>I don’t know if it’s the best attempt but I understand what it is and what the goals are.
a bad solution can potentially be worse than no solution in this case. A false belief in identity guarantees can facilitate fraud and other manipulation, while "you should never trust anyone or anything, including that there's a 1:1 relationship between public keys and individual humans" at least advises everyone of the risk.
Maybe world coin has thought of these problems? Maybe not, but I wouldn’t trust the author to have done any due diligence.
There’s an interesting article to be written here, but this isn’t it imo.
[0] Aside from Larry Elison, but there's still debate on whether he's actually human or not.
You don't. Crypto evangelists, as usual, are trying to put their square blockchain peg in a round hole. They need to stop and check their premises.
Make a human go to a place for example (though even this has difficulties with fraud). I'm not making any specific claims about world coin other than the goal they're trying to solve makes sense as a goal in a world where bots are increasingly capable of mimicking humans successfully, we want to know when something is human and when it isn't.
Attempting to solve that problem now before it becomes critical makes sense, not every attempt will be good.
A better article than this one would have dug into that problem.
Worldcoin only verifies someone is a real human once, when the identity is created. There is nothing stopping someone from lending or selling their verified identity to a bot.
It already happens. Identity dealers will go to poor areas and buy people's proof of identity for just a few dollars, before selling them on the black market.
A company I used to work for had a massive problem with this. I'd detect a fraudulent user and check their proof of identity, and in retrospect it was obvious these were black market identities. They always fell into clusters, one vendor always sourced their IDs from an area of southern Russia.
Another vendor sourced their IDs from a city in northern China. They weren't trying very hard, you would find a bunch of new users all created on the same day, the users were always retirement age women and the photos would show them all in the same room.
The goal is how do you verify humanity in a world where bots are indistinguishable from humans.
To do that, you need to rely on something humans have that bots don’t - world coin is an attempt to do this.
I don’t know if it’s the best attempt but I understand what it is and what the goals are.