from Hacker News

What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

by Multiset on 7/24/23, 3:10 PM with 79 comments

• by eli on 7/24/23, 3:44 PM

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

• by eis on 7/24/23, 4:27 PM

  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/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.

• by kstrauser on 7/24/23, 3:57 PM

  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.

• by monero-xmr on 7/24/23, 3:47 PM

  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.

• by buildbuildbuild on 7/24/23, 3:58 PM

  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.

• by elif on 7/24/23, 3:50 PM

  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

• by Analemma_ on 7/24/23, 5:51 PM

  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.

• by rqtwteye on 7/24/23, 3:49 PM

  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.

• by simbolit on 7/24/23, 3:46 PM

  "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?

• by freitzkriesler2 on 7/24/23, 4:10 PM

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

• by pstorm on 7/24/23, 4:02 PM

  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.

• by JW_00000 on 7/24/23, 3:44 PM

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

• by worksonmine on 7/24/23, 4:42 PM

  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.

• by evbogue on 7/24/23, 4:09 PM

  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.

• by rglover on 7/24/23, 3:47 PM

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