Worldcoin, a project that raised up to 200 million USD, is causing a lot of buzz. The core technology of the project: Proof of Personhood is evaluated as extremely potential. However, it also has problems that can seriously affect the security of users' identities.
What is Proof of Personhood (PoP)?
Proof of Personhood (PoP) is a concept in #Web3 that aims to uniquely identify an individual on the blockchain. Users need to prove their real identity before engaging in activities on the blockchain, such as voting, staking, or accessing certain services.
PoP requires individuals to prove their identity through various means of verification. It becomes important because it helps prevent fraud and other malicious activities on the blockchain.
#Worldcoin establishes Proof of Personhood through a private, decentralized and permissionless global identity protocol called World ID.
To build World ID, Worldcoin's development team proposed a verification mechanism based on a bio-imaging device called Orb – a spherical device. Once a person verifies their identity on Orb, they can receive a unique Proof of Personhood certificate on a compatible digital wallet.
World ID can be thought of as a global digital passport or a digital identity wallet and can be used anonymously thanks to a Zero-knowledge proof (zkP).
Currently, the community is divided into two camps: one strongly supports the PoP features and the other expresses certain concerns. A Tweet of Worldcoin on July 28th showed the great influence of this new technology on users.
Advantage
Proof of Personhood offers many significant benefits and addresses two key challenges when using advanced AI technology:
Limiting the number of accounts per individual helps protect against online attacks using fake identities (Sybil attacks).
Prevent the dissemination of artificial intelligence-generated content that looks and sounds realistic to deceive or spread large-scale misinformation.
Proof of Personhood allows filtering of content or accounts that have been confirmed to be human or non-human, helping to prevent the widespread spread of artificial intelligence-generated misinformation.
Supported verifications include phone number verification for easy access for anyone with a smartphone and Orb iris verification for high accuracy.
Disadvantages of PoP from Vitalik Buterin's point of view
Because of storing information about the user's identity, Proof of Personhood has many problems:
Proof of Personhood is still new and in beta, and there are challenges that need to be overcome before widespread adoption.
#Vitalik addressed the important privacy and security issues involved in Orb implementation, as well as the ethical concerns surrounding the adoption of biometrics as a potentially risky technology. or not.
Vitalik's point of view
Vitalik wrote a blog post on the “proof of biometric identification”, arguing that it may work well in the short term, while social media-based methods may be more stable in the long run and assume a larger share of responsibility over time as Worldcoin's algorithm improves.
He believes that the security of identity technology is declining rapidly and may only be effective in 1-2 years.
Systems with a few hundred people with close ties to the founding team can face a loss of security when exposed to communities they don't have information about. However, a system that relies on tens of millions of users with biometric IDs could actually work. That means, Proof of Personhood needs to reach millions of people to be effective.
Biometric-based startups may perform better in the short-term, while social-graph-based techniques may be more sustainable in the long-term and account for a large share. greater in taking on responsibility over time as their algorithms improve.
The creator of Ethereum has both expressed support for the technology that Worldcoin uses but also expressed certain hesitations about the development of Proof of Personhood for humans.
Personal opinion
With Proof of Personhood from Worldcoin, users can be assured of their personal information, avoiding attacks using fake identities.
However, concerns about its effectiveness from many experts seem to raise many concerns among the investor community.
In addition, restricting the identity to only 1 identified account will hinder the wave of Airdrop / Retroactive from users because it is not possible to use as many accounts as before. This is also a factor that makes many people feel afraid to use this iris scanning technology.