Crypto KOL discusses controversial topics surrounding Worldcoin.

On July 24th, Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency company founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced the launch of its WLD token. Worldcoin focuses on helping people verify their credentials through iris scanning and proving their identity online. According to data, approximately 2 million people have completed iris verification so far, and WLD will be distributed to these users. Regarding the controversial topics of Worldcoin's vision, token issuance, and privacy leaks, cryptocurrency KOLs have expressed their own opinions. BlockBeats has compiled this information.

Related reading: "Sam Altman on Worldcoin: Expect to See Integration with ChatGPT within 10 Years", "Detailed Explanation of Worldcoin Whitepaper: How Will WLD Tokens be Distributed and Released?"

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin   

I have seen the rise of a larger and more ambitious project called Worldcoin in the encryption industry. However, people are mainly concerned about four risks:

Privacy: The registration database of iris scanning may leak information. At the very least, if someone else scans your iris, they can check against the database to determine if you have a world ID.

Accessibility: Unless there are enough spheres, anyone in the world will not be able to reliably access the world ID.

Centralization: Orb is a hardware device, and we cannot verify its construction to ensure that there are no backdoors. Therefore, even if the software layer is perfect and completely decentralized, the Worldcoin Foundation still has the ability to insert backdoors into the system, allowing it to create any number of false human identities.

Security: Users' phones may be hacked, and users may be forced to scan their own irises, while presenting someone else's public key, and it is possible to 3D print "fake people" that can be scanned by iris and obtain a world ID.

But the reality is that the leakage is much more limited: Orb computes locally and only publishes the "hash" of each person's iris scan. This hash is not a regular hash like SHA256; instead, it is a proprietary algorithm based on machine learning Gabor filters. In addition, the iris hash may leak a certain amount of medical data (gender, race, and perhaps medical conditions) , but this leakage is far less than what almost any other massive data collection system in use today (such as street cameras) can capture. Overall, for me, the privacy of storing iris hash values seems sufficient. Related reading:"Vitalik In-Depth Analysis: Worldcoin and the Impact and Prospects of Personal Identity Proof"

万物岛 ThreeDAO Builder 陈剑Jason

translates to

Wanwu Island ThreeDAO Builder Chen Jian Jason

in English.

There are mainly two opinions about WorldCoin:

1. Collecting iris by evil organizations, wearing UBI's vision under Sam's halo to harvest SB projects around the world.

2. The human socialist warriors who bravely stepped forward at a high cost to combat witchcraft and UBI.

The main questions about collecting iris are:

1. Why must we use iris recognition instead of facial recognition or fingerprint recognition?

2. Will iris information be leaked or sold for evil purposes?

Iris recognition is a biometric identification method that is currently not widely used in society due to its high difficulty, high threshold, and high cost. When I scanned the Orb, it took me a total of 3-5 minutes to complete, and I had to keep my eyes open and stare at the special machine up close for a long time to complete the recognition. In contrast, facial and fingerprint recognition do not require special equipment, and any smartphone can complete the recognition in a few seconds. The difficulty, threshold, and cost are low, and there is already a wide social foundation. If WorldCoin really wants to collect human information for sale on a large scale, or wants to cut the world's leeks, why not use facial and fingerprint recognition? There is no need to produce expensive Orbs and hire employees to operate the machine locally in each country. Instead, all they need is for everyone to download an APP and do it themselves. The speed of expansion is geometrically multiplied. Why not? How do you all think about this issue?

The answer I received from the WorldCoin team during my communication with them is two-fold. Firstly, facial recognition and fingerprint recognition still cannot guarantee long-term uniqueness and effectiveness. For example, as people age, their facial features may change and become unrecognizable. There is also a high risk of theft of facial and fingerprint data, such as when someone is asleep. On the other hand, iris recognition has lifelong uniqueness and effectiveness, and it is also very difficult to recognize, as I mentioned before, it takes a long time to scan the device by opening the eyeballs.

Additionally, as mentioned earlier, iris recognition technology is currently not widely used due to its cost and threshold issues. Assuming your face is used as the identifier (of course, many apps we use on a daily basis, including the popular Meitu app, have already collected our facial information), once it is leaked or used for malicious purposes, the threshold is very low. As facial recognition technology has already been widely used, the impact of using it for things like database hacking or face swapping is very broad and the scope of the environment is completely uncontrollable. However, the vast majority of people have probably never used iris recognition technology to do anything, so if it is really leaked, it will only be in a limited and single environment.

Second question, will iris information leak after being collected?

In an article I wrote about WorldCoin six months ago, I discussed this issue. The Orb device generates a one-way irreversible meaningless hash code as the unique identifier for each person's iris when collecting information, and uploads it instead of directly uploading the iris information. For example, if I have your ID number, what I actually see in the background is a number like Y62fS21, which is irreversible to your ID number but corresponds uniquely to it. I don't know what Y62fS21 means, and it's meaningless if leaked. Secondly, this hash code is also generated by Orb's own algorithm and does not belong to a universal algorithm. For example, if another company also obtains your ID number at this time, the code generated by another algorithm is indeed Wf32N12.

Of course, the premise is that Orb will not be tampered with or modified in violation of WorldCoin, which is a problem that needs to be considered. Therefore, even though the difficulty of WorldCoin's wrongdoing is high, there is still a risk of being tampered with.

Therefore, WorldCoin invested a relatively large amount of money to produce thousands of devices like Orb alone, and then shipped them to various countries, and hired employees or partners locally to promote them. This investment cost is very high. If you really want to do evil, you don't have to do it like this. Of course, you can't think that you won't do evil because the cost of doing evil is high. However, it is difficult to do evil when the cost of doing evil is high. This is the basic principle of Bitcoin and even the blockchain industry.

Secondly, WorldCoin's investment in the ZKML field is also very high, which I won't go into detail about. Scroll has also given recognition to this.

Founder of SlowMist, Yu Xian

I think if Worldcoin succeeds, it will be an evil product, but it is likely to fail. The iris is almost the most stable and durable unique identifier of human beings, much more reliable than face and fingerprint verification. The promises in Worldcoin's white paper are indeed good, but we still need to be vigilant.   

 Many people think that the iris is hashed and uses zero-knowledge proofs to achieve good privacy in proof of personhood (PoP). However, in the mind of a hacker, even if I only have the hash, I may be able to draw your portrait. Don't forget, what I'm building is a World ID, and there will be many players in the future, and they may be very diverse.  

Binance Square Creator Rocky

Worldcoin's official website shows that its current FDV is 22.4 billion US dollars, and its circulating market value is also 230 million US dollars. The FDV market value has surpassed many old public chains, such as MATIC, TRX, and SOL. I remember that the last financing valuation was only 1 billion US dollars, and it raised 115 million US dollars at that time.

Within a short few months, the valuation has increased 20 times, which is truly terrifying! Currently, as one of the three parts of the Ultraman Human Plan (AI, Controlled Nuclear Fusion, Global Communism), World Coin is one of the key links to connect the financial lifeline in the three-part plan. It is also a great optimization solution in the distribution and redistribution of productivity and production relations, and must only be allowed to succeed, not to fail.

However, from the current logic, supporting such a huge valuation is still relatively early. I believe it is most likely to prepare for the next round of Series D financing, after all, the cost of global promotion of this iris authentication is very high. (Currently, mainland users can go to Hong Kong for scanning). From an investment perspective, the short-term valuation of WLD is too high and can be left alone for a while. However, at the same time, DID-related projects that have fallen to the bottom of the track are worth paying attention to.

Encryption Blogger BITWU.ETH

Worldcoin Hong Kong has already supported verification. Now with real products, real user growth, and reasonable business logic, can the utopia become a reality? 

Some people may feel insecure and wonder, who would give away their iris biometric data for no reason? No one would do that, right? Does this operation seem familiar to you?

1, ignore it and continue doing other things. 

2, surrender and go for scanning, just like we surrendered to the nucleic acid testing booth. 

3, buy some WorldCoin.   

The fact is, 2 million people around the world have already done this, with over 40,000 people registering for verification on a weekly basis. Most of them are from developing and underdeveloped countries. However, whether this behavior is safe or not is no longer as important.

Encryption KOL Xiyu

 The Worldcoin incident shows that most people do not realize that their privacy should be worth more. There are several logical fallacies that I believe are incorrect.

1. I am Nobody, so my iris is not valuable. Nobody may become the second generation of Satoshi Nakamoto in three years.

2. Without binding my information, I cannot be found. As long as it is a unique iris, you are the iris, and the iris is you.  

3. It has long been leaked on Apple or Android phones. This is not a causal relationship, and it does not mean that it can be ignored just because it was leaked before or in the future.  

The iris is sold for only $75. Selling privacy is also a transaction, after all, even the waist can be sold, but the price is too low. Your iris can be worth more. With a total of 10 billion coins, you only get 25 coins for authentication once. Isn't that too stingy? Imagine if there is a BRC-20 coin with a total of 10 billion, and I get 25 coins. I won't sell them until they reach $75,000. At least I can exchange them for a couple of bitcoins.

Loki, New Fire Technology  

WLD has two price anchors. Short-term: arbitrage cost. If someone can earn more value from the coin than the cost of finding someone to brush the cost, then someone will continue to brush and sell. Long-term: global poverty population's per capita consumption * n% / single person's daily output coin price. Because UBI does not support lazy people, it can only ensure that you will not starve (and the project must succeed beyond imagination).

There are still a few doubts:  

1. Why does the UBI team need to reserve tokens? Does the team need to eat 1/10 of the world's food to survive?   

2. Now registering will give you 25 Tokens, but the truly impoverished people haven't had a chance to claim them yet. You capitalists have all claimed them and bulked up. Who will UBI be given to? 

3. Where did PI lose?

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