldCoin you have to trust a private company which in turn trusts random "Orb Operators" to operate the Orb devices which you again have to trust. For a system which wants to be used for UBI and voting the incentives are too strong to not to abuse this big amount of required trust. It doesn't matter if the source code and hardware plans of the Orbs are made public if we can't inspect a given Orb. Who's to say if that Orb doesn't generate 10% more IDs for someone than real ones. You think those concerns are theoretical? Well there has been already abuse before the project officially was launched: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... And then there is the inflationary nature of the coin itself due to the weekly issueance of coins for each user. This gives an incentive for the people behind the project like Sam Altman and Andressen Horowitz to cash out their part. They allocated 20% of the whole supply to themselves. A quarter billion dollars was put into the project and you can bet they'll want a good return on it while trying to portrait it as something like a charitable project. I remain very sceptical.

worksonmine 3y ago

Interesting, I didn't know the space was thinking about proof-of-personhood. I've been entertaining the thought of something similar for years, to solve a lot of the problems we face. A rough and very simplified version of the way I see it working is: - When someone is born a private-key is created just like an SSN today and a fixed amount of coins are created on that "wallet" - The amount would be based on the actual resources of the planet that are reasonable to spend during a life (inspired by Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project) - The protocol would have a negative income tax set at a threshold where basic needs are met, so the broke would get UBI, the rich pay taxes - Progressive tax to prevent ridiculous hoarding where the top 0.1% own almost everything (hoarding finite resources is a work around still to be solved) - When someone dies that money could still be inherited, or when no next of kin and no will exists distributed to the poor as UBI - Exploiting global resources would and should be costly - There could still be corporations but they wouldn't create new coins I see this solving a lot of problems: - No more printing money to solve short term problems - Everyone starts their adult life with some coin that could go towards education, drivers license etc - No more tax havens since taxation is built into the protocol - No more need for many of the government agencies we have today, reducing need for taxes - Encourages a more circular economy with less waste It's not perfect but I think it would be a nice compromise between the endless discussions of socialism vs capitalism.

Analemma_ 3y ago

Part of me wants to snark at just how far the crypto people have fallen, from “we are going to build a completely private and anonymous economy free from government control” to ”of course you have to be subject to mandatory retinal scans to engage in commerce”, but that wouldn’t really be true. The sad truth is that they don’t really have a choice and neither does anyone else: basically everu web technology will have to implement something like this eventually, because the space is just so overrun with bots and spammers. And it’s only going to get worse as LLMs get better.

kinakomochidayo 3y ago
> how far the crypto people have fallen People are free to build whatever they want on permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, which is way more open to experimentation and new things (like zero-proof knowledge) than Bitcoin ecosystem, which has more cypherpunk roots.