At Devcon's first India edition, the hardest warnings were about what digital ID does to people

An 11-year-old girl in India died in 2017 after her family failed to link their Aadhaar biometric ID to the food ration database and was struck off the rolls as ghosts. "Within two months of them being struck off she died of hunger," the development economist Reetika Khera told Devcon, in the talk that closed the conference's academic track on November 5. 1 ↗1

Khera, a professor of economics at IIT Delhi, brought numbers from a 2017 study of randomly sampled villages. Where ration shops had gone online with biometric checks, Khera said, "the transaction failure rate was five times as high," and the time people spent went from 80 minutes to 107. When the government counted the names it removed as money saved, "these exclusions were being passed off as savings." 1 ↗1

One widely repeated figure got special treatment. A headline said Aadhaar could save $11 billion across India's welfare programs. Khera said the World Bank estimate turned out to rest on a footnote pointing to a policy brief by an anthropologist, which said only that India's welfare budget was $11 billion. 1

The talk before Khera's picked up the legal side. Subhashis Banerjee, a computer science professor at Ashoka University, went through the Supreme Court's Aadhaar ruling, where the majority found the system proportionate and the dissent found it unconstitutional. "Trained Supreme Court judges applied the same test on the same data," Banerjee said, and they reached opposite conclusions. India's privacy judgment puts privacy in dignity and autonomy more than in secrecy, Banerjee argued, and "I don't think that computer science has techniques to deal with stuff like dignity, autonomy." 2 ↗2

This was the first Devcon held in India, and the team opening it on November 3 gave access as a reason for coming. "Indians are actually the ones blocked from accessing our events," Devcon's team lead said, talking about visas. Roughly 40% of attendees were from India and 60% were first-timers, by the organizers' rough count. 7 ↗7

The builders on stage were working on versions of the same problem. Moven Tsai of the Ethereum Foundation described zero-knowledge proofs added to Taiwan's citizen digital certificate, a card issued since 2003 that has more than 11 million users. PTT, a volunteer-run Taiwanese forum, wanted to keep election-season bot armies out without collecting phone numbers or ID numbers. "You can actually add a privacy layer on top of what you have already," Tsai said. The proof takes 5 seconds on an iPhone and about 20 on a laptop. It has been tested with 20 users, and the launch slipped to stay clear of political friction around the election. 3 ↗3

A November 6 workshop took on an Indian case directly: a national medical exam whose paper leaked, sending more than 2 million students to a retake. The hosts, Yuting Jiang, Nicolas Gimenez and Pree, reported that the room split into five clusters and shared one point: "If questions are drawn at random anyone should be able to check the draw." The split was just as plain. "I don't think blockchain does anything here," one participant said. 4 ↗4

The last talk of the conference moved the worry from ID cards to hardware. Péter Szilágyi ran a language model against closed firmware, expecting it to find nothing. "It found 15 zero day vulnerabilities," Szilágyi said, along with three secure boot escapes. The scan took about an hour on a $100 subscription. Reproducing the results on real hardware took a full day. "I was absolutely the bottleneck," Szilágyi said. 5 ↗5

Joe Lubin, the CEO of MetaMask, had sounded calmer that morning. Quantum computing and machine intelligence give Ethereum useful deadlines, Lubin said, but "I think they are overly paranoid timelines." Lubin's read of the record so far: "It hasn't really been software vulnerabilities that have been the problem. It's been human vulnerabilities." 6 ↗6

This recap draws on the 35 of Devcon's 200 recorded talks with transcripts on StreamETH so far, so it covers a slice of the week. StreamETH records Ethereum event talks and keeps them in a searchable archive with transcripts. ↗8