People got scared when they started scanning thousands of people's eyeballs in Africa. It didn't matter that Sam Altman had a good explanation for doing it. Because cryptocurrency is involved, it must be bad, right?
Neither of these two is fulfilled here, so yeah - it's bad.
I have no interest in tying my ability to conduct transactions and hold wealth to an ID that is designed to be immutable. But that's just me. I also lack faith in any system founded on biometrics, as it's a technology that's implicitly sold as something that is nearly impossible to exploit, which I simply have no reason to believe.
If there are people out there who are turned away by cryptocurrency being involved, well, I can't say I entirely blame them. The nerdy advocates and developers of cryptocurrencies and the countless "gurus" have failed to adequately onboard the public or counter the bad PR from the media. When setting up a custodial cryptocurrency account takes more steps than signing up for a credit card, the fees are relatively high, and stories pile up of clueless people falling for scams involving cryptocurrency, as well as the barrage of FUD from folks who are usually ignorant, it's no wonder everyday people would run in the other direction as soon as "cryptocurrency" is mentioned.
Is blockchain technology involved? Then it's worth a look.
I want to give food or money to 1000 distinct people in some part of the world.
How do I make sure that 1000 distinct people do it and it's not just 100 people getting in the line 10 times each?
What source of identity does everyone have (yes, there are exceptions) and on the more difficult to lose side (industrial accidents are more likely to damage fingers than eyes)?
I mean if your goal is to end fraud there seems to be several options that don’t require a blockchain or some custom eye scanning device.
How does worldcoin solve the issue of a local abusing a position of power to direct everyone to transfer their funds to their account or with holding some other resource to force people to give them their aid?
If the zero knowledge can protect that and the wallet id just can identify that you’ve done an eye scan at some point, the wallet id is still as good as knowing the iris hash. Sure crypto evangelists will use sub wallets and multiple accounts and all that jazz to best preserve their privacy (all things that if possible make sybil attacks possible) but most people will just have the one wallet. Eventually everyone who pays attention will be able to identify them using just the wallet.
So I doubt the effectiveness at preventing sybil attacks, I doubt the effectiveness of how privacy preserving this is, and if used beyond Worldcoin transactions, it just becomes an immutable global id. A social security number that requires an iris to generate.
There's no biometric sensors that are guaranteed to be free from tampering. There's no way to prove that the bits and bytes that say "I scanned person X's iris" actually corresponds to a legitimate iris scan. There's no way to stop someone from going town to town with their own iris scanners and claiming they need to scan eyes for the census or vaccines or any number of other things that people might think are real, only to use those scans to accept the money you mentioned in your comment. There's no way to prevent someone from perturbing those scans slightly to allow them to be re-used for new transactions in the future.
Extremely advanced credit card skimmers exist, and those subvert the security of little tiny computers embedded in the credit cards. If you think a picture of an iris is any better, I've got an NFT of a bridge to sell you.
Even if the food/money is perfectly evenly distributed via Worldcoin, a gang boss can have his muscle go around and threaten violence if people don't give him their share of the food/money. That's the problem, right?
The kind of injustice that spurs people to build Worldcoin can't be solved by Worldcoin.
The problem is a real one, lookup "sybil attacks", which is what I think Worldcoin is trying to defend against.
Government-issued ID card?
> How do I make sure that 1000 distinct people do it and it's not just 100 people getting in the line 10 times each?
Find people to do the distribution whom you trust to be able to recognize people who are cutting multiple times? I mean, you already have to trust them to do things like actually disburse the food to the people, and not skim off 30% to sell for their own profit or whatnot. And if you look into where aid distribution goes awry, it's largely not "100 people getting in the line 10 times each" but the distributors absconding with the aid instead of giving it to the intended recipients.
It's easy to think of reasons that wouldn't work particularly well in some parts of the world. That doesn't mean I'm actually onboard with scanning biometrics, especially those of people who haven't read enough dystopian science fiction to be skeptical of that plan.
Government issued ID cards are forgeable and states not too difficult to get officially (the classic example of a spy with four different identities). For that matter, multiple different forms of identification can complicate the matter. Consider https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification - I have a passport, I have a drivers license. There are individuals who have both of those identifications and a Tribal Nation identity card and a Veteran Health Identification Card too. Four different forms of ID for the same person - can those each be used once?
I believe that Worldcoin is/was an attempt to solve some great societal issues with crypto currency tooling ... and is going to end up with many other ideas of how to solve social problems with technology in a "nope, that doesn't work" pile. Scanning eyeballs is an attempt to have one person to one identity - which may work, but it doesn't solve the related practical problems of distributing aid.
The point of government ID is that you have a complete government registry of allowed people, and ID cards are used to prove your association to that registry. For example, when I go to vote, there is a master list of everyone who is eligible to vote, and my name gets checked off the list. If I tried to vote again, well, my name is already checked off the list and I don't get to vote again because of that.
Or put differently, proof of identity isn't the same of proof authorization. ID cards prove identity; some other mechanism needs to prove authority to access the resource, and if necessary, it's that mechanism that prevents repeat access.
A list of voters, and when someone comes in you cross their name off the list. If it turns out they were lying, you'll find out when the actual voter turns up.
How much drift from the original does this allow? And if it can be updates, can that be abused or can people be coerced into handing over their accounts?