Vitalik Buterin has reservations about Sam Altman’s World project

The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, says that the digital identification approach promoted by Sam Altman’s World Project presents real risk of confidentiality.

Previously known as WorldcoinWorld was created under the tools of Altman and Alex Blania for humanity. The organization says that it can help make the distinction between AI agents and human beings By scanning the eyeballs of users and by creating a unique identity for them on the blockchain.

In A long postButerin noted that the global approach to use Zero knowledge tests To verify human identity, while protecting anonymity is also explored by various digital passport and digital identification projects. And he recognized that “on the surface”, the use of a “digital identifier wrapped in ZK” could contribute to “protect our social media, our vote and all kinds of Internet services against the handling of sybs and bots, all without compromising confidentiality.”

However, Buterin has suggested that this approach is always limited to a “person” identification system, which creates significant risks.

“In the real world, pseudonymat generally requires having several accounts … So under an identity document to one per person, even if it is wrapped in ZK, we risk getting closer to a world where all your activities must be disabled under a single public identity,” he wrote. “In a world of growing risks (for example, drones), withdraw the option so that people protect themselves by pseudonymat have significant drawbacks.”

As a concrete excess risks, Buterin noted that the United States government had recently started require candidates for student and university visas To define their social media accounts in public, so that it can filter these accounts for “hostility”. Likewise, he suggested that even if there is no public link between different accounts created under a single digital identifier, “a government could force someone to reveal its secret, so that it can see all their activity.”

How, then, governments, online services and anyone can hope to verify that someone is a real human being without forcing them to compromise their private life? Buterin pleads for an approach emphasizing “pluralist identity”, in which “there is no single dominant issuing authority, whether it is a person, an institution or a platform”.

Pluralist systems can be “explicit” (they ask users to verify their identity according to the testimonies of users already verified) or “implicit” (based on a variety of different identity systems) – in its opinion, these represent “the best realistic solution”.

“In my opinion, the ideal result of identity projects” one per person “which exist today is to merge identity based on social graph”, concluded Buterin.