Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared his thoughts on the biometric proof of identity system offered by Worldcoin, which is listed on Binance.
Stating that personality proof systems bring with them reservations such as privacy and security, Buterin stated that these systems are needed but need to be developed further and this may take years.
Some of the prominent statements in Buterin's article are as follows:
“One of the potentially most valuable tools that people in the Ethereum community are trying to build is a decentralized authentication solution.
Proof of identity, aka the “unique human issue”, is a limited form of real-world identity that claims that a particular registered account is controlled by a natural person (and a natural person different from all other registered accounts), ideally without revealing which natural person it is.
Several attempts have been made to overcome this issue: Proof of Humanity, BrightID, Idena, and Circles come as examples.
Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, best known as the CEO of OpenAI.
The philosophy behind the project is simple: AI will generate a lot of abundance and wealth for humanity, but it can also kill large numbers of people's jobs and make it nearly impossible to tell who is a human and not a bot. So we need to bridge this gap by (i) creating a really good personality proof system so people can prove they are truly human, and (ii) giving everyone a UBI. Worldcoin is unique in that it relies on highly advanced biometrics that scans each user's iris using special hardware called “Orb”.
Worldcoin has been criticized for privacy and security concerns with Orb, design issues with its “coin”, and ethical issues with some of the choices the company has made.
Risks include inevitable privacy leaks, further erosion of people's ability to browse the internet anonymously, enforced by authoritarian governments, as well as the potentially impossibility of being decentralized.”
Buterin, who wrote a long article on the advantages and disadvantages of using personality proof systems by comparing them, said he appreciates any initiative in this regard.
“There is no ideal form of proof of personality. Instead, we have at least three different approach paradigms, all of which have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. A comparison chart might look something like this:
Ideally, what we should do is treat these three techniques as complementary and combine them all.
All of these teams are in a position to make many mistakes and have inevitable dilemmas between business interests and the needs of the wider community. Therefore, it is important to be very careful.
As a community, we can and should push all participants' comfort zones to open source their technology, demanding third-party audits and even third-party-written software and other checks and balances. We also need more alternatives in each of the three categories.
The problem of making an effective and reliable authentication system seems quite challenging, especially in the hands of people far from the current crypto community. I certainly don't envy people embarking on this task, and it will probably take years to find a formula that works.
The concept of proof of personality seems in principle very valuable, and while there are risks in a variety of applications, having no proof of identity also has risks: A world without proof of personality seems more likely to be a world dominated by centralized identity solutions, money, small closed communities, or a combination of the three. I look forward to seeing further progress on any form of personality proof and hopefully seeing the different approaches finally come together into a coherent whole.”
