Smash The Orbs?

Smash The Orbs?

There’s something about eyes that is either truly beautiful or just downright scary. The eyes, too, are seen to be the “Window to Your Soul”. Mother nature has rarely produced an engineering feat as great as the human eye. But, in films like The Minority Report and Clockwork Orange, eyes have been used to scare audiences. They thought, too, that someone touching your eye would bring most people out in a cold sweat.

But, like it or not, your eyes give you away … and it’s not just the colour of your eyes. In fact, your iris has a fairly unique pattern of freckles and pits. But, if we look at the back of the eye — in the retina — we see an almost unique pattern of veins that could identify you immediately and which does not age over time in the way that your face does.

And, so, in May 2018, I went to get my yearly eye test and managed to get a scan of my retina:

But some people said you shouldn’t publish your retina scans on the Internet, as some people might get a trace of your biometrics.

The orb

Now, Sam Altman — the OpenAI CEO — wants your “orb” in exchange for some cryptocurrency (WLD — Worldcoin):

It involves an iris biometric cryptocurrency project and was launched in October 2021 as a Layer 2 Ethereum-based currency. Initially, it raised $25 million, but within six months, and still, in a beta phase, the currency had a valuation increased to around $3 billion (and with more than two million users). Some have criticised its approach of attracting users from less developed areas of the world, but others might say that people in those areas need to have an identity to be part of our online world without the complexity of our online world.

Basically, Worldcoin aims to make user authentication a whole lot more reliable and move away from usernames and passwords. It does this by capturing iris scans and then using AI to authenticate users. With a global database of scans, the system could integrate with online applications in order to prove someone’s identity.

But, the iris is not quite as distinctive as a biometric, and where a retina scan is much more reliable. The false-positive rates on iris scanning can be quite high, and it needs good lighting to get a reliable capture of the iris. The Worldcoin team think that by getting enough samples of iris, AI can then make sense of the biometric markers and make the system a whole lot more reliable.

Conclusions

Would you give away your iris or your retina scan for some crypto?