The creator of interoperability blockchain Polkadot (DOT) says that one use case for the blockchains is crucial for their mass adoption.
In a new interview on macro guru Raoul Pal’s podcast, Polkadot creator Gavin Wood says that proof of personhood – or a mechanism that digitally verifies a person’s humanity – could be the killer blockchain application that triggers widespread adoption.
“What I’ve come to think about in this regard [during] the last couple of years is that blockchains have so far only really mastered doing scale of value – money basically. They haven’t mastered the concept of personhood, it’s something that we rely on in everyday life for almost everything.
You go to a shop to buy, I don’t know, a big piece of computer equipment [and] they make sure that you are a person before you can spend over $1,000. You don’t notice it, but it’s a necessary element of modern society, at least in the West.”
Wood goes on to note just how prevalent proof of personhood is in Western society but warns that we should not rely on governments to verify who is and isn’t a person.
“We just do it naturally, [we] expect to be able to see a face and so many transactions rely on that. So much of our social fabric relies on [proof of personhood] that it needs to be part of blockchain before blockchain is going to be a big part of society…
The question is: how do you do it without relying on things like governments to tell you who’s a person who’s not? I’m not a big fan of the Worldcoin approach, I think that’s just too much trust in the Worldcoin apparatus. I’m not a big fan of the KYC (know-your-customer) passport approach, I think it’s too much reliance on governments…
I wouldn’t, broadly speaking, rely on any government stuff to power blockchain and this needs to sit at a pretty low level for it to be useful so we need to come up with quite a lot more inventive means of building personhood into blockchain.”
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