Lots of good analysis here, with the main flaw (imho) coming in last*. The WC team may be book smart, but not experienced or wise, especially in building complex systems with high integrity and assurance. They cut too many corners, take too many intellectual shortcuts, assume away too many hard problems, minimize important constraints inherent in their chosen architecture, and clearly haven't really thought it all through. Wishful thinking is no substitute for sound engineering. All red flags of a project doomed to fail.
*> A black market for Worldcoin accounts has already emerged [1] in Cambodia, Nigeria, and elsewhere, where people are being paid to sign up for a World ID and then transfer ownership to buyers elsewhere — many of whom are in China, where Worldcoin is restricted. There is no ongoing verification process to ensure that a World ID continues to belong to the person who signed up for it, and no way for the eyeball-haver to recover an account that is under another person’s control. Worldcoin acknowledges that they have no clue how to resolve the issue: “Innovative ideas in mechanism design and the attribution of social relationships will be necessary.“ The lack of ongoing verification also means that there is no mechanism by which people can be removed from the program once they pass away, but perhaps Worldcoin will add survivors’ benefits to its list of use cases and call that a feature.
Relatively speaking, scanning your iris and selling the account is fairly benign. But depending on the popularity of Worldcoin, the eventual price of WLD, and the types of things a World ID can be used to accomplish, the incentives to gain access to others’ accounts could become severe. Coercion at the individual or state level is absolutely within the realm of possibility, and could become dangerous.
I can’t imagine how naive you have to be to not see account selling as a massive problem. Especially when your plan is to first onboard users in poor countries. Why would these people do anything other than signup and immediately sell their accounts, for what may amount to a month or two of normal pay, just for waiting in line and getting scanned. I find it crazy that they claimed their system is Sybil resistant when it had this most obvious flaw. Maybe they don’t really give a crap and just wanted to collect that sweet sweet VC money.
Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.
Or maybe, just possibly, there might be more to it.
Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.
(Disclaimer: I have no association with this project, haven't gotten my irises scanned, don't own the token, haven't invested any effort to understand it. But I've been around long enough to recognize the smell of reflexive groupthink cynicism, and to profit by betting against it.)
> but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road
You mean the ones who also invested in Theranos, WeWork, and FTX? They don’t always make the wisest investment decisions. They’re not complete idiots, but they’re sucsceptible to same biases and misjudgements as the rest of us. And I’m sure they‘re aware of some or all of WC’s flaws, and are just investing b/c Sam Altman, or because they invested back in the 2018-2021 crypto bubble. There’s also some time pressure, they’ve gotta put that money somewhere within a year (standard VC LP contract), or give it back.
> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.
Molly already put extensive effort into just that in the OP, as did several other folks she references and links to. If you have any critiques of her critiques and why she may be wrong, love to hear it. But without that, it’s not her or us that’s being reflexive here.
> Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.
You write this like it's an absurd notion, but we've already been through Juicero, WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, and FTX among others.
I’m not saying it’s a scam, just that it seems their system isn’t really Sybil resistant due to the issue of account selling. And if that’s the case they either didn’t think this would be an issue, or they expected it but don’t really care, and the claim of Sybil resistance is just marketing. Is this wrong in some way you’d like to explain?
I can't explain anything about this project because I haven't invested the effort to understand it.
Maybe I'll spend the 20 minutes to read the 5000 words in Molly White's article, and then another couple hours to read the whitepaper, then another who knows how many hours researching the claims and counterclaims to make my own judgment.
But probably I'll never do any of those things, and I'll still have high confidence that the project probably isn't simply a scam for sweet, sweet VC money, or unimaginably naive, or full of fatal flaws that every rando can identify instantly.
Because in the past, when anonymous internet commenters are of one mind that a new thing is a scam or fatally flawed, while the team behind the new thing are highly capable, with good reputations for not being scammers or unimaginably naive, usually the anonymous internet commenters don't understand what's really happening.
And then I'll ctrl-f the whitepaper to search for 'sybil' and discover that the arguments in this thread are already discussed in the whitepaper, which gives me even more confidence that the hivemind conclusions of scamminess or naivete are most likely uninformed.
Once again, I never claimed this was a scam. I'm simply pointing out that the system has an inherent flaw regarding account selling, which makes it not sybil resistant, as claimed by the founders. I usually give projects the benefit of the doubt, but I've never heard Sam or the other founder talk about this major issue with their system design.
> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand
If that's the case, then isn't it on WorldCoin to educate us? Their communications so far have apparently been insufficient, if people are rejecting the scheme merely because they don't understand it.
*> A black market for Worldcoin accounts has already emerged [1] in Cambodia, Nigeria, and elsewhere, where people are being paid to sign up for a World ID and then transfer ownership to buyers elsewhere — many of whom are in China, where Worldcoin is restricted. There is no ongoing verification process to ensure that a World ID continues to belong to the person who signed up for it, and no way for the eyeball-haver to recover an account that is under another person’s control. Worldcoin acknowledges that they have no clue how to resolve the issue: “Innovative ideas in mechanism design and the attribution of social relationships will be necessary.“ The lack of ongoing verification also means that there is no mechanism by which people can be removed from the program once they pass away, but perhaps Worldcoin will add survivors’ benefits to its list of use cases and call that a feature.
Relatively speaking, scanning your iris and selling the account is fairly benign. But depending on the popularity of Worldcoin, the eventual price of WLD, and the types of things a World ID can be used to accomplish, the incentives to gain access to others’ accounts could become severe. Coercion at the individual or state level is absolutely within the realm of possibility, and could become dangerous.
[1]:https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=sam-altmans-worldcoin-proje...