One solution was the universally hated worldcoin. I hate it as well and don't think it could work, but the problem they meant to tackle is very real and we should talk about it.
I think we are going to need some kind of certificates vouching for humans being humans.
I wonder if there could be a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous. Although it seems like it should limit it to giving you only a few certs a month. But then bad actors could start buying those certs from people themselves. Still would make it much harder to spam requests.
I could totally imagine Verisign or something doing this. Imagine a world where you have to pay a yearly renewal fee to keep your humanity. They’d love it. Of course, it’s not a claim that the user is a human, but rather the user has a slightly difficult to obtain certificate that had to be requested by a human.
> I wonder if there could be a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous.
This is possible with the German identity card. (I have no idea but my guess would be that this is possible with other identity cards from Europe or around the world too.) You can even make age checks with out transmitting the actual birthday. It just returns whether the card holder has or is above the age in question. You can't cross reference those certs with other sites.
It really grinds my gears if a identity check wants a video call or what ever instead of them using eID features.
> a service which you use with your real identity registered, but the certs it gives you are untracked to still allow for possibility of being anonymous.
The best you can do is pseudonymity. If the attestations are completely anonymous then you have no way of dealing with bad actors, like those who sell their digital identity to spammers.
> One solution was the universally hated worldcoin. I hate it as well and don't think it could work, but the problem they meant to tackle is very real and we should talk about it.
No it is not a solution. What prevents me from "selling" my biometrics to someone to be used for nefarious purposes? Or you are proposing putting an orb in from of every computer and not allow accessing the Web without scanning user's iris every time they type web-site address? Even if such dystopia get implemented we will end up with situation when bunch of real people in third-word countries are getting paid 2$ a day to sit in front of a computer playing games all day while getting their eyes periodicaly scanned to allow spammer botnet to browse the Web.
> I think we are going to need some kind of certificates vouching for humans being humans.
Who are "we"? Me and probably absolute majority of other users are perfectly fine with the way the Web currently works and don't care about the cost of fraud for Google's ad empire.
Ah, yes, I absolutely trust Sam Altman to keep all of my personal data, to never resell it to people I have absolutely no idea of. Just like I absolutely trust him to not completely manipulate worldcoin and generate tokens that will be given to bots. He's totally not in a position where he creates both the problem and the solution.
I think we are going to need some kind of certificates vouching for humans being humans.