Are Worries About Worldcoin Unfounded?

Source: Coindesk; Compilation: BitpushNews Mary Liu

Not since the failure of Facebook's (now Meta) digital currency project Libra has a project caused such controversy in the crypto community, so are concerns about Sam Altman's ambitious iris-scanning UBI project unfounded?

Clearly many are enthusiastic about the project, and Worldcoin sees it as a way to empower humans in the face of the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, with proof of its unique personality solution designed to differentiate humans from deepfakes. robots, and support a fair distribution of all AI-generated wealth.

Within minutes of Worldcoin’s mainnet launch on Monday, the token jumped more than 40 percent, with roughly 250,000 people who scanned their irises with Worldcoin’s silver sphere receiving an airdrop of tokens. About 2 million people around the world are currently signed up to be scanned, a level Altman tweeted this week that equates to almost one person being scanned every eight seconds.

Jeff Wilser toured Worldcoin's Berlin offices and gave in-depth coverage of Worldcoin's incubation and launch, including a CEO never held a role before taking charge of this complex back office and oversight.

Many people are uncomfortable with this project. The voices were particularly loud within the cryptocurrency community, with many hinting that this was a Leviathan-like capture of highly sensitive personal data.

Crypto author David Z. Morris puts his critics well. In a column a month ago, Morris acknowledged the potential benefits of Worldcoin’s Universal Basic Income (UBI) ambitions, but added that Altman and His co-founder “found a way to make this appealing premise seem totally dystopian.” He warned of the dangers of centralized entities collecting retinal fingerprints, noting the $5,000 per sphere cost, And the logistical challenges of distributing it around the world make even the so-called "universal" rollout a mockery.

(Morris adds in a side note that the name "Sphere" also sounds "creepy," as if to suggest "The Eye of Sauron, Foucault's Panopticon, the Saudi Intelligence Sphere, Saruman's Palantir, and for-profit spy companies".)

On the other side are supporters such as Coinfund partner Jake Brukhman, which invested in Worldcoin in 2021. Brukhman predicted on CoinDesk TV that the project will bring billions of people into the cryptocurrency space, with attendant financial inclusion benefits.

Brukhman, Altman, and other proponents inside and outside Worldcoin stress that neither the company's servers nor its devices store any raw human data, and instead convert scans into unique, undiscoverable hash codes, eliminating privacy concerns .

A more balanced but still cautious view was offered by ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who in a blog post praised the world currency for its commitment to privacy and the advanced technology it uses to protect people's data. But he highlighted "four major risks" to the project, noting that there's no way in a centralized model to keep people's data absolutely safe. He said it was impossible to know whether there was a "back door" built into the Sphere's hardware that would have allowed a company or government to access the data at some point.

My opinion is somewhere in between these comments.

While Vitalik believes perfect privacy is impossible, I think concerns about a major breach of people's biometric data and the threats it could pose to them may be overblown — or at least they're no bigger than the privacy threats we face elsewhere bigger. (For example, we store more data on iPhones with similar device-local encryption protections, and let's not forget that the largest cryptocurrency exchanges must collect know-your-customer (KYC) identifying information for all customers.)

My concern is the corporate centrality of this and the misplaced incentives it creates.

Why is UBI the responsibility of a private company? Wouldn't this create uneasy dependencies among poorer recipients? What exactly are tokens for? Worldcoin appears to be hoping to serve as the foundation for an ecosystem of decentralized AI applications as it promotes its software development kit to developers.

For now, however, the project is designed to channel participation through speculative enthusiasm, which in turn is fueled by buzz around high-profile projects and founders, creating an environment for early token holders. Lucrative exit opportunities and set conditions for investors to absorb losses after the launch. (Sure enough, WLD tokens fell sharply later in the week.)

Many have questioned the token economics of the Worldcoin launch, which severely limits the total circulating supply, and to many, the whole thing looks like a much-hyped cash grab around something as important as a person's identity Engaging in rampant profiteering is not going to end well.

This brings me to a point I made earlier, that there are lessons to be learned from Web2 as we enter this new era of artificial intelligence. The risk isn't in the technology itself -- we've known for years that AI has the power to destroy us. The problem is, if we concentrate control of these technologies in the hands of a few too powerful companies that have an incentive to use them as proprietary "black box" systems in pursuit of profit, they will quickly move into dangerous, harmful Human domain, as some Web2 platforms do.

Nonetheless, there can be at least one positive side to the Worldcoin project. It draws attention to the need for some kind of proof of humanity, which could energize a number of interesting projects aimed at giving people more control over their identities in the Web3/AI era. The answer to proving and enhancing our authentic humanity may lie in capturing our “social graph” of online connections, relationships, interactions, and authorization credentials through initiatives such as the Decentralized Identity (DID) model or the project’s Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). "free. Or it could exist in a biometric solution like the one Worldcoin is developing, albeit hopefully with a more decentralized, less corporate structure. It was obvious that we had to do something.

To take an inappropriate but thought-provoking example: an artificially intelligent bot creates an incredibly realistic digital female character and appears in a pornographic video sold to OnlyFans customers who think they are real sex workers. You might not hold pornography in high regard, and might think that simple-minded men deserve no sympathy if they fall for it. But consider what this means for sex workers.

Despite all the criticism, OnlyFans, or more specifically the direct-to-client model it has built, has been embraced by sex work advocates because it offers these individuals a safe working environment where they can Earn income your way. If they can't adequately prove they're human, and get beaten in the competition for client funds by an army of fake bots, what choice do they have? Is it just a return to selling their bodies on the streets, where they can easily prove that they are "real people", but again face the risk of violence from johns and pimps?

In the digital age, dignity is the bottom line for everyone. Achieving this goal requires a balance of reliable solutions that separate humans from machines and a commitment to privacy and most importantly, personal data.