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But why is a crypto currency required? Biometrics like Apple’s Face ID reasonably identify the owners of a phone. Why not distribute managed iPhones with access

But why is a crypto currency required? Biometrics like Apple’s Face ID reasonably identify the owners of a phone. Why not distribute managed iPhones with access to an account to wire money to or an app that displays a code that aid workers can use to identify that the right person got the goods? That phone or app could be set to only generate one code per aid delivery event and without a code you don’t get aid. Someone having multiple phones would be easy to identify as the aid worker would recognize they are back in line. I mean if your goal is to end fraud there seems to be several options that don’t require a blockchain or some custom eye scanning device. How does worldcoin solve the issue of a local abusing a position of power to direct everyone to transfer their funds to their account or with holding some other resource to force people to give them their aid?

gs17 3y ago
Part of the idea is to expand it beyond those, so anyone can verify that a user is representing a distinct, real human. It's supposed to be privacy preserving, so you could use it in user registration to block bots without needing to request any real identifying information. Of course, you've hit on part of the issue here, it's not going to really prevent a lot of the fraud it's intended to.
- kemotep 3y ago
  And I really am skeptical about how privacy preserving it can be. If there is anyway at all to associate the wallet id back to the iris hash, the wallet id is as good as knowing the iris hash. If the zero knowledge can protect that and the wallet id just can identify that you’ve done an eye scan at some point, the wallet id is still as good as knowing the iris hash. Sure crypto evangelists will use sub wallets and multiple accounts and all that jazz to best preserve their privacy (all things that if possible make sybil attacks possible) but most people will just have the one wallet. Eventually everyone who pays attention will be able to identify them using just the wallet. So I doubt the effectiveness at preventing sybil attacks, I doubt the effectiveness of how privacy preserving this is, and if used beyond Worldcoin transactions, it just becomes an immutable global id. A social security number that requires an iris to generate.

gs17 3y ago

Part of the idea is to expand it beyond those, so anyone can verify that a user is representing a distinct, real human. It's supposed to be privacy preserving, so you could use it in user registration to block bots without needing to request any real identifying information. Of course, you've hit on part of the issue here, it's not going to really prevent a lot of the fraud it's intended to.

kemotep 3y ago
And I really am skeptical about how privacy preserving it can be. If there is anyway at all to associate the wallet id back to the iris hash, the wallet id is as good as knowing the iris hash. If the zero knowledge can protect that and the wallet id just can identify that you’ve done an eye scan at some point, the wallet id is still as good as knowing the iris hash. Sure crypto evangelists will use sub wallets and multiple accounts and all that jazz to best preserve their privacy (all things that if possible make sybil attacks possible) but most people will just have the one wallet. Eventually everyone who pays attention will be able to identify them using just the wallet. So I doubt the effectiveness at preventing sybil attacks, I doubt the effectiveness of how privacy preserving this is, and if used beyond Worldcoin transactions, it just becomes an immutable global id. A social security number that requires an iris to generate.