Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed an NSA surveillance programme, has criticised Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Cybersecurity expert Edward Snowden, who gained notoriety by disclosing a National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programme, has identified flaws in Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and backed by the OpenAI Foundation.
As part of his critique, the whistleblower asserted that the project’s creation of a worldwide hash database of people’s iris scans was insufficient, claiming that just erasing the scans would be insufficient.
This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans (for “fairness”), and waves away the implications by saying “we deleted the scans!”Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.Don’t catalogue eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021
Snowden warns his followers not to provide their biometric data to anybody or use it for anything other than identification purposes, stating that the human body is not a “ticket punch.”
This much-hyped cryptocurrency’s distribution methodology relies on scanning people’s eyeballs with the aid of a chromatic sphere nicknamed “The Orb,” which is a chromatic sphere with a blue light inside. The pilot involves the deployment of 30 similar spheres in various locations throughout the world.
So far, more than 130,000 people have taken part in the experiment.
VCs will create a creepy orb WorldCoin rather than build on Bitcoin.— Brandon Quittem (@Bquittem) October 23, 2021
WorldCoin is built on Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain in terms of transaction volume. According to co-founder Alex Blania, who spoke to TechCrunch, Bitcoin is not scalable enough:
Bitcoin isn’t scalable to billions of people
As a result of Snowden’s statements, Altman defended the social experiment, claiming that users’ transactions will be cryptographically separated from the hash generated by the project. The contentious WorldCoin cryptocurrency is expected to be released as an ERC20 token in early 2022, according to reports.