Worldcoin was created by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI. It aims at providing a decentralized proof-of-humanity infrastructure to give a unique identifier to every human on the planet.
The official narrative is that AI is going to spread disinformation all over the internet, and that we need Worldcoin to make sure humans can still have a say in this sea of bots.
In Worldcoin:
- Each user opens an app that self-generates a key pair.
- They use a Worldcoin Orb to scan their iris (!!!), which generates locally a hash of the user’s iris and commits the user’s public key with this hash, while the original preimage is supposedly deleted by the proprietary Worldcoin hardware (!!!).
- The public key would then be used as an identifier to log in or register, without much consideration about key rotation, phishing-resistance, malicious reuse, theft, loss & recovery (other than re-scanning your iris), and above all with the risk that the Worldcoin Orb & server actually keep the association between the user’s public key and the user’s iris preimage, biometrics that the user will obviously never be able to change (!!!). This is a simplification, but it’s still relatively accurate.
To incentivize people to get this Worldcoin credential, Worldcoin pays anyone that scans their iris with the token of the project (!!!). The official narrative is that the world would benefit from having Universal Basic Income (UBI), where humans would get money without working, while AI would do the work.
Note that the Orb software is gradually being open-sourced, but that alone doesn’t guarantee that the right software runs on the right hardware. The consequences of using malicious Orbs can be disastrous - much like with electronic voting machines. Simply put, it’s not worth the risk, even if the chances of using malicious Orbs were low.
Advantages
- Not much else, really (see limitations).
Limitations
- Worldcoin is useless, ineffective and dangerous. See this article for a comprehensive analysis.
Could it be useful for our requirements?
No.