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What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

vitalik.ca

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Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#31

Post by hinkley »

lesuorac wrote: post #27
kstrauser wrote: post #18

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…

> Having been raised in a conservative evangelical church 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury

To the best of my recollection, usury is not mentioned in Revelations.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#33

Post by Mistletoe »

rqtwteye wrote: post #10

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.

Ethereum may not be useful to you but it is very useful to me and many others. It will become even more useful in the future as people learn what happens when your money is centralized to one particular government, based on nothing at all, and just keeps getting printed more and more of.

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.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#34

Post by hinkley »

notahacker wrote: post #25
simbolit wrote: post #5

"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?

In theory, the biometric data collected and hashed is unique to a particular person, and therefore non-matching hashes of biometric scans validates that 57 accounts represent 57 unique people rather than one person signing up with a lot of different monikers, email addresses or phone numbers or bank cards Like a social security number, except relying on the worthlessness of the handout "currency" and other perks to d…

If you're going to talk about collectable data then your first visit on the security tour should be replay attacks.

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.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#35

Post by kstrauser »

lesuorac wrote: post #27
kstrauser wrote: post #18

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…

> Having been raised in a conservative evangelical church 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury

I never said they were consistent.

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.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#36

Post by simbolit »

xvector wrote: post #12
simbolit wrote: post #5

"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?

It's in the article. Fuzzy iris hashes made with specialized hardware.

So why not call it 'biometric identity' just like everyone else?

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#37

Post by ackfoobar »

xvector wrote: post #13
eli wrote: post #2

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

Meh, it sounds creepy, but the article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private. 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.

> fortunately it is easy to solve with zero knowledge proof technology

I don't have enough intuition around what zkp can/cannot do. It's hard to take his word for it.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#38

Post by ackfoobar »

simbolit wrote: post #36
xvector wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the article. Fuzzy iris hashes made with specialized hardware.

So why not call it 'biometric identity' just like everyone else?

Last sentence of the first paragraph:

> 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.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#39

Post by kinakomochidayo »

Mistletoe wrote: post #33
rqtwteye wrote: post #10

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.

Ethereum may not be useful to you but it is very useful to me and many others. It will become even more useful in the future as people learn what happens when your money is centralized to one particular government, based on nothing at all, and just keeps getting printed more and more of. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement I think crypto solving this issue is definitel…

Yup. One thing that I find respectable about Ethereum, contrary to what many Bitcoiners say, is that it’s always trying to find the minimum viable issuance, with less and less issuance, that makes the chain work effectively.

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.

Re: What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?

#40

Post by JohnFen »

xvector wrote: post #13
eli wrote: post #2

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

Meh, it sounds creepy, but the article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private. 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 article goes into detail on why the iris hashes are sufficiently private.

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.

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