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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does Worldcoin just seem like a massive ploy to get one's hands on a ton of biometric data? Scan your eyes and get $20 in funny money that may or may not be redeemable later. The coin will crash and burn like all the others leaving Sam with a treasure trove of biometrics data to do whatever he wants with.

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What's funny is that in the crypto world, projects that have similar tokenomics as Worldcoin were often called "Sam coins" - low float, high market cap, and a vesting schedule that allows the founding team to relentlessly dump on speculators and holders.

Trouble is, the Sam in question with these coins was Sam Bankman-Fried

I've never heard that term before, usually such coins are called shitcoins. And while I'm not denying SBF did that with his coin, he certainly didn't pioneer it; XRP has been doing it for years before SBF got into crypto.

What else can it be, given that is necessary step of their plan? At a minimum, the biometric data could support the company's existence. Coins and whatever are built upon this data. It used to be just pageviews/eyeballs, now it is literal eyeballs.

The purpose of the scanning is to just have a different talking point so people will buy the coin. It is a scam like all the others. If they'd just launched it without scanning, would anybody be interested in buying it or even talking about it?

To what end, though? I can't claim you are wrong, but I just don't see the benefit without resorting to ludicrous movie plots that largely don't hold up outside of entertainment value.

The entirety of "big data" is built on get data->???->profit.

That's what's always been behind the push for ai, the hope that these ML programs can extract gold from the ocean.

Right, but most "big data" money is made from selling people tools to process data. Few seem to have any amazing use case that benefits from a ton of data. LLMs come to mind, but that is from a very different type of data, all told. Even medical data is only useful if you have a ton more data per person.

Iris identification is just not that useful? Even in movies, the goal is to get a high value target's iris to fake an entry. But, while entertaining in movies, this is not really a thing that makes any sense at a mass level. Is it?

Big data is built on "get data -> increase sales -> profit". The entire discipline is built over the idea of extending a few well known experiences from the 90's and 00's.

Almost the entire thing is bullshit, of course, but the entire pipeline was always well specified.

I wonder if it's a ploy to either secure a monopoly on iris-scanning biometrics, or poison the market for everyone else?

Either they have a monopoly on it and it's all good (it's fine for them to have the data since they are verifier anyway), or if not, then it makes sure no other company can exist in this space since they have a massive database of high-resolution biometrics that could presumably allow to bypass any competitor's product, making it a non-starter.

I may be wrong, but isn’t Worldcoin using zero knowledge proofs in their system? It would mean that nobody has access to the private data behind them - not even WC.

...if you take them at their word. Oh, and ignore the bit where they will give you extra money if you agree to let them keep your biometric data on file to "improve their algorithm".

> isn’t Worldcoin using zero knowledge proofs in their system? It would mean that nobody has access to the private data behind them - not even WC.

No, it wouldn't mean that. It would only mean that entities who verify the zero knowledge proofs do not learn anything about the data except that it satisfies the proved property.

The data on its own doesn't seem valuable. Having a "real human / really who they claim to be" authentication API that internet companies rely on for all sorts of things seems valuable. I assumed that was the goal, to create such a service.

It's definitely not only you

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