Source publication: November 7, 2026, at 16:52:36 (UTC+8). Written by Thejaswini M A of The Token Dispatch; Chinese translation by TechFlow.
An equal token airdrop to every wallet is not necessarily an equal distribution to every person. If one participant can cheaply create thousands of addresses, that participant can collect thousands of allocations.
This is the economic problem behind proof of personhood: establishing that a participant is a real, distinct human rather than another account controlled by someone already participating. The source article examines why that proof has a cost—and why neither resource-based blockchain mechanisms nor biometric devices eliminate every trade-off.
When accounts become claims on benefits
The article opens with Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls. Its buyer acquires the names of deceased serfs who remain on official census records. Landowners can shed the associated tax burden, while the buyer can use those paper assets to seek loans from the state bank.
The internet version involves accounts rather than census records. Email addresses, social profiles and blockchain wallets can be created in large numbers. Whenever a system distributes benefits per account without establishing who controls those accounts, creating additional identities can become profitable.
In crypto, this is known as a Sybil attack: one participant presents multiple identities as if they were independent participants. The article traces the term to Microsoft researcher John Douceur’s 2002 paper.
For token distribution and voting, the key distinction is straightforward: counting wallets does not establish how many people are participating.
The market price of getting past verification
The article cites University of Cambridge researchers who track the cost of buying SMS verification codes. On December 19, 2025, the reported prices were:
- Telegram: $0.34 per code.
- Facebook: $0.21.
- WhatsApp: $0.25.
These prices fluctuate with demand. They illustrate that obtaining the inputs for fake-account creation is itself a market.
SIM cards are one route into that market. According to the article, the US Secret Service seized 300 SIM servers and 100,000 prepaid SIM cards in September 2025. The group involved had used the equipment to register thousands of social and payment accounts.
Verification also imposes costs on legitimate users. The article cites research estimating that internet users collectively spend about 500 person-years every day solving CAPTCHAs, such as identifying distorted letters or selecting traffic lights. Valued at the US minimum hourly wage, the estimated annual time cost was approximately $1.3 billion.
That expenditure does not guarantee protection. The article also cites a 2024 study in which researchers using multimodal vision models achieved a reported 100% automated solve rate on the mainstream visual CAPTCHA tests they examined.
Blockchains can count resources instead of people
Bitcoin takes a different approach: it does not try to establish one vote per human.
As the article explains, Satoshi Nakamoto recognized that voting by IP address would be vulnerable because one person could obtain many proxy addresses. Bitcoin instead uses proof of work, in which miners expend computing power and electricity calculating hashes.
The article contrasts this with proof of stake, which bases participation weight on staked capital. Both approaches rely on scarce resources rather than treating each newly created account as an independent person.
But resource weighting and human uniqueness answer different questions. A system can make influence costly to acquire without establishing one-person-one-vote participation. That distinction matters when the intended token allocation or voting rule is explicitly based on people rather than computing power or capital.
World’s iris verification: stronger hardware, harder deployment
World, formerly Worldcoin, attempts to verify people directly through its dedicated Orb device. Infrared cameras capture facial and iris information to check that someone is human and has not already registered, after which the system generates a unique digital identity credential.
The source reports that, according to official figures, more than 18 million people had completed verification by the time of publication.
The article presents dedicated hardware as central to World’s security approach. An ordinary camera interface could be exposed to a fabricated video feed; controlling the sensors, lenses and lighting is intended to make such manipulation harder.
The trade-off is physical deployment. Precision devices must be manufactured, transported and made accessible to users.
For data storage, the article says World uses secure multiparty computation (SMPC): iris codes are divided into encrypted fragments held on servers operated by different organizations, rather than placing the complete biometric database with one central organization.
Yet verifying a real person does not necessarily eliminate economic manipulation. The article describes a possible attack in which intermediaries pay people to undergo iris verification and then resell their credentials. Where an airdrop’s token value exceeds a resident’s daily living costs, such recruitment may become economically attractive. This is presented as an attack scenario, not a documented incident in the article.
Palm recognition faces a similar hardware constraint
The article also examines Amazon One’s retail palm-payment system and Tencent WeChat’s palm recognition, deployed at transit gates and convenience stores.
These approaches combine surface palm patterns with vein structures beneath the skin, detected using near-infrared light. The article explains that the infrared absorption characteristics associated with blood flow make this harder to imitate than a flat facial photograph.
It also argues that presenting a palm can feel more comfortable and fit everyday checkout or gate use better than positioning an eye near a scanner, without requiring users to remove sunglasses or lean toward a camera.
However, the underlying trade-off remains: achieving a high level of resistance to forgery requires dedicated infrared vein sensors, not simply a cheap smartphone front-facing camera.
The token-design lesson
The source’s central point is that benefits distributed per person create an incentive to manufacture additional identities. Making accounts expensive, weighting participation by resources and verifying bodies are different responses—not interchangeable solutions.
For a token mechanism, the important question is therefore what it actually counts: accounts, resources or verified people. Biometric systems bring that last option closer, but the article leaves their core challenge unresolved: balancing specialized hardware security with broad access, while accounting for the incentives to buy or transfer credentials.