Vitalik Buterin’s Take on Worldcoin’s Biometric Proof Of Identity

Vitalik Buterin, the crypto entrepreneur behind Ethereum, recently shared his take on the biometric proof of identity offered by Worldcoin. Worldcoin was launched earlier today by Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, the company behind artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT.

Vitalik Buterin took to Twitter earlier today to share a lengthy paper penned by him, which covered the pros and cons of the biometric proof of identity, which is also known as the proof of personhood. The need for such a biometric system arose when developers felt the need to determine that an account is controlled by a real person rather than a bot.

According to the Ethereum co-founder, biometric proof of identity offers secure and reliable functionality on a large scale but comes with its fair share of risks and challenges. Buterin believes that such systems can be privacy friendly and easier to deploy. But at the same time, biometric systems came with a risk of centralization along with certain vulnerabilities to hacking. Such systems could also be exposed to coercion by the state or malicious actors.

Buterin compared the biometric proof of personhood to social graph-based verification and concluded that the biometric system offered better scalability and security. However, he highlighted that social graph-based verification provided distinct numerical scoring without the use of specialized hardware.

“It is very difficult to join a social-graph-based proof-of-personhood system unless you already know someone who is in the social graph. This makes it very easy for such systems to remain restricted to a single community in a single country,” Vitalik Buterin stated while commenting on the cons of a social graph-based system.

Sam Altman’s widely anticipated Worldcoin went live earlier today. Its native token $WLD is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, which debuted at $1.92. At the time of writing, $WLD was trading at $2.9, up more than 60% since its launch.