Worldcoin Isn’t as Bad as it Sounds: It’s Worse
July 28th, 2023One person is willing to sell their soul every 8 seconds for a shitcoin and a cattle tag. Extreme clown world alert. https://t.co/RZeJYANCAV
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) July 26, 2023
Via: Blockworks:
Worldcoin — a new financial system connected to sensitive biometric information, mostly harvested from poor people — sure sounds like a terrible idea.
“Terrible” doesn’t do it justice.
Worldcoin will need to assemble a vast database of iris data. But not everyone is eager to gaze into an Orb. In the bootstrapping phase, at least, you had to pay people to scan their eyes. And so Worldcoin turned to the global south — home to the cheapest eyeballs — and played a dark game of ‘what will people do for money?’
Incredibly, Worldcoin was unprepared for an obvious consequence of this rollout strategy: A black market for verified credentials. You can now seemingly buy a World ID for as little as $30. Anyone, then, with more than $30 on hand can command more than one digital identity (although Worldcoin is aware of this issue and has proposed solutions to resolve it). Connecting real people to digital identities is a thorny puzzle.
