https://projectglitch.substack.com/p/rip-daos

Here we go again! Worldcoin: totally not a real-life Black Mirror episode. Virtual pet OGs say take your metaverse hype elsewhere. And the implications of the Ooki DAO saga run deep. This is Glitch #4.

In this issue:

1. Stuff that has us like 👀

   a. Worldcoin’s big “if”

   b. Neopets ditches its metaverse

2. Life after DAOs

1. Two things that have us like 👀

Biometric proof-of-personhood

(Stefon voice) The internet’s hottest club is Worldcoin. It has EVERYTHING: Orbs. Iris scanners. Zero-knowledge proofs. Lofty promises of decentralization. And proof-of-personhood. You know, it’s that thing where we can no longer tell the difference between humans and AI online, so we need a form of identity that can vouch for the fact that a living, breathing human is on the other end of an interaction without revealing who they actually are?

In all seriousness, the Worldcoin project is … multifaceted. There’s so much to talk about it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s follow Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s lead and focus on how Worldcoin has developed a new approach to something called “proof-of-personhood” or PoP.

Worldcoin’s creators inform us that PoP is needed because “advances in AI make it difficult to distinguish between AI and humans on the internet.” Worldcoin is a “future-proof” way to prove “humanness,” they say. All you gotta do is stare at a chrome orb so it can scan your irises!

Photo by Lucy Harley-McKeown

The project has, unsurprisingly, inspired outrage and disdain among crypto purists. Not only are the optics dystopian and the potential privacy risks dire, but the onboarding tactics have also been questionable, to say the least. Besides that, the whole thing just reeks of traditional, centralized Silicon Valleyness.

Buterin, for his part, spent thousands of words avoiding a judgment as to whether Worldcoin is philosophically acceptable. Instead, he tried to elevate the conversation by writing to a question: “What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?”

PoP is important, he argues, because without it “decentralized governance (including ‘micro-governance’ like votes on social media posts) becomes much easier to capture by very wealthy actors, including hostile governments.” Translation: if we can’t verify that real humans are voting for things on the internet, voting for things on the internet won’t work. No pressure, but online democracy may depend on this shit.

As Buterin points out, there are other ways to do it that don’t involve collecting biometrics and assuming horrendous privacy risks.

But if (...if…!) Worldcoin’s system works like the company says it’s supposed to, that risk is limited because the Orbs don’t publish the iris scans themselves, only hashes of them—cryptographically generated digital fingerprints. Once your iris hash is in the database, you can verify your personhood by generating a zero-knowledge proof that you hold a private cryptographic key associated with one of the hashes—without revealing which one.

“On the whole, despite the ‘dystopian vibez’ of staring into an Orb and letting it scan deeply into your eyeballs, it does seem like specialized hardware systems can do quite a decent job of protecting privacy,” Buterin writes.

Perhaps, but if the goal is also to avoid having to trust yet another big tech company with sensitive data, we’ve got some problems. Though the source code that Orbs run is “mostly public,” Worldcoin-affiliated startup Tools for Humanity is the only one building the actual devices right now. And the iris hashes live on a centralized server. Worldcoin intends to replace this setup with a decentralized system “once they are sure the hashing mechanism works,” according to Buterin. 👀