On July 24, Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency company founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced the launch of the WLD token. Worldcoin focuses on helping people verify their credentials in person through an iris scanning ball and prove their identity online. Data shows that about 2 million people have completed iris verification so far, so WLD will be distributed to these users. Regarding the vision of Worldcoin's creation, coin issuance, privacy leaks and other controversial topics, crypto KOLs expressed their views. BlockBeats sorted them out.
Related reading: "Sam Altman talks about Worldcoin: We can see the combination with ChatGPT in ten years", "Detailed explanation of Worldcoin white paper: How to distribute and release WLD tokens?"
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin
I see the rise of a much larger and more ambitious The Proof of Humanity project: Worldcoin. But people are concerned about four main risks:
Privacy: A registry of iris scans could potentially leak information. At a minimum, if someone else scans your irises, they could check against the database to determine if you have a World ID.
Accessibility: Unless there are enough spheres that are easily accessible to anyone in the world, the world ID will not be reliably accessible.
Centralization: The Orb is a hardware device and we have no way of verifying that it is constructed correctly and has no backdoors. Therefore, even if the software layer were perfect and fully decentralized, the Worldcoin Foundation would still have the ability to insert a backdoor into the system, allowing it to create as many fake human identities as it wants.
Security: Users’ phones could be hacked, users could be forced to scan their irises while presenting a public key belonging to someone else, and it would be possible to 3D print a “dummy” that could be iris-scanned and given a world ID.
But the reality is that the leakage is much more limited: Orb locally computes and publishes only a "hash" of each person's iris scan. This hash is not a regular hash like SHA256; instead, it is a specialized algorithm based on machine learning Gabor filters. In addition, iris hashes have the potential to leak a certain amount of medical data (gender, race, and perhaps medical conditions), but this leakage is far less than what can be captured by almost any other massive data collection system in use today (such as street cameras). Overall, to me, the privacy of storing iris hashes seems sufficient. Related reading: "Vitalik's in-depth analysis: The impact and prospects of Worldcoin and personal proof"
ThreeDAO Builder Jason Chen
There are two main opinions about WorldCoin:
1. The evil organization that collects irises, using Sam’s halo and the vision of UBI to harvest SB projects around the world
2. Human socialist warriors who took a brave step towards fighting witches and UBI at a high cost
The main questions about collecting irises are:
1. Why must we use iris instead of face or fingerprint?
2. Will iris information be leaked or sold for malicious purposes?
Iris is a biometric information recognition method that has not been widely used in society. The main reason is that it is difficult to identify, has a high threshold and high cost. It took me 3 to 5 minutes to scan Orb. I had to keep my eyes open and face Orb at a special machine for a long time to complete the recognition. On the other hand, face and fingerprint do not require special equipment. Any mobile phone can complete the recognition in a few seconds. It is easy, has a low threshold and low cost. It even has a broad social foundation. If WorldCoin really wants to collect human information on a large scale for sale, or wants to cut leeks all over the world, why not use face and fingerprint? There is no need to produce expensive Orb separately and hire employees in various countries to operate this machine. Instead, everyone only needs to download an APP to do it themselves. The speed of this rollout is geometrically increasing. Why not? I wonder what you think about this issue?
In my communication with the WorldCoin team, I got two answers. First, faces and fingerprints still cannot guarantee long-term uniqueness and validity. For example, as people age, their faces change and cannot be recognized. There is also a high risk of face and fingerprint being stolen, such as when someone is asleep. Iris, on the other hand, has lifelong uniqueness and validity, and is very difficult to recognize. As I said, you have to open your eyes and scan the device for a long time.
In addition, the iris, as mentioned earlier, is a biometric information recognition technology that has not yet been widely used due to its cost and threshold issues. Assuming that your face is used as an identification object (of course, a large number of apps we use in our daily lives, including the popular Miaoya Camera some time ago, have already collected our facial information), once it is leaked or used for evil, the threshold is very low, because the face is an identification technology that has been widely used, whether it is used for database collision or face swapping, the impact is very wide, and the environmental range is very large and completely uncontrollable, but the vast majority of people have probably never used their iris to do something, so if it is really leaked, it will only be in a limited single environment.
The second question is, will the iris be leaked after being collected?
I talked about this issue in my article about WorldCoin half a year ago. When collecting information, the Orb device will generate a one-way, irreversible, meaningless Hash code as the unique identifier of each person's iris, and then upload it, instead of directly uploading the iris information. For example, after I get your ID number, what I actually see in the background is a number like Y62fS21. This number is irreversible to your ID number, but it uniquely corresponds to your ID number. I don't know what Y62fS21 means, and it has no meaning after being leaked. Secondly, this Hash code is also generated by Orb's own algorithm and is not a universal algorithm. For example, at this time, another company also gets your ID number and uses another algorithm to generate Wf32N12.
Of course, the above premise is that Orb will not be tampered with or hacked to perform modifications or other operations that violate WorldCoin. This is an issue that needs to be considered. Therefore, even if it is very difficult for WorldCoin to do evil, there is still a risk of being used for evil.
Therefore, WorldCoin has invested a relatively huge cost to produce thousands of devices like Orb, and then shipped them to various countries, and then hired local employees or partners to promote them. This set of investment costs is huge. If you really want to do evil, you don’t have to do so. Of course, you can’t think that you won’t do evil because the cost of doing evil is high, but it is difficult to do evil when the cost of doing evil is high. This principle is also the basic reason for the existence of Bitcoin and even blockchain.
Secondly, WorldCoin has also invested a lot in the ZKML field, which I will not elaborate on. Scroll has also recognized it.
SlowMist founder Yu Xian
I think if Worldcoin succeeds, it will be an evil product, but it will most likely fail. The iris is almost the only mark of human beings that is the most stable and lasting, and is much more reliable than face and fingerprint verification. The promises in Worldcoin's white paper are indeed good, but we still need to remain vigilant.
Many people think that the iris is hashed, and they use zero-knowledge proof to make PoP (proof of personhood) with good privacy. But in the hacker's mind, even if I only get the hash, I may be able to draw a portrait of you. Don't forget, I want to build a World ID. There will be a lot of players in the future, and they may be very complicated. Source of opinion
Binance Square creator Rocky
According to official Worldcoin data, the current FDV is $22.4 billion, and the circulating market value is $230 million. The market value of FDV has surpassed many established public chains, such as MATIC, TRX, SOL, etc. I remember that the latest financing valuation was only $1 billion, and it raised $115 million.
In just a few months, the valuation has increased 20 times, which is really scary! At present, as one of the three parts of Ultraman's human plan (AI, controlled nuclear fusion, global communism), WorldCoin is one of the key links in the trilogy to open up the financial lifeline. It is also a great optimization plan in the distribution and redistribution of productivity and production relations. It must succeed and not fail.
But from the current logic, it is still relatively early to support such a huge valuation. I think it is likely to prepare for the next round of D financing. After all, the cost of promoting iris authentication globally is very high. (Currently, mainland users can go to Hong Kong to scan) From an investment perspective, WLD’s short-term valuation is too high and can be left alone, but at the same time, DID track-related projects that have fallen to the bottom are worth paying attention to. Source of opinion
Crypto blogger BITWU.ETH
Worldcoin Hong Kong already supports verification. Now with real products, real user growth, and reasonable business logic, can utopia come true?
Some people feel unsafe and may wonder, who would give their iris biometric data to others for no reason? No one would do that, right? Do you feel that this operation is familiar?
Do you remember a time when someone wanted to stab us in the throat and we did it obediently? As a spectator in the center of the storm, you actually only have 3 choices now:
1. Ignore it and continue doing other things.
2. Surrender and go to scan, just like we surrender and go to the nucleic acid booth.
3. Buy some WorldCoin.
The fact is that 2 million people around the world have already done this, with an average of more than 40,000 people registering for verification every week, most of whom are in developing and underdeveloped countries. But it is no longer important to worry about whether this behavior is safe.
Crypto KOL Xiyu
The Worldcoin incident shows that most people don’t know that their privacy should be more valuable. There are several logics that I think are wrong.
1. I am Nobody, so my iris is worthless. Nobody may be the second generation of Satoshi Nakamoto in three years.
2. Without my information bound to it, you can’t find me at all. As long as your iris is unique, you are the iris and the iris is you.
3. It has already been leaked on Apple or Android phones. There is no causal relationship. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need to care about it in the future just because it was leaked before.
75 dollars is too little for iris. Selling privacy is also a transaction. After all, kidneys can be sold, but the price is too low. Your iris can be worth more. There are 10 billion coins in total, and you are given 25 coins for one authentication. Isn’t it too stingy? Imagine if there is a brc-20 coin with a total of 10 billion. I was given 25 coins. I didn’t sell them and would consider it when it reached 75,000 US dollars. At least I have to exchange it for two bitcoins. Source of opinion
Loki, New Fire Technology
The price of WLD has two anchors. Short-term: arbitrage cost. If the value of the coin that can be arbitrage is greater than the cost of finding people to arbitrage it, then people will continue to arbitrage and continue to dump the market. Long-term: per capita consumption of the world's poor * n%/per person's daily coin price. Because UBI does not support lazy people, it can only ensure that you will not starve to death (and the project must be successful beyond imagination).
There are still a few doubts:
1. Why does the UBI team need to reserve tokens? Does the team need to consume 1/10 of the world’s food to avoid starvation?
2. You will be given 25 tokens when you register now, but the truly poor people have not had enough time to receive them, and you capitalists have all received them in bulk. So who will the UBI be given to?
3. Where did PI lose? Source of opinion