Sam Altman’s Worldcoin: Digital identity breakthrough or security nightmare?

The blockchain identity system, which aims to be used to differentiate humans from bots, already has two million sign-ups from its trial

In November 2022, Sam Altman’s company OpenAI broke the internet when it launched the powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, for public use. It could produce human-like responses when prompted or asked a question. This quickly triggered a wave of questions about the possibilities of AI, including the types of jobs it could make redundant and if it could actually take over the world.

On Monday (July 24), Altman launched what seemed to be a solution to his creation: Worldcoin, a blockchain project centred around an identity system that provides “proof of personhood”—the idea of differentiating humans from bots.

Announcing the news in a joint letter, Altman and project co-founder Alex Blania stated that Worldcoin is made up of two core parts: a “privacy-preserving” digital identity called World ID that only humans can get, and a digital currency that every person is entitled to receive “simply for being human”.

They posit that it will be essential in a world where powerful AI models are increasingly becoming available.

To get a WorldID, you must sign up to do an in-person iris scan using Worldcoin's “Orb”, a biometric verification device approximately the size of a bowling ball. Once the Orb verifies that you are a real human, it will create your WorldID.

Worldcoin is developed by Blania’s San Francisco and Berlin-based company, Tools for Humanity.

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Worldcoin has reportedly reached 2 million signups from its beta period, and with Monday’s launch, it plans to ramp up its “orbing” operations and push out 1,500 orbs to 35 cities in 20 countries.

To encourage sign-ups in certain countries, the company is enticing people with its cryptocurrency WLD. On crypto exchange Binance, the price of WLD has shot up from a starting price of $0.15 to $2.12 at press time, with a market cap of more than $220 million.

According to Worldcoin, if the project succeeds, it could “increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and show a potential path to AI-funded UBI (Universal Basic Income)”.

Since the launch, reactions from the crypto world have been mixed. Concerns have been raised about its actual ability to ensure privacy and security around the orb, as well as certain ethical issues surrounding how the company obtained its first batch of test users.

According to interviews conducted by MIT Technology Review with more than 30 individuals in six countries—including Indonesia, Kenya and Norway—who either worked for Worldcoin, had been scanned or were unsuccessfully recruited to participate in its initial user tests, the company’s representatives were found to have used “deceptive marketing practices” and “failed to obtain meaningful informed consent”.

Above Inside an Orb, Worldcoin’s biometric imaging device (Photo: Worldcoin)

One of the most prominent voices expressing concerns about Worldcoin is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In a blog post, Buterin highlights four major risks related to Worldcoin’s user authentication system: privacy, accessibility, centralisation and security.

Buterin first argues that the registry of iris scans could lead to more information being revealed than intended. If someone else scans your iris, for example, they would at the very least being able to check against the database to find out if you have a WorldID or not. He also says that realistically, not everyone would be able to get an Orb, which means the WorldID won’t be accessible to everyone.

As the Orb is a hardware device, Buterin argues that it is difficult to verify that each has been constructed correctly and does not contain backdoors, which are hidden access points in the computer systems or software that would allow unauthorised individuals—including Worldcoin Foundation—to gain entry and exploit the system.

Finally, Buterin also believes it is also possible for people’s phones to get hacked, them being forced to give out their iris scans or the chances of 3D printing fake people that can pass off as humans to get a WorldID.

Buterin acknowledges that there is no “ideal form of proof of personhood”, and that many teams running such systems ”have shown a willingness to take privacy much more seriously than pretty much any government or major corporate-run identity systems, and this is a success that we should build on”.

He adds that a world without any proof-of-personhood has its risks too, as it is “more likely to be a world dominated by centralised identity solutions, money, small closed communities, or some combination of all three”.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, on the other hand, had only one word to describe Worldcoin’s declaration “attempt at global scale alignment”: cute.

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