WLD | WORLDCOIN & Sam Altman 🌎What if I told you, all you need to do to get free money is to look into this Orb! would you do it?
Worldcoin wants to give everyone free crypto in exchange for scanning their eyeballs which at this time, over 2 million people have signed up
The project has garnered serious attention and has early investors such as Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, LinkedIn Cofounder Reid Hoffman, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko,
Polkadot founder Gavin Wood and even the infamous degen SBF himself!
In March 2022, a funding round brought Worldcoin’s valuation to an eye watering $3 billion.
The price of Worldcoin is $2.2 today with a 24hour trading volume of 300 million dollar but
Why are VCs pouring money into Worldcoin and why does Worldcoin want your eyeballs ?!
Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, is co-founded by Alex Blania and Sam Altman.you might be more familiar with Sam as he is also the founder behind OpenAI, the company behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT, which took the world by storm since its release in November last year.
The wild success of ChatGPT also spawned an AI arms race between tech giants, which probably
means AI will only get more advanced from now.
The rapid advancement in AI is now worrying the public as AIs are now able to ace the SAT, create increasingly convincing deepfakes, and probably most concerningly, remove the need for humans in the workforce.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but Sam has a solution for the identity problem as well as for aiding people whose jobs are taken by AI…Worldcoin. In a world set to be increasingly impacted by AI, Worldcoin purportedly aims to provide individuals a way to verify ‘personhood’ as well as access to universal basic income.To achieve this, Worldcoin is attempting to create a global digital identity and financial network using blockchain technology.
Worldcoin is currently testing its smart contract on the Polygon Network but is in collaboration
with Ethereum Layer2 Optimism to build on and migrate to its network.The team has launched World App in May, a non custodial wallet which enables its users to transact with the Worldcoin token and a few other cryptos, as well as interact with dApps on the Ethereum ecosystem.
However, the key feature of World App is enabling World ID,Its is a global digital passport that allows users to prove their identity while preserving their private information through the use of cryptography and zero knowledge proofs.
World ID can help establish ‘proof of personhood’,meaning to prove that someone is a real, unique human. Proof-of-personhood could be useful to prevent the spread of misinformation by realistic AI-generated content, as well as limiting Sybil-attacks, which are basically online attacks where a single attacker assumes multiple fake identities to gain influence over a network.
As World ID gets more adoption, it’s meant to be used as a method to sign in to websites, mobile apps, and crypto dApps, perform actions such as voting in DAOs or even government elections, as well as receiving aid from NGOs and government programs.
As of now, to obtain a verified World ID,users are required to gaze into the infamous Orb.
The Orb will perform an iris scan and a machine learning algorithm within the Orb will ensure
that the eyeballs scanned are indeed real human irises and not something else, like colored contact lenses or... a cat.
Then the iris scan will be converted to a hashcode or as Worldcoin calls it, ‘IrisHash’. As soon as the code is generated, the Orb supposedly deletes any images from the scan. Within the Orb, the IrisHash is encrypted with a private key before being uploaded on-chain and cross-checked with the existing catalog of IrisHashes.
If the IrisHash does not match any records,it will be added to the catalog. When Worldcoin launches, each verified World ID owner will then be eligible to claim their one-time airdrop of MIL:WLD tokens. which worth 50$ right now
Many have asked why World ID needs iris scans for proof-of-personhood.Supposedly, it’s because the human iris has a very high degree of randomness, making it a much more effective biometric than faces or fingerprints to differentiate between billions of individuals and establish proof-of-personhood.
Unsurprisingly, Worldcoin’s decision to create a global digital identity network using iris scans has raised a lot of eyebrows, understandably so due to its uncanny similarity to what you’d
see in a Black Mirror episode.
Just as Worldcoin was introduced back in October 2021, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden slammed the use of iris scans. Although Worldcoin has promised that the iris scans will not be saved, Snowden pointed out that the hashcodes produced by these scans are still saved and would match future scans, and that the use of zk-proofs doesn’t justify the use of biometrics for anti-fraud.
There is also pushback from the crypto community- some argued that the ability to use multiple
accounts in Web3 for privacy is a feature, not a flaw; and though most agreed that Web3 is in need of protection against sybil-attacks, it is not necessary to have 100% sybil-resistance
as long as there is a method that can prevent a large enough percentage of sybils.
Additionally, MIT Technology Review released a damning report last year against Worldcoin
on the revelations upon investigating Worldcoin’s field testing.Much of its early field testing is conducted in poorer, developing countries such as Indonesia,Sudan and Kenya where data privacy regulations are weaker and whose communities were the most financially impacted by the pandemic.
The lengthy report revealed that Orb operators were given limited information during recruitment, other than being made aware that their payment is based on the number of signups they achieve.
Operators were then employing strategies such as hosting giveaways of cash and Airpods to encourage sign-ups while providing participants little information on Worldcoin’s campaign.
On top of that, Worldcoin claimed that only an iris scan is needed for sign-ups.However, orb operators also requested email addresses and phone numbers of participants, which a Worldcoin representative denied as part of the data collection practice.
A black market for verified iris scans has even popped up in China where the Worldcoin app isn’t supposed to be available, though the Worldcoin team is attempting to contain the issue.
Furthermore, the project was found to have made contradictory claims of compliance with EU data regulations and was accused of lacking transparency in its data collection practices.
While it seems that Worldcoin is neck-deep in controversies, the project has just received
another $115 million in a series C funding round last month. Onboarding billions of people to create a global digital identity and financial network to distribute universal basic income is a tall order.
With the backlash it's getting from its field-testing and many wondering if Worldcoin is simply
a cover for mass data collection, it remains to be seen whether Worldcoin can deliver on their promises.
Unlike offshore exchanges, none of the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase Kraken has Worldcoin listed. Worldcoin notes that WLD tokens are not available to persons or companies residing in the United States, however World ID and TFH's World App are still available in the United States.
also the founder of the security agency Slow Mist said that if Worldcoin succeeds, it will be an evil product, but there is a high probability of failure. the iris is almost the most stable and long-lasting unique mark of human beings. The promise of the Worldcoin white paper is good, but it is still possible for hackers to paint a portrait through the hash information!
