1. Why the orb?<p>So they say it’s about UBI, but… what’s wrong with the ways we establish human-ness now?<p>Usually it’s a combination of national ids, photo ids (also a kind of biometric) and respected persons like doctors or licensed engineers attesting you exist. No one method is dominant, which has its privacy benefits.<p>The eyeball scan, plus the cryptoasset incentive, seems like a strategy that could place this company as a very dominant broker of human-ness. Regardless of whether WorldCoin becomes a useful financial token.<p>2. What’s even good about the Orb versus something more boring<p>So the orb bootstraps a user into having a private key. So I have all the same privacy difficulties of managing my own key, don’t I? It’s not like I can pay for things with my eyeball.<p>So if we have special licensed operators, with controlled hardware, why not generate a key randomly with that hardware?<p>Presumably they have provisions for transitioning you to new keys when your iris changes, so… if that is done by a controlled hardware and a licensed orb franchise, why not just use regular national or photo ID methods, sign that data with the Orb-station’s private key, and we’re done?