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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?

#51
post #2

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

Thats a bold claim, especially when TFA has this quote:

>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.

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

#52
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.

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

#53
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be informed on the subject and still think this is an awful idea. 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.

I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be informed on the subject and still think this is an awful idea. 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.

I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?

For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?

For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.

I don't eat pork, I don't like the taste (except bacon but that's beside the point). That doesn't mean I think pig farmers are solving a vague problem. I hadn't heard of this coin before today, and as mentioned I don't like this specific solution but I don't think the problems are vague at all.

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.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36850769

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

#56
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exact problem does this solve? Voting on a decentralized platform. Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. > Also also, sucks if you’re blind, I guess. Blind people tend to have irises. Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans.)

> Voting on a decentralized platform. That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. I can parse those words, but I don’t see how they’d depend on the widget from the article. > Even when both eyes are missing - the article mentions other ways to verify proof-of-personhood (at the expense of privacy compared to iris scans…

> That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good.

A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood.

> Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general.

Governance on decentralized platform can typically be approached via a few ways:

- weighting votes by compute power

- weighting votes by volume of ownership (eg of a coin)

- weighting votes by number of identities/wallets

The first two only serve the rich (the people that can afford GPU farms or equity), and will lead to an oligarchy.

The last doesn't work because one person can create infinite accounts (eg public/private key pairs.)

The last, however, can work if one person can only ever be linked to one account.

> “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason).

You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this.

You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.

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

#57
post #40
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see…

How is the hash of an iris scan "sensitive biometric information," any more than a CCTV camera at your coffee shop, or the government minting your ID? It is a hash, for god's sake.

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.

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not for biometrics and especially pre-mined tokens to the founders as the solution, but what about the problem is vague?

For me, the real-world need for such a thing in the first place. It's not often I dismiss something as a solution in search of a problem, but I think that's what this is.

Plenty of use cases require proof of personhood. Voting, for one. Anti-spam as another. And most use cases in which you're required to present an ID.

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

#59
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#60
post #2

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

It really checks every possible box for a list of “things that are terrible ideas for humanity to try”

It's more private than literally any other existing form of proof-of-personhood. Why is it a terrible idea for humanity to try?
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