Edward Snowden needs you to be extremely skeptical of the ominous cryptocurrency that desires to scan your eyeballs
Cybersecurity knowledgeable Edward Snowden, who rose to fame after exposing a National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, has picked holes in Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The famend whistleblower slammed the challenge for creating a worldwide hash database of individuals’s iris scans, arguing that merely deleting the scans gained’t remedy the issue.
This appears to be like prefer it produces a worldwide (hash) database of individuals’s iris scans (for “fairness”), and waves away the implications by saying “we deleted the scans!”
Yeah, however 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 urges his followers not to use their biometric knowledge for something, including that the human physique is not “a ticket punch.”
The distribution mannequin of the much-hyped cryptocurrency is based mostly on scanning individuals’s eyeballs with the assistance of a chromatic sphere dubbed “The Orb.” The pilot entails 30 such orbs in nations across the globe. 130,000 individuals have thus far taken half within the trial.
The WorldCoin challenge, which is backed by enterprise capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz and different distinguished traders, drew the ire of privacy-conscious members of the cryptocurrency.
The Bitcoin group criticized VCs for pouring cash into “a creepy orb” as an alternative of specializing in constructing out the ecosystem of the biggest cryptocurrency:
VCs will actually create a creepy orb WorldCoin quite than construct on Bitcoin.
— Brandon Quittem (@Bquittem) October 23, 2021
WorldCoin is based mostly on Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain. Co-founder Alex Blania told TechCrunch that Bitcoin is not scalable sufficient:
Bitcoin isn’t scalable to billions of individuals.
Altman defended the social experiment after Snowden’s feedback, asserting that customers’ transactions shall be cryptographically decoupled from the hash.
The controversial WorldCoin cryptocurrency is rumored to be launched in early 2022 as an ERC20 token.
