Wednesday W.O.W - Proof of Personhood 🌐🪪🙋♂️
[7 min read] Your mid-week bite sized treat on emerging tech on our journey to the Metaverse. Learn about how Proof of Personhood aims to ensure that out online identities are authentic and protected.
A nibble of knowledge in your inbox every Wednesday with a simple format:
🇼 What the technology is
🇴 Objective(s) - what is it trying to achieve, with some examples
🇼 Why it is important to users as well as businesses & brands.
This is week 37 of the 520 weeks of writing I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
🇼 What is Proof of Personhood?
In the emerging Metaverse, our physical and digital lives converge as we move into immersive online spaces to work, play and socialise. If in this future online identities are easily forged, distinguishing genuine individuals from deceptive bots or malicious actors becomes a daunting challenge.
In the digital realm, we face a challenge called "Sybil attacks," where malicious actors create multiple fake accounts to deceive and manipulate online systems. Proof of Personhood directly tackles this issue by ensuring that each individual can possess only one genuine identity, making it extremely difficult for anyone to disguise as multiple users.
Enter Proof of Personhood (PoP), a powerful concept that aims to address this very issue and unlock the potential of a secure, human-centred digital realm. PoP is a cryptographic authentication mechanism that seeks to establish the uniqueness of individual human beings in online spaces. By ensuring that each person can only possess one authentic identity, PoP aims to build a virtual landscape where trust, transparency, and accountability flourish.
🇴 Objectives and Use Cases of Proof of Personhood
Imagine a world where you can be confident that the voices you hear online and the votes you cast online come from real people and not automated bots. That's the utopian vision that Proof of Personhood strives to realise, and here are the lofty objectives it aims to achieve:
Countering the Sybil Threat. Just as a strong fortress defends against invasions, PoP fortifies digital networks against Sybil attacks. By limiting each individual to a single authentic identity, PoP ensures that manipulative actors can't overpower online systems with bots and fake personas.
Empowering Digital Democracy. Imagine an online democracy where everyone's voice matters, and participation is truly inclusive. PoP sets the stage for such a future by creating networks that rely on the cognitive abilities of real humans, rather than algorithmically generated data. This paves the way for peer-to-peer democracies and public goods funding.
Fostering Prosocial Behavior. Traditional authentication mechanisms often require revealing personal information, exposing users to privacy risks. PoP, on the other hand, allows for a person to verify without exposing private info, which is a whole different paradigm of identity verification fostering community-oriented behaviour. This (ideally) leads to a digital ecosystem where users and applications are limited in their ability to exploit and attack each other.
Countering Identity Commodification. In an age where our identities are commodified and controlled, PoP serves as a potential antidote to the surveillance capitalism plaguing our digital lives. By shifting the focus from "Who are you?" to "Is this the only account you control?" PoP aims to liberate individuals from identity intermediaries and put them in charge of their own data.
As you can see, these are very very ambitious goals! But even if PoP manages to enable a portion of these objectives, the internet will be better for it. Next, let’s talk about use cases:
Universal Basic Income Cryptocurrencies. PoP's ability to establish unique human identities opens doors to innovative economic models. Universal Basic Income (UBI) cryptocurrencies, where individuals receive financial support without intermediaries, become feasible on PoP-based networks like Idena.
Decentralised Governance. Digital societies built on PoP offer governance and voting structures where decision-making is transparent, open, and collective. By ensuring that each voice is that of a unique human being, decentralised governance becomes more inclusive, fair, and resistant to manipulation.
Digital Reputation Systems. In a world where digital interactions are increasingly prevalent, reputation plays a crucial role in establishing trust. PoP can be integrated into digital reputation systems to ensure that reviews, ratings, and feedback come from genuine individuals. This fosters a more reliable and trustworthy reputation ecosystem, benefiting online marketplaces, service platforms, and social networks.
Anti-Spam and Content Moderation. Online communities often struggle with spam and malicious content flooding their platforms. By implementing PoP, platforms can effectively filter out bots and malicious actors, creating a more pleasant and meaningful user experience for genuine participants.
Personalised Healthcare and AI Assistance. In the era of personalised medicine and AI-driven healthcare, Proof of Personhood could provide the assurance that medical data and recommendations come from authenticated individuals. This trust foundation can enhance collaboration between patients and healthcare providers while safeguarding sensitive health information.
Decentralised Social Media. As concerns over data privacy and centralised control grow, decentralised social media platforms gain traction. PoP provides a fundamental building block for these platforms, facilitating the creation of trust networks where users can confidently connect and share content without the fear of fake identities or data misuse.
Human-Centered AI Research. In the realm of artificial intelligence, where models are trained on vast datasets, PoP can help researchers ensure that training data comes from real individuals and not fabricated entities. This contributes to more reliable and ethical AI systems that better understand and cater to human needs.
🇼 Why Proof of Personhood Has a Role in the Future of Society
In essence, Proof of Personhood holds immense potential for revolutionising various aspects of our digital lives. The prevailing belief that our surveillance-driven systems are the only path forward is challenged by Proof of Personhood. Instead of downgrading human value in favour of machine algorithms, PoP enables the formalisation of a structure that celebrates our collective agency, diversity, and innovation. From combating fraud and disinformation to fostering trust and inclusivity, this concept represents a pivotal step towards a future where technology aligns with human values and aspirations.
As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of digital interactions, embracing Proof of Personhood offers a beacon of hope for a more secure, transparent, and human-centric digital society.
Bonus: The Controversy Around Worldcoin
Worldcoin overview: a PoP cryptocurrency project that aims to create a unique digital identity for every individual on the planet, using their iris as a biometric identifier. The project proposes to issue a universal basic income (UBI) in the form of its own cryptocurrency to all registered individuals.
Their “pitch”: Worldcoin has introduced what they call a privacy-first, decentralised, and permissionless identity protocol called World ID to establish Proof of Personhood (PoP) globally. The process begins with a proof of personhood mechanism using a custom biometric imaging device called the Orb. Once a person verifies their “humanness” at the Orb, they receive a unique PoP credential on a compatible digital wallet, such as the World App developed by Tools for Humanity. World ID acts as a global digital passport or identity wallet, residing locally on the user's phone and allowing anonymous verification through zero-knowledge proofs to confirm their real and unique identity. The protocol, developed by the community, will support various verified credentials, including phone number verification and Orb iris biometric verification.
The criticism: The Worldcoin project has faced criticism and scepticism from certain sectors due to concerns about privacy and security. They have faced criticism and resistance due to concerns about their proposal's impact on privacy and user security. Critics argue that using the iris as a digital identifier poses risks of misuse and discrimination. The storage of user data on a centralised server has also raised worries about unauthorised access and data leaks. Even former NSA analyst Edward Snowden has expressed concerns about the project's risks.
Despite the controversy, Worldcoin has managed to attract over two million people from 120 countries who have registered and scanned their irises in exchange for free tokens. Many users, particularly young individuals interested in technology and cryptocurrency, view Worldcoin as an opportunity to experiment with something new and potentially profitable.
Further reading from the Worldcoin blog on PoP, as well as the privacy, decentralisation and hardware considerations surrounding it. All very pro Worldcoin obviously:
Why irises beat faces and fingerprints for proving personhood
Opening the Orb: A look inside Worldcoin’s biometric imaging device
Also, here is a great conversation from the Bankless team about Worldcoin:
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.