Is it about freedom or surveillance? (OP-ED)

Is it about freedom or surveillance? (OP-ED)

It was a big week for Worldcoin, the Blockchain idea of ​​Openai CEO Sam Altman. The blockchain biometry project concludes a financing contract of over $ 100 million. In addition to the previous one, the investors of this round also include new supporters.

The 100 million dollar seed round of Worldcoin

The former Seed round investors from Worldcoin include A16Z (Andreessen Horowitz), the risk capital department of Coinbase, Khosla Ventures and even Sam Bankman-Fried.

(The FTX founder, who had fallen out of favor, is currently defending himself against several criminal complaints and enforcement measures in the USA.)

Fortune reports:

"The financing news is a ray of hope for crypto investments in a dark year. According to Crunchbase, risk-fitting linner up for web3 startups from 9.1 billion US dollars in the first quarter of 2022 to $ 1.7 billion in 2023, which corresponds to a decrease of 82 % compared to the previous year."

The Chatgpt founder's large fundraising campaign shows that there is still an enormous VC demand for investments in the crypto area. And despite the years of crypto winter, which may have ended in January, a number of failed crypto companies in recent months and an epic regulatory fight with the US regulatory authorities.

biometric key: freedom or surveillance?

Worldcoin has ambitious ambitions to integrate biometric identification into Web 3.0.

The cryptocurrency project of the Openai founder aims to collect and develop support for ID authentication for retina scans. The enthusiastic support of the project by VC means that they may be able to implement such a brave plan.

But is Worldcoin more suitable for releasing the advantages of blockchain freedom or Orwell's high-tech monitoring capitalism? For decades, civil rights activists consider the digitization of medical records to be associated with legal and humanitarian dangers.

The use of biometric data as a security and authentication standard can violate people's privacy. The goal of Worldcoin would be to create a world that ultimately requires people to give up their biomarkers to use apps and do business.

However, this is not the inevitable result of Worldcoin. Shutting biometric data into the blockchain and the use of web-3 techniques for the management of private, personally identifying information for Internet users could be the safest, fairest and free way to do this. Web 3 can use ZK-Proofs and multi-party calculations to keep this data privately and at the same time to prove to the servers who request that the user is the one for whom he pretends.

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