[Dismas]

Pretty creepy at first, but it's not government-owned and iris data is supposedly anonymized.

The big question is:
If it's being given out for free, can it retain any sort of value economically?

More than 100,000 people have had their eyes scanned in return for a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, as a project to distribute digital money more widely around the world accelerates.

Worldcoin has distributed about 30 iris-scanning hardware devices, which they call “orbs,” to early users on four continents, who get rewards for signing up more people. Orbs take photos of a user’s eyeballs, creating a unique code that can be used to claim free digital tokens.

The project’s developers said on Thursday they planned to release hundreds of orbs in the coming months and eventually distribute 4,000 devices per month. The team plans to debut the cryptocurrency network early next year and begin giving away the tokens at that time. They have not said how much cryptocurrency users can expect to receive.

Worldcoin amounts to one of the most ambitious and complex attempts to hand out cryptocurrency to the world’s population, similar to the economic concept of universal basic income. The project has already faced feverish criticism, and its own developers admit the “outcome is uncertain.”

Alex Blania, the cofounder of Worldcoin, denied that the project would invade people’s privacy, saying that the orbs convert iris scans into unique strings of letters and numbers before permanently deleting the images.

Read More: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021...ocurrency/

[mothered]

No thanks.

I prefer to keep my unique form of Identification to myself.

[danas]

You know what the most interesting and fair thing about cryptocurrency is? For example, take bitcoin, because as soon as it appeared you could earn it by solving math problems or physics puzzles, and real smart people, maybe they are now world-class scientists, got their bitcoins for free, just because of their intelligence and now they are millionaires, it is not even lucky, but I think it is fair))

[funkyC]

this is creepy, but on the other hand one of my previeus employers had all the employee's eyes scanned so they could turn the alarm off

[fritz]

and real smart people, maybe they are now world-class scientists, got their bitcoins for free, just because of their intelligence

This is completely bullsh*t

Pretty creepy at first, but it's not government-owned and iris data is supposedly anonymized.

As I understand it, even if it is anonymized, it means anybody can see your wallet (depending on the anonymity they chose for the crypto) by scanning your iris.
It's an effective way to definitely link a unique wallet to a unique person, and that's dangerous and at the opposite of the ideology of most cryptos.