Exploring the Future of Web3 Social: Biometrics and Social Guarantees to Solve Identity Issues

Original Title: 《Future of Social Networks (2 of 3)》

Written by: PAUL VERADITTAKIT, Partner at Pantera

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

This article is the second part of a series on decentralized social networks written by Pantera partner PAUL.

The series explores how today's technologies and trends address a range of issues facing decentralized social networks, providing specific explanations and explorations for each issue.

Previous article: The Future of Web3 Social (Part 1): Building Social Graphs to Solve Customer Acquisition Problems

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

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

(2) The issue of handling users' personal information

(3) The advertising problem for users

They argued that in all three cases, existing tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google leave no room for significant competition due to their extensive economies of scale.

Fast forward to today, what was once deemed "impossible" seems less unattainable, and we appear to be on the brink of a transformation in the concept of social media networks. In this three-part series (this is the second part), we will explore how new ideas in decentralized social (DeSo) address these "old" problems, specifically including:

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

(2) Using identity verification and cryptographic techniques to address user identity issues

(3) Utilizing token economic models and incentive mechanisms to solve revenue problems

In this article, the author primarily discusses solutions to problem 2.

The User Identity Problem in Social Media

Modern social media faces the issue of bots. While social media platforms are obligated to uphold free speech, the problem becomes tricky when the "users" involved are actually bots rather than real users.

It turns out that bots have a significant impact on public discourse, from being accused of interfering in the U.S. presidential election to influencing public perceptions of COVID. Particularly in contexts emphasizing anonymity, security, and privacy, any decentralized social media platform will inherit the "bot problem"—that is, in an era of advanced artificial intelligence, how do you convince people that the accounts on your platform are real and not bots?

One naive approach is to adopt traditional KYC protocols, but this method immediately encounters privacy issues—the other side of the problem. Why would you trust any social media platform to store our sensitive data (from government IDs to private messages and financial transactions), which could reconstruct a person's entire personal, social, and professional life?

Thus, the "user identity" problem is essentially a tension between confirming that users "are indeed human" and providing privacy assurances for personal data. In this article, we will explore two different approaches to solving this problem: one is a biometric approach (using zero-knowledge proofs), and the other is a social verification approach.

Worldcoin and Biometric Verification

In the realm of the "proof of personhood" issue, Worldcoin is one of the most well-known and controversial projects. Besides having OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as one of its supporters, Worldcoin's solution to the "proof of personhood" problem is quite straightforward: use retinal scans to create biometric proof that you are a human (since bots do not have retinas) and receive a certification token in return. Regarding data privacy, Worldcoin claims to use zero-knowledge proofs to ensure that the biometric data collected is securely stored.

Worldcoin argues that as artificial intelligence plays an increasingly significant role in society, it is necessary to distinguish between humans and bots in a privacy-preserving and decentralized manner. By using retinal scans from the Worldcoin orb, individuals can obtain a World ID similar to a "digital passport," allowing holders to potentially qualify for a cryptocurrency-based global basic income mechanism and participate in new mechanisms of global democratic governance. Essentially, this World ID aims to become the social primitive for future digital social networks.

In its documentation, Worldcoin emphasizes its privacy-first solution. For example, it states that it deletes the images collected by the orb, only storing the hashes of users' irises, and runs zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to share proof of personhood information without disclosing any personal data. Although these hashes are currently stored in a centralized database during the rollout phase, the team is committed to storing these iris hash data on the blockchain once the hashing algorithm is fully mature.

However, despite these privacy protection claims, there are still many controversies regarding real privacy, security, and fairness guarantees. For instance, there are claims that the credentials of Worldcoin operators were stolen, and World IDs were sold on the digital black market so that users could obtain Worldcoin tokens without undergoing retinal scans. There are also broader fairness issues; MIT Technology Review published a sharp article in April 2022 accusing the project of deceiving, manipulating, and exploiting nearly 500,000 users (mostly from developing countries) during the testing phase, even labeling it a form of "crypto-colonialism." In fact, as of August 2, 2023, Kenya, once one of the largest data collection sites for Worldcoin, has banned the scanning due to security, privacy, and financial issues.

Beyond these project-specific controversies, there are broader concerns about Worldcoin's overall adoption of specialized hardware for biometric verification. Since the orb is essentially a hardware device, even if Worldcoin's software is flawless, there is no guarantee that there are no hardware backdoors allowing Worldcoin (or other third-party manufacturers) to secretly collect users' actual biometric data or insert false profiles into the system. For skeptics, all of Worldcoin's privacy assurances (zero-knowledge proofs, iris hashes, on-chain decentralization) seem to be merely ironic statements.

Proof of Humanity and Social Verification

Another approach to solving the proof of personhood issue is to adopt a social verification method. Essentially, if verified humans Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David all "vouch" for Emily as a verified human, then Emily is likely also a human. The core issue here is thus a game-theoretic design problem—how do we design incentive mechanisms to maximize "verification of humanity"?

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

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

(2) Have someone already in the registry vouch for you,

(3) Pass within a "3 challenge period." If someone questions you during this time, the case will be submitted to the Kleros decentralized court, and the deposit will be at risk.

During the proof process, users are first paired with a verifier through a credential form. After pairing, they will conduct a video call to verify the match between the profile and the real person. Like Worldcoin's paper, the proof of human identity community has long held the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) that would be provided to those verified in the human identity registry.

Other projects are also on similar paths, utilizing social graphs to verify human identity, including BrightID's video call verification, where everyone verifies each other, Idena's ongoing captcha creation and solving games, and Circles' trust-based circles.

The greatest appeal of these social verification-based platforms may lie in their seeming non-invasiveness compared to Worldcoin, which requires you to scan your iris on a metal orb. Some of these methods, such as Idena's captcha "checkpoint ritual," even seem to retain a degree of anonymity without requiring extensive personal data sharing or third-party identity verification centers.

The Future of Human Identity

As artificial intelligence continues to advance and exhibit characteristics increasingly resembling human behavior, designing novel human identity verification mechanisms becomes increasingly important, not only for the incentive measures discussed in universal basic income and other human identity verification projects but more importantly as a way to better purify and regulate future social networks.

However, from data privacy to process invasiveness to determining the validity of human identity, this process involves many trade-offs and is one of the well-known "challenges in cryptocurrency." As Vitalik pointed out, there seems to be no ideal form of human identity verification, and he suggested a possible hybrid path: a biometric-based startup approach that transitions to more social graph-based methods in the long term.

Looking ahead, this field needs more process, code, and data transparency. In short, there cannot be an ironic paradox where users need to "trust that this is a trustless solution." Only in this way can we truly create a social network foundation that aligns with the original vision of decentralization and privacy in cryptocurrency.