Is the concern about Worldcoin groundless?

Is the concern about Worldcoin unfounded?

Source: Coindesk

Translation: LianGuaiBitpushNews Mary Liu

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Since the failure of Facebook’s (now Meta) cryptocurrency project Libra, no other project has caused such controversy in the crypto community. So, are people’s concerns about Sam Altman’s ambitious iris scan UBI project baseless?

Obviously, many people are enthusiastic about this project. Worldcoin sees it as a way to empower humanity in the face of rapid AI expansion. The proof of its unique personality solution aims to distinguish humans from deepfake robots and support fair distribution of wealth created by AI.

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On Monday, within minutes of the launch of the Worldcoin mainnet, the token’s price surged by more than 40%, and about 250,000 people who scanned their irises with the Worldcoin silver orb received an airdropped token. Currently, around 2 million people worldwide have signed up for scanning. Altman tweeted this week that this level of interest is equivalent to one person scanning every eight seconds.

Jeff Wilser visited Worldcoin’s office in Berlin and reported in-depth on the incubation and launch of Worldcoin, including the CEO who had never held any position before being responsible for the complex backend and regulatory work.

Many people are uneasy about this project. The voices within the crypto community are particularly loud, with many suggesting that it is like Leviathan acquiring highly sensitive personal data.

Crypto author David Z. Morris aptly points out the critics’ views. In a column a month ago, Morris acknowledged the potential benefits of Worldcoin’s universal basic income (UBI) ambition, but he added that Altman and his co-founders “have found a way to make this appealing premise look entirely dystopian.” He warned of the dangers of a centralized entity collecting retinal fingerprints and pointed out the $5,000 cost per orb and the logistical challenges of distributing it globally, making the so-called “universal” promotion plan a laughingstock.

(Morris added in a footnote that the name “orb” also sounds “eerie,” as if suggesting “the Eye of Sauron, Foucault’s panoptic prison, Saudi intelligence orbs, Saruman’s palantir, and for-profit spy companies.”)

On the other hand, supporters like Coinfund partner Jake Brukhman, who invested in Worldcoin in 2021, predict on CoinDesk TV that the project will bring billions of people into the cryptocurrency field and bring about inclusive financial benefits.

Brukhman, Altman, and other supporters inside and outside of Worldcoin emphasize that the company’s servers and devices do not store any raw human data, but convert the scan results into unique and unidentifiable hash codes, thus eliminating privacy concerns.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a more balanced but still cautious view, praising Worldcoin’s commitment to privacy and its advanced technology for protecting people’s data in a blog post. However, he emphasized the “four risks” of the project and pointed out that there is no way to guarantee absolute data security in a centralized model. He said it is impossible to know if there are “backdoors” built into the hardware that would allow companies or governments to access the data at some point.

My opinion is somewhere between these comments.

Although Vitalik believes that perfect privacy is impossible, I think the concerns about significant leaks of people’s biometric data and the threats they may pose to them may be exaggerated—or at least not greater than the privacy threats we face elsewhere. (For example, we use similar devices to locally encrypt and protect more data stored on iPhones, and let’s not forget that the largest cryptocurrency exchanges must collect “Know Your Customer” (KYC) identification information from all customers.)

What concerns me is the central position of these companies and the misplaced incentives it brings.

Why is UBI the responsibility of a private company? Won’t this create dependence and unease among the less privileged recipients? What is the purpose of the token? Worldcoin seems to hope to become the foundation of a decentralized artificial intelligence application ecosystem when promoting its software development kit to developers.

However, currently, the project’s design purpose is to guide participation through speculative enthusiasm, which is in turn driven by hype surrounding high-profile projects and founders, creating a lucrative exit opportunity for early token holders and setting conditions for investors to bear losses after launch. (Indeed, the WLD token plummeted later this week.)

Many people have questioned the token economics introduced by Worldcoin, which severely limits the total circulating supply. To many, the whole thing seems like a speculative money grab, and it will not end well to profit wildly from something as important as human identity.

This has made me realize a point I made before, that we can learn from Web2 as we enter this new era of artificial intelligence. The risk is not in the technology itself—we have known for years that artificial intelligence has the ability to destroy us. The problem is if we centralize control of these technologies in the hands of a few overly powerful companies, which have the motivation to use these technologies as proprietary “black box” systems to pursue profit, then they will quickly enter dangerous and harmful areas for humanity, just as some Web2 platforms have done.

Nevertheless, the Worldcoin project can at least produce a positive side. It has drawn attention to the need for some form of proof of humanity, which could bring vitality to many interesting projects aimed at giving people better control over their identities in the Web3/AI era. The answer to proving and enhancing true humanity may lie in measures such as capturing our online connections, relationships, interactions, and authorization credentials in a “social graph” of freedom through decentralized identity (DID) models or decentralized social network protocols (DSNP) in projects. Or it may exist in a biometric solution, like the one Worldcoin is developing, albeit with a more decentralized and less corporate structure. It is obvious that we must do something.

A somewhat inappropriate but thought-provoking example: an artificial intelligence robot creates an extremely realistic digital female character and appears in pornographic videos sold to OnlyFans customers, who believe they are real sex workers. You may not highly value pornography and may think that if simple-minded men are being deceived, they don’t deserve sympathy. But please consider what this means for sex workers.

Despite receiving criticism, OnlyFans, or more specifically, its direct customer-facing model, has gained support from sex work advocates because it provides a safe working environment for these individuals to earn income on their own terms. If they cannot prove themselves as human and are defeated by a group of fake robots in the competition for customer funds, what other choices do they have? Are they only left with the option of returning to the streets to sell their bodies, where they can easily prove they are “real people” but face the risk of violence from clients and pimps once again?

In the digital age, dignity is the bottom line for everyone. To achieve this goal, a balanced and reliable solution is needed to differentiate between humans and machines and promise to protect privacy and the most important personal data.

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