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Comment by teucris | Hacker News Reader

Humans! We rely on nation states for root identity - social security numbers and birth certificates in the US - which are then used to get further identification credentials, eg drivers licenses, mailing addresses, passports, etc. These are easily defrauded, lots of mistakes are made, and are dependent on the nation’s government for support and reliability. Imagine those systems required no government bureaucracy, couldn’t be revoked, proved you were a human, etc. Wouldn’t that be a benefit?

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> Imagine those systems required no government bureaucracy, couldn’t be revoked, proved you were a human, etc. Wouldn’t that be a benefit?

That describes CAPTCHAs. While there are practical implementation issues, the goal of proving you're human is reasonable.

ID systems however go further and, for instance, prevent you from protecting your privacy by making throwaway accounts. I prefer the balance we currently have, where such verification is plausible for important things (buying a house) but not so convenient that it'd be used by every website.

There exist ID systems that prevent you from protecting your privacy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a core feature.

World ID explicitly set out to solve PoP, which includes uniqueness of individuals within a system, such that "creating 1,000 bot accounts would require finding 1,000 human users willing to consistently verify their authenticity"[0]. They consider CAPTCHAs to fail "because any human can pass multiple of them". They advertise it as a method for "Control Over Max Number of Accounts per Person"[1] (in addition to "Protection Against Unlawful Account Sharing").

So at the very least it seems like a core feature of World ID. For some other system, if it allows verifying users' humanness but not uniqueness or identity then I don't think I'd class it as an ID system. Maybe I'm failing to imagine all possibilities.

[0]: https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

[1]: https://worldcoin.org/world-id?for=apps

Respectfully, I don't agree with your assumptions.

    Imagine those systems required no government bureaucracy

How? I presume you're talking about some sort of system that keeps immutable biometric data. Who maintains that system? How is it secured? What happens when a leak occurs, and bad actors are able to clone your biometric information? Can this all be done without any government bureaucracy?

    Couldn’t be revoked

I'll concede this one; keeping credentials on a blockchain would indeed make them impossible to revoke.

    Proved you were a human

Does it? Maybe today, but I can imagine a not-so-distant future where a lab can concoct whatever biometric credentials we decide are un-clonable today.

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