Recently, Sam Altman, the founder who set off a wave of technology with OpenAI, announced the launch of the Web3 encryption project WorldCoin (World Coin).
Worldcoin is unique in that it relies on highly sophisticated biometrics, scanning each user's iris using a specialized piece of hardware called the "Orb".
Sam Altman said: "Due to the development of AI, the need for systems that provide proof of personality, as well as the need for new experiments in wealth redistribution and global governance systems is growing."
The Ethereum community has been trying to build, although quite tricky, a highly valuable decentralized proof-of-personality solution. Therefore, in addition to attracting a large number of investors to participate in this project, it also naturally attracted the attention of V God, the founder of Ethereum. V God even published a long article explaining his views on Worldcoin and his vision for the future of "Proof of Personality".
Proof of personality, aka "The Only Human Problem", is a limited form of real-world identity that asserts that a given registered account is owned by a real person (as distinct from real people for other registered accounts) Controlled, ideally without revealing who the real person is.
In fact, the idea behind the Worldcoin project is simple: artificial intelligence (AI) will create massive and abundant wealth for humans, but it will also potentially take away so many jobs that it will be almost impossible to tell who is human and who is a robot , so we need to fill this hole by (1) creating a really good proof-of-personality system so humans can prove they are human; (2) giving everyone a UBI.
Although Worldcoin has had the halo of ChatGPT since its launch, it cannot conceal that there are many problems to be solved. The most pressing issue is security, as iris scans, like other biometric data, cannot be altered if compromised and misappropriated.
Secondly, although according to the official statement, the data scanned by Orb will not be stored and maliciously used by Worldcoin, and technology will be gradually adopted for higher security protection. But in fact, in some areas, in order to obtain more token airdrops, its operating contractors will adopt incentives to encourage local residents to submit data, and even data trading has occurred. In some areas of Southeast Asia, there are unknown The phenomenon of love villagers whose irises are being bought for $30 or less to help complete app registrations.
As a result, V God also issued a warning against Worldcoin technology, saying that its iris scanning hardware and biometric data collection practices have raised major privacy issues. Since the scan results are stored in the company's database, iris scanning may reveal more information; once a hacker obtains someone's iris scan data, it will always face the risk of being abused for identification and authentication; in addition, there is a possibility It is a 3D printed "dummy" that scans their iris and obtains a World ID. However, V God believes that this can be solved with zero-knowledge proof technology.
The security of biometric technology needs to be guaranteed. How to protect users’ biometric information from being leaked is a big challenge. Whether WorldCoin’s iris recognition technology is accurate and reliable enough needs to be tested in practice. Therefore, the success of this project still depends on changes in global regulations, and may even face some legal risks.
At the end of the article, V God expressed his vision for the future of "personality proof". He believes that the problem of crafting an effective and reliable proof-of-personality system, especially in the hands of people far from the existing crypto community, seems quite challenging and will likely take years to find an effective solution.
Summarize
The concept of proof-of-personality seems very valuable in principle, and while implementing it in various ways has its risks, so does having no proof-of-personality at all: a world without proof-of-personality seems more likely to be one where centralized identity solutions , money, small gated communities, or some combination of the three.
So expect to see more progress in the future on all types of proof of personality, and hope to see the different approaches finally converge into a coherent whole.