What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?
vitalik.ca
vitalik.ca
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.
The problem is that if it something goes wrong, you can't fix things by changing your biometrics. That means that "sufficiently" private is a much, much higher threshold than it would be in other contexts.
It also requires a lot of trust of the entities gathering the biometric information, and it's hard to come up with any entity that seems trustworthy enough. Especially any entity in the cryptocurrency space.
Even ignoring the extremely creepy aspect of this (something worldcoin amplified immensely with those orbs), this seems like a very bad and dangerous idea. Even if the odds of a terrible mistake are very low, if you roll the dice enough times, you will eventually roll badly.
Personally, I wouldn't touch any of this at all. I'd feel more comfortable having the entire internet think I'm not human than expose myself to this sort of thing.
It is more privacy preserving than the latter two, or any currently known proof-of-personhood currently in existence - while still accomplishing the goal of proof-of-personhood.
> any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID?
It's not, fundamentally, but that's not an argument in favor of things like this. The less of this sort of thing, the better.
But a big difference is that my local coffee shop is, you know, local and not likely to be sharing the images with anyone as a routine matter, and they certainly aren't correlating the images they capture with my identity.
The difference with government ID is twofold: it's the government, which means it's not optional. Second, it's the government rather than private entities. I can have some sort of influence over my government. I have zero influence over private entities. So while I don't like it in either case, I prefer the government-issued ID over something done by companies.
> while still accomplishing the goal of proof-of-personhood.
I'm not sure why this is a goal that is so important that it's worth any reduction in privacy.
You seem to be framing this as a reduction in privacy but it is quite the opposite.
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.
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.
Anti-spam? That seems like shooting mosquitos with missiles. And I doubt it would be that effective at spam prevention. Spammers will just start paying tons of actual people to vet the messages as coming from real people, much like how captchas and the like are circumvented.
> And most use cases in which you're required to present an ID.
We already have ID for that. And surely, in those cases, what is trying to be established isn't just whether or not you're human, but which specific human you are.
I've also heard that it's useful to administer UBI (just to round out your list), but UBI is a thing that -- at least in the US -- is but a vague dream, not anything that's realistically going to happen anytime soon. And even if it is, I don't think a system that just demonstrates proof-of-humanness would be sufficient.
Why not? One vote per human is trivial. Just read the last entry before the poll closes. Solved. That's how we do it today, with paper ballots.
> We already have ID for that
While modern IDs have biometrics they aren't usually validated as such. Just a quick glance is more common. It can be circumvented and fake/borrowed IDs are common.
> UBI is a thing that at least in the US -- is but a vague dream, not anything that's realistically going to happen anytime soon
Only because of lack of understanding and FUD. I agree that the US has a long way to go but in Europe where we have working welfare system UBI would save billions in administration costs. We already have it but with strings and hoops. I don't think a country where an ambulance ride costs a monthly salary should serve as an example to that argument. That's like claiming police is worthless because -- at least in Saudi Arabia -- is but a vague dream, since they're so easily bribed.
I don't have enough intuition around what zkp can/cannot do. It's hard to take his word for it.
He's a known expert re. cryptography and zero-knowledge proof technology.
It's about as hard to take his word regarding zkp as it is to take a climate scientist's about climate change.
Otherwise you're just ignoring someone that is objectively more knowledgeable than you, which is quite lame indeed.
Not to mention philosophers.
>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.
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/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.
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.
What's their stance on Usury [1]? I have no doubt that if say tax credits were tied to having World Coin as opposed to a SSN that they would end up going along with it.
But to channel the scary pastors of my youth, “that’s also a sin, and people shouldn’t do that, but I’m not going to sit back and let the One World Government roll out the mark of the Beast!”
If you want to see how quickly a quarter of the US can organize and mobilize, things like this are a great way to find out.
Voting and UBI are often cited as valuable use cases.
It will definitely be subverted if it becomes widespread enough to be impactful.
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.)
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).
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.
That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing.
In short, I've voted for many things in many contexts in the existing world. I don't think I've ever bumped into a problem with voting that any form of a decentralized platform would have improved.
> You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this.
It's just the first example I thought of. I'm sure that 8 billion people could crowdsource all source of other edge cases.
> You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.
I wasn't the one making the proposal. The onus is on the proposer to explain how they're going to deal with the edge cases and convince the rest of us that this is a real, thought-through idea.
Are you aware of how decentralized computers work? Every computation can be verified by every participant. It's objectively true that such a platform would be less prone to being rigged.
For instance, under no circumstances, ever, do I want it to be possible for guys with machine guys to show up at my door and "help" me verify that I voted "for the right person". Any proposal that would make that possible is a human rights disaster and can be dismissed.
Your understanding of cryptography as it related to decentralized systems seems to be limited, and you're reaching wildly misinformed conclusions. You have a strong opinion about decentralized systems being bad and haven't bothered to actually learn the area before making statements like this. Monero is an example of an anonymous decentralized system. There are plenty of anonymous decentralized systems and nothing precludes a system with proof of personhood also being anonymous.
You can’t have vote verification and anonymity at the same time. Either your vote goes into the anonymous, aggregated pool of all votes, or it’s possible for you to look yours up afterward to make sure it was recorded directly.
That latter option has fire real-world consequences, and any system that allows someone (and especially the people looking over their shoulder) to see their choices is dead on arrival.
The ability to verify votes after casting them isn’t just unneeded: it’s completely unwanted. It’s the sort of thing that gets people killed, and that’s not hyperbole.
Well, alternatively, everyone has a skull - it's the most human symbol imaginable.
Getting a reliable image of that repeatedly might prove tricky though.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
(and yes, I'm being very facetious)
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.
What are you scanning your ID for? I've never had to do that a single time.
Let’s reduce an oppressor’s canvas of options rather than extend it further into our bodies.
maybe it should be a nose orb
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
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.
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.
I am far from convinced that cryptocurrencies are actually a solution to this, but even if it is -- at what price? Not all solutions are worth the cost. I am not saying cryptocurrency would fail this test, but I am saying that it's a mistake to proceed without a genuine cost/benefit analysis.
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.
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?
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
Every idiot who comes up with a biometric solution does not want to talk about replay attacks (which is why they get the moniker), and it should be the first thing we talk about.
> 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.
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.
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.