Seven decentralized personhood projects across four sybil-resistance approaches. The missing primitive for direct-to-human currency issuance.
A monetary system that issues currency to humans — universal basic income, demurrage-funded distribution, per-person allocation of any kind — runs straight into the Sybil problem: without a way to count unique people, anyone can claim a thousand allocations by spinning up a thousand wallets. The state solves this with national IDs. A state-free currency cannot rely on that.
For Money2069’s vision — a neutral, debt-free, value-preserving currency standard that outlasts any nation-state — some form of decentralized personhood proof is the missing primitive. It enables:
The identity layer itself must be state-free (no government ID required), privacy-preserving (verify humanity without revealing identity), inclusive (work without smartphones, passports, or Western infrastructure), and decentralized (no single point of failure or capture).
Four families of solutions have emerged. Each makes a different trade-off.
Physiological signals — iris, face, fingerprint — verified via specialized hardware or proprietary algorithms. The strongest sybil resistance available today. Trade-off: requires hardware (Orbs) or trust in a third-party recognition stack, and creates long-term privacy risk if biometric templates ever leak or correlate.
Re-uses the world's existing identity infrastructure — passports, national IDs — but with cryptography that proves the document is valid without revealing it. The strongest legal grounding, the easiest UX where issuance exists. Trade-off: excludes the undocumented, the unbanked, and roughly 1 billion people in low-issuance jurisdictions.
Coordinated human activity at a specific moment — synchronized puzzle ceremonies or live video meetings — proves both uniqueness and humanity without hardware or documents. Trade-off: doesn't scale to instant verification and requires participants to show up at the same time.
Existing verified humans vouch for new ones. No biometrics, no documents, no central authority — just a social graph that grows from a seed. Trade-off: bootstrapping is slow, small graphs are vulnerable to collusion, and onboarding speed is limited by the number of available certifiers.
Physiological signals — iris, face, fingerprint — verified via specialized hardware or proprietary algorithms. The strongest sybil resistance available today. Trade-off: requires hardware (Orbs) or trust in a third-party recognition stack, and creates long-term privacy risk if biometric templates ever leak or correlate.
Each verified human is enrolled by stepping in front of an Orb, which produces an iris code that is hashed and discarded. The result is a World ID — a zero-knowledge proof of unique humanity.
Layer-1 blockchain where every validator is a unique human verified via 3D facial liveness scanning. One-human-one-vote consensus and sybil-resistant infrastructure for downstream apps.
Re-uses the world's existing identity infrastructure — passports, national IDs — but with cryptography that proves the document is valid without revealing it. The strongest legal grounding, the easiest UX where issuance exists. Trade-off: excludes the undocumented, the unbanked, and roughly 1 billion people in low-issuance jurisdictions.
Reads the cryptographic chip embedded in modern e-passports and produces a zero-knowledge proof that you hold a valid passport — optionally including nationality or age — without revealing the document or your identity.
Coordinated human activity at a specific moment — synchronized puzzle ceremonies or live video meetings — proves both uniqueness and humanity without hardware or documents. Trade-off: doesn't scale to instant verification and requires participants to show up at the same time.
Every epoch (~21 days), all participants solve image-sequence flip puzzles simultaneously online. Synchronous attendance and time-bounded puzzle-solving prove personhood without biometrics or documents.
Identity is bootstrapped through short video calls between strangers ("connection parties") who confirm each other are humans. The resulting social graph of mutual confirmations replaces any central registry.
Existing verified humans vouch for new ones. No biometrics, no documents, no central authority — just a social graph that grows from a seed. Trade-off: bootstrapping is slow, small graphs are vulnerable to collusion, and onboarding speed is limited by the number of available certifiers.
On-chain registry on Ethereum where each profile combines a video, a signed declaration, and a vouch from an existing member. Disputes are resolved by Kleros jurors. Verified humans receive an ongoing UBI token.
Cryptocurrency network where each member must be certified by 5 existing members within a bounded social distance. Every verified human receives a monthly Universal Dividend (the Ğ1 "June" currency).
No single approach is sufficient yet. Each family has gaps an attacker can exploit at scale, and each excludes some legitimate humans. The path forward likely combines methods — biometric uniqueness as one signal, web-of-trust attestation as another, with documents as a fallback for those who have them.
For Money2069, the question isn’t which identity system is best. It’s whether any of them, alone or in combination, can scale to the point where direct-to-human issuance of a state-free currency becomes practically possible. These seven projects are the live experiments.
