Opinion: Worldcoin is no radical new financial system, and certainly not one aimed at equality or fairness.

Worldcoin’s plan to collect biometric data from poor people to bootstrap their system is unethical and raises serious privacy concerns. Their promises to protect users’ data are not enough to ensure privacy and security, and linking immutable biometric traits to financial identities could enable total identity lockout with dystopian consequences. In addition, Worldcoin’s token allocation favors insiders and market makers, indicating that equal distribution among all people is not a genuine goal. Overall, Worldcoin appears to be just another speculative crypto project masquerading as a radical new financial system.

  • Gork@beehaw.org
    7·
    1 year ago

    They say they get around the easy linking of a single wallet address to your identity by using subaddresses. I don’t think this fixes it, it merely delays it.

    The number of these subaddresses are capped to prevent botting. But suppose you use this account every day for years or decades. You’ve meticulously allocated subaddresses for different categories of spending, assessed the risk profile of using each one, and used them throughout the years until you’re out of subaddresses.

    Now you’re vulnerable to having your identity tied to the account since the risk of getting had goes up every time you use any of your subaccounts. And this risk only increases the more you use your Worldcoin.

    Even if the biometric privacy safeguards they built in (hashing yer Mk. I orbs) work perfectly, I wouldn’t use it for the reasons I mentioned above, there isn’t a way to ensure transactional anonymity if your account/subaccounts can be linked to your real identity regardless of the method.