When Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has been asked lately about his favorite projects being built on the blockchain, he often names Proof of Humanity. Created by the non-profit Democracy Earth Foundation, Proof of Humanity looks something like an online phonebook, on which people can sign up and add their citizenship, degrees or skills. But while the concept is very simple on its surface, Buterin hopes that the system will be an onramp to all sorts of more advanced benefits, including better and fairer voting processes, universal basic income and social media networks that aren’t overrun with bots and misinformation.
To sign up for the registry, you make a short video of yourself, put down a returnable deposit of .157 ETH (about $400) and find one person who is already certified to vouch for you. Your profile then gets added to a theoretically secure and decentralized registry on the blockchain (as opposed to your data living on a Facebook or LinkedIn server). If other members of the community feel you aren’t real, or use the platforms’ facial recognition tools to determine you have duplicate accounts, they can dispute your profile. All of the hoops you have to jump through, combined with the continual communal monitoring of accounts, are meant to discourage the creation of bots or fake accounts in a way that Facebook or Twitter do not.
For this week’s newsletter, I spoke with Santiago Siri, the founder of the Democracy Earth Foundation and the lead creator of Proof of Humanity, as well as a couple blockchain experts who are more skeptical about Proof of Humanity’s goal to become the “internet’s social backbone.” Siri himself doesn’t necessarily see Proof of Humanity as a definitive issuer of internet IDs, but rather one step toward breaking out of what he terms the “colonial internet” controlled by a few Big Tech giants. Here are some of the main problems Siri hopes Proof of Humanity can solve–and the challenges that the project faces.
Continue reading: https://time.com/6142810/proof-of-humanity/
To sign up for the registry, you make a short video of yourself, put down a returnable deposit of .157 ETH (about $400) and find one person who is already certified to vouch for you. Your profile then gets added to a theoretically secure and decentralized registry on the blockchain (as opposed to your data living on a Facebook or LinkedIn server). If other members of the community feel you aren’t real, or use the platforms’ facial recognition tools to determine you have duplicate accounts, they can dispute your profile. All of the hoops you have to jump through, combined with the continual communal monitoring of accounts, are meant to discourage the creation of bots or fake accounts in a way that Facebook or Twitter do not.
For this week’s newsletter, I spoke with Santiago Siri, the founder of the Democracy Earth Foundation and the lead creator of Proof of Humanity, as well as a couple blockchain experts who are more skeptical about Proof of Humanity’s goal to become the “internet’s social backbone.” Siri himself doesn’t necessarily see Proof of Humanity as a definitive issuer of internet IDs, but rather one step toward breaking out of what he terms the “colonial internet” controlled by a few Big Tech giants. Here are some of the main problems Siri hopes Proof of Humanity can solve–and the challenges that the project faces.
Continue reading: https://time.com/6142810/proof-of-humanity/
