Literally everything about this is a huge nope for me.
Credit cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, "new world orders", the United Nations. All of these things were tools of the devil, marking your soul for eternal damnation.
I get the sense they would have had a field day with Worldcoin.
I can hear it now. "The Antichrist is taking control of the global finance system. When you choose to scan your eyes and participate in his world instead of the kingdom of heaven, you surrender your soul to the devil. And that's a place where even Jesus Christ himself cannot save you. Choosing to scan your eyes - that God himself gave you - is swearing allegiance to Lucifer and his armies on this earth. Choosing Worldcoin is making a personal choice of eternal damnation."
Worse, acknowledging even an accidental good tends to encourage lazy thinking and reinforce a very harmful system.
And calling them out every time someone tries to throw them a bone doesn't take away from the bad elsewhere -- such as VC grifting shit coins and their panopticon dreams.
Worldcoin seems like the peak of a top-down push to have perfect digital control over every human being.
Especially since UBI distribution aren't built in any meaningful way on this blockchain. They have some vague notion of one day wanting to use it to provide UBI, but they don't have any idea of what that actually looks like, or when, etc.
They are vaguely gesturing towards the concept of UBI.
This is not necessarily applicable. There's cryptography from 20 years ago (e.g. the work of Stefan Brands) that can show that someone has a World ID without revealing which ID it is. If no "username" is ever revealed then it can't be linked to anything.
Maybe you can find a few thousand on the black market, but that's going to add up fast.
https://worldcoin.org/cofounder-letter
There are a few words about economic opportunity but little explanation, so you can discount that part. They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as any distribution today[1]
Their main sell:
> scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy
> Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID)
> You can now download World App... After visiting an Orb ... you will receive a World ID. This lets you prove you are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private.
This seems to be the sole feature but "distinguish" and "privacy" are fundamentally at odds. Always! If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private. They may be private for a little while, but as soon as User12345 is outed to be Taylor Swift, there's no going back. There's no worldcoin re-roll. Twitter accounts are more anonymous than that - at least if your anon twitter account is unveiled, you can make a new one! In that way uniqueness is anti-privacy. It has to be.
[1] For example worldcoin has a plan to confirm that people exist. It does not have a plan to confirm that people are dead. https://japantoday.com/category/crime/man-says-he-kept-paren...