What I find even more dystopian is that there's already a black market for those digital eyeball credentials:<p>> Meanwhile, a black market emerged on Chinese social media and ecommerce sites. Sellers were offering KYC verifications for the World App, which offers wallet and ID services. The credentials often come from developing countries like Cambodia and Kenya, according to social media posts. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-worldcoin-credentials-pops-up-in-china/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...</a>
The OP quotes one of the investors:<p><i>"Worldcoin has a unique opportunity to establish and scale a new privacy-preserving primitive for the Internet..."</i>, etc.<p>I'm not going to quote the rest because everyone here is tired of corporate-speak.<p>Translation from corporate-speak:<p><i>"We're high as a kite on the vision of managing identification credentials for everyone everywhere."</i><p>---<p>PS. Let me add: I believe Sam and his team genuinely have good intentions. But good intentions do not guarantee a good outcome.
What I don't understand about this at all, and it's alluded to in the article mentioning black market orbs, how can some decentralized system with Iris scans prevent fraud?<p>Can't someone just get their hands on one of these orbs and start uploading fake unique ids to their network? Surely it can't be impossible to generate a fake iris scan.<p>The only way to make sure nobody is abusing this would be to have trusted employees verify you're a real person, in which case why don't just start a non-profit in Switzerland or wherever that just runs a database of scans, what do you need this coin for?
This is one of the most blatant MLM token projects. Inviting new marks and getting benefits from the number of people you've brought into the scam, conferences, targeting of the vulnerable populations, all the hallmarks of a typical pyramid scheme.
This future was foretold in 1993: [<a href="https://youtu.be/XoGkp7PPEfI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/XoGkp7PPEfI</a>]
I guess if you don't have any real ideas, you scan other people's retinas ("World"-Coin), appropriate other people's creations ("Open"-AI), insert yourself in the process and sell everything back to them.<p>In the end, you will have created nothing of value. A single Renoir painting is worth more than all this nonsense.<p>I wonder how the world worked in the 1990s without such luminaries. The answer is: better!
This kind of headline would normally be torn apart by HN for being somewhat uncharitable for its word choice. But in this case, I'm sure the crypto angle will inspire a knee-jerk negative reaction.<p>Instead, here are a few links for the curious, which explain how the techniques Worldcoin employs may be one of the only viable methods to generate a totally privacy-preserving form of internet native identification and Sybil resistance.<p>The result is that no images of irises ever need to be saved, unlike CLEAR or other surveillance state friendly techniques that create dangerous repositories of private information.<p>1. Humanness in the Age of AI: <a href="https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-of-ai" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...</a><p>This piece explains other techniques to identify personhood and why they've fallen short.<p>2. Proof of Personhood and Why It's Needed: <a href="https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/proof-of-personhood-what-it-is-why-its-needed" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/proof-of-personhood-wha...</a><p>And outline of the general motivation.<p>3. Privacy at Worldcoin: <a href="https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive</a><p>Some of the extreme lengths they've gone to make it impossible to reconstruct who is behind the unique identifier.