Exploring the Social Future of Web3: Biometrics and Social Assurance Crack the Identity Problem

Original author: PAUL VERADITTAKIT, Partner of Pantera

Compilation of the original text: Deep Tide TechFlow

This article is the second in a series of articles on decentralized social networking written by Pantera partner PAUL.

This series explores how todays technologies and trends can solve a series of problems in decentralized social networks, and provides specific explanations and explorations for each problem.

The first article in the past issue:The future of Web3 social networking (1): Building a social graph to solve customer acquisition problems

In 2017, a group of MIT Media Lab researchers claimed in Wired that decentralized social networks will never succeed. In their article, they list three impossible challenges:

(1) The problem of attracting (and retaining) users from scratch

(2) Problems with handling users’ personal information

(3) User-oriented advertising issues

In all three cases, they argue, the incumbent tech giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, simply do not leave room for any significant competition due to their extensive economies of scale.

Now that the time has come, things that were once hailed as impossible no longer seem so far away, and we seem to be at the dawn of a shift in the concept of social media networks. In this three-part series (this is part two), we will explore how new ideas in Decentralized Social (DeSo) can solve these old problems, including:

(1) Use open social layers to solve the cold start problem

(2) Use personal identification and cryptography technology to solve user identity problems

(3) Use token economic models and incentive mechanisms to solve income problems

In this article, the author mainly discusses the solution to problem 2.

Social media user identity issues

Modern social media faces a bot problem. While social media platforms have an obligation to uphold free speech, the issue becomes tricky when the “users” involved are not actually real users but bots.

Bots have proven to have a significant impact on public discussion, from being accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential election to influencing public opinion about COVID. Especially with an emphasis on anonymity, security, and privacy, any decentralized social media platform will inherit the “bot problem” — that is, in the age of advanced artificial intelligence, how do you convince people of accounts on your platform? Real and not a robot?

A naive approach would be to employ traditional KYC protocols, but this approach immediately runs into privacy issues - the other side of the coin. Why would you trust any social media platform to hold our sensitive data (from government IDs to private messages and financial transactions) that can reconstruct a persons entire personal, social and professional life?

Therefore, the issue of user identity is essentially the tension between confirming that the user is really a human being and ensuring the privacy of personal data. In this article, we explore two different approaches to this problem, a biometric approach (using zero-knowledge proofs) and a social assurance approach.

Worldcoin and biometric authentication

In the field of personality proof issues, Worldcoin is one of the most famous and controversial projects. In addition to having OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as one of its backers, Worldcoins solution to the proof of identity problem is straightforward: use retinal scans to create biometric proof that youre a human (since robots dont have retinas yet), and from that Obtain an authentication token. As for data privacy, Worldcoin claims to use zero-knowledge proofs to ensure that the biometric data obtained is stored securely.

Worldcoins thesis is that, as artificial intelligence plays an increasing role in society, there will be a need to distinguish humans from robots in a privacy-preserving and decentralized manner. By using the retinal scan of the Worldcoin sphere, people can obtain a World ID similar to a digital passport, making it possible for the holder to qualify for a cryptocurrency-based global basic income mechanism and participate in a new mechanism for global democratic governance. In essence, this World ID is intended to be the socially primitive mechanism for future digital social networks.

In its documentation, Worldcoin emphasizes its privacy-first solution. For example, it says it deletes images collected by spheres, stores only hashes of users irises, and runs zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to share personally identifiable information without revealing any personal data. Although at the current rollout stage, these hashes are stored in a centralized database, the team is committed to storing these iris hashes on the blockchain once the hashing algorithm is fully mature.

But despite these privacy claims, there are still many disputes about true privacy, security, and fairness guarantees. For example, it has been claimed that Worldcoin operator credentials were stolen and World IDs were sold on the digital black market so that users could earn Worldcoin tokens without iris scans. And theres also the overall fairness issue, with MIT Technology Review publishing a scathing article in April 2022 accusing nearly 500,000 users (mostly in developing countries) of cheating, manipulating, and exploiting during the beta phase , even calling it a kind of cryptocolonialism. In fact, as of August 2, 2023, Kenya, once one of Worldcoins largest data collection locations, banned Worldcoins scans due to security, privacy, and financial concerns.

Beyond these project-specific controversies, there are broader concerns about Worldcoin’s overall adoption of specialized hardware for biometric authentication. Because the sphere is basically a hardware device, even if Worldcoins software were flawless, there would be no guarantee that there would be no hardware backdoors that would allow Worldcoin (or other third-party manufacturers) to surreptitiously collect users actual biometric data, or insert fake profiles into the system . To skeptics, all of Worldcoins privacy guarantees (zero-knowledge proofs, iris hashing, on-chain decentralization) seem like ironic claims.

Human Proof and Social Guarantee

Another way to solve the problem of personal identification is to use the social guarantee method. Basically, if verified humans Alice, Bob, Charlie, David all vouch that Emily is a verified human, then Emily is likely to be a human too. The core question here is therefore a question of game-theoretic design—how do we design incentives to maximize “human validation.”

Proof of human identity is one of the oldest and most important projects in this field. To prove your human identity you need

(1) Submit personal information, photos and videos, and a deposit of 0.125 ETH,

(2) People who already exist in the registry vouch for you,

(3) Pass before 3 challenge periods. If someone challenges you during this period, the case will be submitted to the Kleros decentralized court and the deposit will be at risk.

During the attestation process, users are first paired with a credential holder via a credential form. Once users are matched with a credential, they go on a video call to verify that the profile matches a real person. As with Worldcoins thesis, the proof of human identity community has long had the idea of ​​a universal basic income (UBI) that would be provided to those verified on the human identity registry.

A number of other projects are on a similar path, utilizing social graphs to verify peoples identities, including BrightIDs video call verification where everyone verifies each other, Idenas continuous captcha creation and solving game, and Circles trust-based circles.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of these social proof-based platforms is that they seem less intrusive than Worldcoin, which requires you to scan your iris on a metal ball. Some of these methods, like Idena’s captcha “checkpoint ceremony,” even seem to preserve a level of anonymity that doesn’t require extensive sharing of personal data or third-party identity authorities.

The future of human identity

As artificial intelligence continues to advance and exhibit characteristics that are closer and closer to human behavior, it will become increasingly important to design novel proof-of-human mechanisms, not only for the incentives discussed by Universal Basic Income and many other proof-of-human projects measures, and more importantly as a way to better sanitize and regulate social networks in the future.

However, the process involves many trade-offs, from data privacy to the intrusiveness of the process, to determining the validity of human identities, and is one of the famous hard problems in cryptocurrency. As Vitalik points out, there doesnt seem to be one optimal form of human identification, and suggests a possible hybrid path: a biometric-based approach to startup, but transitioning to a more social-based approach in the long-term Chart method.

Going forward, this space requires more process, code, and data transparency. In short, there cannot be the ironic paradox that users need to believe that this is a trustless solution. Only in this way can we truly create the foundation of a social network that lives up to cryptocurrency’s original vision of decentralization and privacy.