I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.
Worldcoin is just a centralized / privately owned database of iris scans and issued user IDs that integrates with the blockchain.
> solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem
> till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments
The solution Worldcoin provides is "trust us for knowing who is real-people". I fail to see how that's better than the way governments solve the problem.
Governments regularly do terrible things in the banking system: Printing money, capital controls and mind boggling amount of red tape. With this red tape they can punish anyone who disagrees with them.
Oh yeah, all that abhorrent red tape like "If you are a bank you have to prove you aren't doing funny things with people's money" and "if you provide financial services you need to make an honest effort to not fund like, actual terrorists, or north korea" and "We thought we learned our lesson about unregulated stocks back when it caused the great depression"
Eh, we could kinda resolve the problem by having a government auth system, and you can get some OpenID like response from it. Then private companies could just use that for identification (like in Sweden, a lot of apps have that BankID or whatever its called). We have something similar in Canada in a couple of provinces, but they’re exposed to government portals only.
However bringing that theme into US is a no-brainer because of the distrust in the government or some other issues.
I would very strongly prefer the government do this over a private company. The government already knows my identity anyway, so I lose nothing. Plus, I think that the greatest threats to our freedom and liberty in the US comes from corporations rather than the government.
I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly that we should sacrifice any amount of privacy for it. Especially to a corporation.
And despite WC's claims, their scheme does involve sacrificing some privacy.
> I am very far from convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved so badly
How much front line experience do you have fighting organized false engagement campaigns, fraud, and other botting? Sprawling amounts of activity you see online is not genuine. I would not be surprised if 50% or more of the comments on Reddit and HN are not by sincere users given their complete lack of identity verification.
Businesses offer discounts through ID.me because they know it comes from a real buyer and doesn't have the 1-10% chance of being a fraud bot. Running your own email server and assuring your emails actually make to a user's inbox is nigh impossible, for a reason. More and more of the internet disappears behind the Cloudflare wall, for a reason.
Public facing services are under a relentless assault by organized, meticulous, and resourceful actors. That was before advanced AI that can read images better than some humans and large language models that destroyed the Turing test. SOTA abilities are fortunately expensive to build and run and kept close to the chest by OpenAI, Microsoft, and others, but that defensive wall will one day fall and the internet will need infrastructure and systems in place ready for it.
I read a paper that looked at Sybil attacks in the age of modern generative AI. In short, the internet is unviable without a clear human-or-bot signal. Until now that signal was inherent: most things a human can easily do a bot cannot; captchas, targeted cyberhacks, interactive realistic phone calls.
I deeply disagree. While Worldcoin's execution seems questionable at best, the idea seems like a solution to a problem that we (society) definitely have, namely the real-people problem. Worldcoin or something like it, if properly implemented, makes it possible to distinguish between real people and bots. This is a real problem that we have today, is getting rapidly worse, and till now this problem has only been solved in shitty ways by governments.