AI makes manufacturing "fake people" cheaper and cheaper, while proving you're human becomes harder and harder: the identity business from Dead Souls to irises and palm prints.

World (formerly Worldcoin) has verified more than 18 million people through its Orb iris-scanning hardware as the cost of proving personhood shifts from software checks to biometric hardware, according to a Token Dispatch analysis. The piece frames the problem through SMS-verification black markets, where a single Telegram code cost $0.34 on Dec. 19, 2025, versus $0.21 for Facebook and $0.25 for WhatsApp, while CAPTCHA-solving consumes roughly 500 person-years of global internet users' time daily, valued at about $1.3 billion annually at U.S. minimum wage. Crypto's answer to Sybil attacks has been to weight influence by scarce resources—Bitcoin's proof-of-work and proof-of-stake capital—but neither delivers one-person-one-vote allocation. World's Orb relies on custom infrared hardware and secure multi-party computation to split iris codes across servers, yet deployment remains constrained by device cost and logistics, and in low-income regions token airdrop value can exceed a day's local earnings, inviting intermediaries to recruit real residents to scan and resell credentials. Palm-vein systems such as Amazon One and WeChat's palm payment offer better usability than iris scans but face the same trade-off: high assurance requires dedicated infrared sensors rather than ordinary phone cameras. The next test is whether decentralized identity can balance hardware-grade security against global accessibility.