Worldcoin and Proof of Personhood
Hi frens,
Are you willing to scan your iris for 25 Worldcoin ($WLD), roughly worth 55 USD today?
I have read books about universal basic income (UBI), kept an eye on Worldcoin for some time, and I don’t see much in common.
If Worldcoin is truly about UBI, why not just give people (who have iris scanned) a pack of food, or USDT?
Proof of Personhood
Worldcoin, or the World ID system, tries to build a human verification solution without verifying government ID. It’s also called Proof of Personhood:
Vitalik: The simplest way to define a proof-of-personhood system is: it creates a list of public keys where the system guarantees that each key is controlled by a unique human.
In other words, if you're a human, you can put one key on the list, but you can't put two keys on the list, and if you're a bot you can't put any keys on the list.
How does the system guarantees that?
We all know that computer information is just 0 or 1. No matters how the system processes the iris information, anyone could hack into the system, Orb (iris scanning machine), and create fake iris identities to receive 25 $WLD.
Here’s how the system guarantees that (source):
4. A message containing the user’s identity commitment and iris code is signed with the Orb’s secure element and then sent to the signup service, which queues the message for the uniqueness-check service.
5. The uniqueness-check service verifies the message is signed by a trusted Orb…
In short, it’s relying on Orb operators to make sure iris data are input by real human. Sounds like government service counters, right?
The Dream of Online ID
In the early days of internet (web1) or cryptocurrency (Bitcoin), everyone is anonymous by default.
The industry would like to have online identities. OpenID was developed, but Google and Facebook came in and took the market. Online identities have been used to serve ads.
So why is web3 so keen to Proof of Personhood?
Vitalik: 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…
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.
So here’s the thing: The whole industry wants an online ID solution that scales. But usually it inevitably empowers centralized authorities.
As for anti-spam, it remains a hard problem, and…
gmcdermott: I’m always amazed at how people have so little idea the scale of the challenges here.
If you’ve even got spammed on social networks (like, ex-Twitter), you know how “good” those fake identities are doing. Tens of thousands followers or views, hundreds of replies, making them appear genuine unless you double-check their identity and content.
Play by Rules
If I’m a bad guy, and I wanna run a Ethereum node to earn reward. Will it work? Sure. I just play by rules.
If someone does something great, who cares it’s human, AI, or a three-year-old cats?
Crypto people has built a decentralized utopian world. Some of them fight with centralized government, and work hard to develop any possible solutions to fully replace existing solutions from the government.
I would love to see a world that each side of people work together, have arguments, and compete to offer diverse solutions for the benefit of humanity.
Sincerely,
Denken