Worldcoin 

One of our analysts Blueseriph asked me I what I think about Worldcoin and its risks to privacy so I thought I would go down the rabbit hole with this project to see what I think once I have done some digging.

One the face of things Worldcoin is a project with ambitious goals of fostering global financial inclusion and positive change and offers several promising use cases - facilitating peer-to-peer transactions, supporting remittances and micropayments, promoting e-commerce and retail, and aiding humanitarian efforts through charitable contributions. The WorldCoin Foundation has established as a non-profit organization which aims to ensure sustainable growth, financial education and community support by partnering with governments and NGO’s.

With all these amazing feats demonstrating the project’s lack of greed, passion for educating and helping the world for the greater good you wouldn’t be wrong to question how this project could ever be considered for being malicious. Well this is where we are going to get into the nitty gritty of it all.

The most significant cause for concern lies in Worldcoin's reliance on an iris scanning system. The team claims that only the uniqueness of the iris pattern is stored and that iris images are deleted post scan. Yet this is actually a centralized iris scanning system where individuals are required to surrender their biometric data to a single entity. Hmmm. Being centralized this could easily lead to a lot of sensitive data being vulnerable to be exploited. It has even been already rumoured that there is a black market for Worldcoin accounts emerged, with prices dropping to as low as $1 per account on platforms like Telegram.

Despite the praise for Worldcoin's scanning technology due to its accuracy and uniqueness, to me it also presents serious concerns relating to privacy invasion and mass surveillance. The fact that this identification system is centralized really raises alarm bells in my head. In my opinion the data has the potential to be misused by governments, other corporations, or malicious entities, even if its not done by Worldcoin itself. These powerful entities always have a way of leaning on companies to get what they want. This could put individuals, like ourselves, in a very vulnerable position. Things like constant monitoring and tracking of our activities, both online and offline, the erosion of personal freedoms and civil rights are things in an extreme scenario that also come to mind.

Furthermore, Worldcoin’s project premise also has the ability to compromise the anonymity that has been a key appeal to many for the use of cryptos. As users are forced to link their iris data to their digital wallets, this makes transactions very traceable back to individuals. This can lead to more monitoring and tracking that presents the ability to potentially enable discrimination based on financial history or spending patterns. Think similar to what is going on in China right now.

One last point I have managed to dig up is that Sam Bankman-Fried, founder FTX, was involved in Worldcoin’s early funding round further adding to the project’s contentious nature as we all know who he is in bed with.

Worldcoin's holds both potential for promise and peril. While its goals are admirable, the project must navigate these ethical and operational challenges to prove its worth in revolutionizing digital identity while safeguarding user rights and freedoms. The success of Worldcoin will depend on its ability to strike a delicate balance between its technological innovation and maintaining user trust and safety. Right now I am not completely sold on the idea, I have trust issues from governments and big corporations and this project has the ability to very easily put the majority of the world into a Chinese dystopia. Show Less