nicoverse

I’d assume many people who join the Crypto revolution are inspired by the same mission: to provide a chance for everyone, I mean, everyone from the planet earth, to to join the global economy system.

I visited India back in 2017 January. I found myself standing in the middle of the Indian banknote demonetization and had no where to get cash. Locals told me that it is very hard to get cash, and everyone must use an payment app (like PayPal, Venmo or WeChat Pay) that links to ones bank account. I survived through credit card and the aiding from some local friends to exchange cash for me. Then I asked my friends: how about people in the slum? How could they create a bank account? (Most people in the slum do not have a residential registration and they cannot have a bank account). My local friends simply said, “they cannot. They could only exchange through black market brokers or they just can’t get money.”

I was shocked. Thought it is the fact that I known for a while that many people around the world does not have an identity card or residential registration, but it never occurs to me on what it will impact on their lives. And the fact that they will never be able to be part of the economic system and trade freely struck me.

Later, when I started to join one of the cryptocurrency exchange and devote my time fully on crypto, researching and following different technology to create a decentralized identity verification process that does not require government data become my passion. WorldCoin’s mission on Proof-of-Personhood stood out so much and I was one of their biggest fan for a while.

Let’s take a step back to understand what is IrisHash and why WorldCoin is promoting this solution.

Why do we need an identity card or passport? Because we cannot just trust each other’s word of saying “I am Nico, daughter of Helen from Taipei. My family is from the east mountain over the rainy sea.” to identity and verify a person’s identity. Any identity card or passport is a certificate issued by governments whom we seen as a trustworthy authority. Usually, each identity certificate will require other form of information or document, for example, a birth certificate, a resident registry that is tied to an address, or other government documentation that can be trusted to say you are who you are.

Let’s go back to the slum situation in India. People in slum do not have birth certificate (because many of them were born in the slum) from the hospital, nor an address to prove their residency (because there’s no address in most slum). India governments have been using more clever process to overcome this challenge, but with the most reason effort, only less than 20% of people in slum could receive an identity card. Without ID, they cannot open an bank account and join the rest of the ecosystem in the society. We need to have a way for anyone who can claim to be themselves and prove they are a unique human being, not the other person. The Biometric data, like DNA.

Each individual has unique irises, even twin cannot have the same iris. Similar to finger print, it can be scanned and compared easily without invasive process, like taking your blood or hair for DNA. Irises are also less likely to be altered due to damages like finger prints, therefore it is a robust information to use for verifying individuals.

Now, let’s move to how WorldCoin generate the Irishash. WorldCoin’s solution is very sophisticated and really value user’s privacy (reference 1). In general, they put in a huge effort to create a mathematical model to allow the scan of each iris will only generate one hash, but it is impossible to reverse the hash information to reconstruct the iris image due to data distortion. Additionally, they design and manufactured a sophisticated iris scan device — The Orb — to ensure the iris image uses to generate the Irishash is detail enough to feed into their model.

I might think too negative on humanity and how data can be used in abusive way. Coming from the content moderation scene, I believe when people are given an anonymous opportunity, some would tend to behave in the most malicious manner. I believe strongly that if Irishash is the most promising solution, then we are putting ourselves in the danger zone of either people are hurting other peoples in the poorer financial status to gain access to more fake identities, or some governments or entities will try to reverse engineer on the information store on IrisHash and really get a full 360 degree monitor to people. The ironic part is that these are the people and the kind of tyrannic structure that everyone works in this blockchain revolution want to over thrown.

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Privacy at Worldcoin: A Technical Deep Dive – Part I. (2023, February 10). WorldCoin Org. https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive