Worldcoin: those controversies and criticisms

Author: Lucas Matney, author of Bankless; translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou

After years of hype, confusion and controversy, WorldCoin is finally live.

This bold move aims not only to create a unified database of human online transactions via iris scanner orb verification, but also to create a widely accessible encrypted payment system that instantly rewards users with tokens to incentivize them to join the network .

When Worldcoin launched, it reached a fully diluted value (FDV) of $22 billion, a figure that puts the network’s maximum token count higher than most other fixed-cap crypto projects such as Solana, Optimism, and Arbitrum.

We recently interviewed Worldcoin founders Sam Altman and Alex Blania. The conversation focused on the concept and execution of the project, which faces a number of hurdles in gaining widespread adoption, one of the main hurdles being massive resistance from the crypto industry — so, what happened?

After Worldcoin’s high-profile launch, the community spoke out; only a few expressed support for the token, and most expressed concerns about its various potential problems.

Criticism of Worldcoin can basically be divided into two categories:

· Inherent criticism of biometric “proof of personality” and Worldcoin’s implementation

· Inherent criticism of the WLD token and its distribution

1**, real person**

Let’s look at the first critical point. V God wrote a long blog post on this topic. Unsurprisingly, it’s worth a read.

Character proof is as fascinating, complex and controversial as it sounds. Vitalik had a lot to say, highlighting the numerous problems facing potential decentralized solutions. He didn’t comment directly on Worldcoin in the article, but he didn’t directly criticize it either, and at this point he is already much more generous than most.

The scope of the criticism reflects the complexity of the project. Frankly, it’s surprising that Worldcoin has come this far. It certainly wouldn’t have come to this point without Altman’s involvement. Worldcoin has emerged as a social token, closely tied to the expected success of Altman’s other projects.

In many ways, the value of Worldcoin is intrinsically linked to the AI revolution Altman led while working full-time at OpenAI. An internet populated by more human-like machines means that you can no longer be sure that the entities influencing you online are actually human or part of a vast and complex botnet. This is pretty disruptive today. With Worldcoin’s World ID identification solution, you’ll be able to tell whether an online entity is a real person or an AI - at least in theory.

The reality is that such a solution may inevitably appear soon.

V God’s blog post described this aspect in more detail. A deeper online world is taking shape. Yes, Internet identity systems are like a dystopian nesting doll of existential risks, and we should not rush into any action. Meanwhile, waiting for the perfect solution may end up waiting for government support for the worst.

But the reality is that for the US government to have the public’s carte blanche to create such a program could trigger some pretty disastrous consequences (as far as I’m concerned). Fortunately, the government, despite its best efforts, has been rather incompetent (on its own) at leading the tech dystopian curve.

The most likely short-term solutions to the above problems may come from existing centralized tech giants like Apple, which, to its credit, has done a considerable job thus far in creating privacy-preserving trustless biometric authentication for its products. Thoughtful and meticulous work. How this capability and good intentions apply to the very different problem of managing is a topic for Apple themselves, as is whether they have a short-term commercial interest in addressing proof of personhood, and more critically, their Whether it can avoid the back door of the government.

Trying to implement a decentralized alternative is clearly ideologically preferable, but it is a challenge.

Much of the criticism Worldcoin has now is that one has to place trust in the various actors in the value chain, each of whom has their own motives (Is the operator operating my Orb a malicious operator? Is the maker of my Orb a malicious manufacturer?) ?)

The biggest concern being discussed today is whether Worldcoin is absorbing millions of eye scans and holding all the biometric keys and their associated identity links. Worldcoin insists that they are not holding the scans, but the hashes generated by them, which will prevent someone from matching real-world identities with World IDs. Those words didn’t satisfy critics who were waiting for answers to edge cases, but further criticism ultimately boiled down to questioning whether the project simply required an unacceptable level of trust in so-called “decentralized” options.

Many (not all) of Worldcoin’s centralized quirks make it feel like it’s essential to build a company that solves the identity problem in this way. The company ran into problems that other startups of its kind likely would, and the question then became whether a for-profit startup would be a good fit for building solutions in the space, or, if the incentive structure was too pervasive, less likely to be exploited. utilization, then a less precise approach to decentralization based on social graphs should be adopted, or, once the use cases for such a system become clearer, we should try to get mobile giants such as Google or Apple to correlate in a thoughtful way. building.

Moving toward centralization and hoping for the best is clearly not a good option, although one should also question the idea of letting big tech heirs and prominent VCs hold too much governance in a decentralized system Power, is it really the best choice.

2*************************************************************************************************

Frankly, I had my iris scanned by an Orb a few weeks ago! (I ended up with 25 OrbBucks waiting for me, not enough to affect my opinion of the project) I have always been an early adopter of technology, and maybe over time, I will regret this choice, but I also think that compared to Other issues with the project, the fixed amount of the iris scan/hash element of the stack is a bit odd.

Like… the WLD token itself.

According to reports, Worldcoin has raised a significant amount of funding from VCs, over $500 million. Many token ecosystems rely on pre-mines or institutional sales to fund early development, and few of these ecosystems rely on marketing the phrase “universal basic income.”

A speculative UBI token that has been largely pre-allocated to private investors and insiders is somewhat morally ambiguous. This is obviously a very capital hungry vision, a new startup cannot succeed without raising a lot of cash, but maybe instead of accepting 25% of tokens to insiders in the first place, we should focus on this Whether the incentive structure can solve this problem.

With the platform opportunity so vast, one wonders why a team co-founded by one of the brightest minds in tech should rely so heavily on token licensing.

Technology will always find a way to monetize public infrastructure investments. Over the past decade, Facebook has spent billions of dollars funding satellite internet in Africa. Their goal was never to make a profit along the way, but rather hoped that at the end of the journey, when their services attracted a new continent of customers, a platform opportunity would arise.

If a project like Worldcoin is successful and decentralized, there will still be ample opportunities for profitability in its infrastructure.

3**、Conclusion**

I’m not sure if the crypto community should give Worldcoin a chance.

To be honest, it all feels pretty messy! However, I think it’s important to realize that, no matter what, proof of personality is an important issue that needs to be addressed, even with difficulty.

Just because you think the question of proof of personality is important, then Worldcoin is not worthy of your support, you need to look at the vision of the world shaped by its realization and distribution, and then decide whether it is the world-wide coin you want (world currency).