HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle. If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain.
There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted.
Given the interesting potential of the idea, someone was going to eventually work on it. Worldcoin should have approached the problem slightly differently. First, testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it. Since the idea is controversial, they would have gained more goodwill by initially launching in the EU/North America under the more strict legal frameworks. Second, make the orb look less dystopian. Third, launch with a non-economic use case. Worldcoin won't solve UBI or inequality in one shot, so why not launch with a lower stakes use case such as an online forum or community that requires proof of personhood to post?
Sadly I think because of all the missteps, I can't see Worldcoin tackling the proof of personhood problem in the longterm. I hope another project comes along and makes an attempt more "sensitively".