After years of endless hype, confusion and controversy, worldcoin finally launched, about a week ago.
It is a bold attempt to not only create a unified database of humans transacting online by verification through a weird-retina scanning proprietary camera orb, but also a widely accessible crypto payments system that instantly awards users tokens as an incentive to join the network.
Worldcoin is, however, facing a lot of controversy, unsurprisingly. Among the most substantial pushbacks is from the crypto community. The critiques however seem to fall into one of the two categories:
- Critiques inherent to biometric "proof-of-personhood" and worldcoin's particular implementation.
- Critiques inherent to the WLD token and its distribution.
Sifting through the countless critiques, Vitaliks' write-up was rather objective and avoided outright judgements on Worldcoin directly. One of the scanty gentle takes on the internet so far.
Worldcoin's value is intrinsically tied to the AI revolution that Sam Altman's full-time job at openAI is spearheading. An internet full of human-like bots causes uncertainty of the entity you are interacting with. Is it humans or part of a sophisticated group of botnets? Worldcoins' world ID proof-of-personhood, which is exactly what it sounds like, enables you to distinguish unique human actors from our AI pals, at least in theory. We are yet to find out.
Over the past years, internet activity has peaked and is still growing almost exponentially. This implies that something like this is definitely bound to exist, probably soon; however, we can all agree that at this particular point in time, the choice isn't worldcoin. A near solution might arise from one of the tech-giants already in place, like apple. However, relying on the goodwill of such companies is not a good option. In markets, every individual or entity tend to be rational actors driven by incentives and not necessarily goodwill. Trying to achieve a decentralised indentity is obviously ideologically preferable, but it's a challenge.
Many of the critiques worldcoin receives today is the numerous trust one must bestow on the actors on each level of the value chain. It maintains that the scans and the data are not held on-masse, rather the hashes are which would prevent someone from matching a real world indentity to an ID. However, this hasn't satisfied critiques who are still waiting on answers for various edge cases. For some, it requires so much trust, a little too much for a "decentralized" project.
Shying away from the technology involved and right over to the WLD token, there appears to be sth ethically murky about a speculative token already pre-allocated to private investors and insiders to such a substantial degree. Some people believe the token would have been issued as a non-transferable asset to users awaiting real traction before allowing it to be publicly tradable. They should have let its internal usage prove itself as a utility first without leaning on the speculative overhang on it!.
Another problem is that its incentive model was flawed at its very core. A worldcoin spokesman acknowledges this "In a few hundred instances, individuals were incentivised to sign up for a world ID that was delivered to a third-party app rather than their own". This has led to the rise of a flourishing black market for the accounts going for as low as a dollar. In May, there was a surge in this trade in China, where they could not sign up yet, they were purchasing iris scan tokens from Cambodia and from ill-informed Africa!
As much as we might try to be positive about this, it is quite obvious that the implementation is flawed and the execution does not seem to be in better shape. However, proof-of-personhood is a complex and critical problem to be tackled, especially in a "decentralised" context even if it feels icky.
Worldcoin doesn't inherently deserve your undying support just because you think the overarching problem is important. It is important to take a look at its vision, individual implementation & distribution, values and motivation as well as your own personal objectives, values and whether they align with that of the project before deciding whether it is the worldwide coin you want.
In the next article, we will take a look at the project itself, its mission, and goals as well as a sneak peek into the founders themselves and how they have and may impact the project in the future, stay tuned!
