Product

Why do people think proof of human is useful?

To avoid bots in digital products: leaving reviews, sniping memecoins, generating replies

exploring new frontiers in tech, ai, crypto, farcaster DAU since 2023, product designer since 2018, portfolio → /basedstudio

What happens if you pay people to do that or rent out their proof of human credentials?

People only have one proof of human credential to rent out so you have to convince many individual people to rent theirs to continue to spam/attack. And because people can only get one themselves, they take risk in lending theirs out.

In other words, the marginal cost of acquiring an ID and performing an attack is much higher when (1) only humans can get an ID [personhood] and (2) humans can only get one [uniqueness]. There are fewer IDs in the market and require more coordination to obtain.

CTO @a16zcrypto, lover of https://github.com/a16z/awesome-farcaster

It’s a kind of audience segmentation tool + a way to enforce second-degree price discrimination.

Right now, bots are not only low-value users but they can inflict negative externalities on high-value human users. In the future this could change (bots start spending) but the need to segment users, adjust “pricing” (speaking loosely), and isolate negative externalities from low-value users will remain.

But why do I care if you’re human? Does that make you inherently more “valuable” to a protocol than a bot?

Yes and people may not realize selling something like that is worse than selling your passport 

With passport you can either claim it stolen or issue one in another country


But here there’s no workaround really