Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency project founded by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI. Due to the fact that a large portion of the world's population currently lacks digital means to verify their identity, Worldcoin's vision is to build the world's largest and most equitable digital identity and currency system. The goal is to help every individual gain access to the global financial system.
Origin of Worldcoin
Worldcoin was proposed by OpenAI's founder Altman in 2019, drawing inspiration from the theory of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The precursor of the UBI theory can be traced back to Thomas More, the author of "Utopia" in the Middle Ages. As a humanist and social philosopher, he believed that rational equality, industry, and pursuit of education are fundamental features of democracy.
In their research, they found that currently, 4.4 billion people worldwide lack legitimate identity and cannot undergo digital identity verification, making it difficult for them to access financial services. Additionally, only 3% of the world's population is engaged in the cryptocurrency network. Therefore, Worldcoin aims to provide a more accessible digital identity for people worldwide, enabling more individuals to quickly utilize the cryptographic network and aims to distribute cryptocurrency for free to every genuine human globally.
Worldcoin Identity Authentication
Worldcoin offers multiple authentication methods, including common phone authentication, verification codes, and more advanced face recognition and biometric recognition. The security of these authentication methods is ensured through the combination of various technological means.
Phone authentication and verification codes are common methods used to verify users' phone numbers. While relatively simple, this method has limitations in countering witch attacks, which refer to malicious behavior of manipulating or influencing a system by creating multiple false identities. Although phone authentication can prevent one person from using multiple phone numbers to register, an attacker could still bypass this method if they possess multiple genuine phone numbers.
To enhance the accuracy and security of authentication, World Coin adopts more advanced methods such as face recognition and biometric recognition. Face recognition technology verifies a user's identity by analyzing their facial features. It utilizes technologies such as deep learning and artificial intelligence to distinguish real faces from synthetic or modified ones. This method is relatively secure since each person's facial features are unique and difficult to simulate or impersonate.
Biometric recognition is another advanced authentication method that uses individual unique biological features for verification, such as fingerprints, irises, or voiceprints. These biological features are inherent to each individual and can not be forged or imitated. By utilizing biometric recognition technology, World Coin can more accurately verify users' identities, preventing witch attacks and identity fraud.
Despite the advancement of artificial intelligence, which makes it difficult to determine whether certain characteristics, such as online speech and voice, are from a human or an AI, proving oneself as a real person, still relies on biometric information. As AI does not possess genuine biological features, biometric information remains an effective means to distinguish humans from machines.
Worldcoin's Key Products
In terms of product implementation, Worldcoin has three main products.
World ID: A digital identity that allows users to prove themselves as unique genuine individuals in an anonymous manner. This product utilizes zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to protect users' privacy.
Worldcoin Token: Tokens distributed for free to humans globally, which can be used for future governance.
World App: A self-hosted wallet that allows the use of Worldcoin tokens, digital assets, stablecoins, and traditional currencies for payments, purchases, and transfers worldwide.
Worldcoin Token
The Worldcoin token is named WLD, with a total supply of 10 billion.
8 billion WLD tokens are allocated to the community to encourage and reward community members participating in the Worldcoin project.
1 billion WLD tokens are dedicated to long-term funding for the Worldcoin protocol, including providing grants to developers to support the continuous development and innovation of the protocol.
The remaining 1 billion WLD tokens are allocated to individuals who contribute to the Worldcoin protocol and tools, as well as investors. Among these, $100 million worth of tokens are provided to first-round financing institutions.
Worldcoin's Risks
Currently, Worldcoin faces the greatest challenges in terms of privacy and regulatory issues. Collecting human biometric information is highly sensitive. Earlier, a former CIA employee, Snowden, publicly criticized Worldcoin's use of human information for encryption.
In response to privacy controversies, Worldcoin has stated that it is only for achieving anti-cheating effects and that once the company's algorithm is optimized, all iris databases will be deleted. However, this deletion process is difficult to supervise, and the company has not disclosed the specific time for optimizing the algorithm, nor when data collection will stop.
As this global project has already collected hundreds of thousands of eye images in more than 20 countries, Worldcoin has also attracted attention from regulatory authorities in various countries.
Currently, many countries have regulations that prohibit commercial companies from transferring privacy data overseas, and Worldcoin has evidently crossed this red line. As an example, in Kenya, an African country, a data protection law has been passed to prohibit companies from transferring biometric data overseas without approval from the newly established Data Protection Commissioner's office. According to data consent forms, Worldcoin is currently processing user data in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and India.
The controversies and legal issues surrounding privacy infringement have posed significant obstacles to the development of Worldcoin. According to Bloomberg, after regulations prohibited its operations, Worldcoin has ceased its plans to operate in at least seven countries.
Named after the "world currency" and aiming for that goal, Worldcoin has become mired in difficulties. Despite being backed by a lavish VC lineup, the project faces multiple challenges, including fraud suspicions, privacy violations, and violations of privacy protection regulations, which directly threaten its survival.
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