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