I mean the root comment pretty much already explained it. It is literally impossible for Worldcoin to actually perform its stated purpose, therefore it's a scam.
> Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated purpose" is not something they have ever stated.
I encourage you to read their whitepaper, where they state that world id is indeed a proof of personhood. The allegation in this thread is that it fails at proving that someone is a unique person, and it cannot possibly due so because of the oracle problem. Therefore it is a scam.
"proof of personhood" is something of a term of art which worldcoin did not invent. They are not literally claiming they can prove, in a mathematical sense, personhood. What would that even mean? See for example this, which seems to have originated the term in 2017: https://berkeley-defi.github.io/assets/material/Proof%20of%2...
"proof of personhood" was created in contrast to "proof of work" and "proof of stake". If you want to get technical "proof of work" is also not a mathematical proof, it is more of an argument of work, since it's possible to get lucky and find a low hash without doing all the work. The word "proof" is not doing what you think it is doing.
There are a couple other "proof of personhood" protocols and none of them mathematically prove personhood, because that is obviously impossible, some of them are listed at the beginning of this post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html
That it actually freakin' works at doing the thing it's trying to do (providing a currency with a guarantee that each account is controlled by one person)
I don't believe they have ever promised that. One person = one account is not at all how the system is designed. It is definitely never mentioned or promised here: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/ and it is contrary to the system outlined in that document.
That whitepaper doesn't explicitly say "one person = one account", but it seems to be a really basic feature of the system:
- They clearly don't want accounts that don't belong to a person ("Keep the Bots Out" is an explicit goal).
- They also don't want one person with more than one account (World ID is intended to solve the problem of governance by ensuring that each person gets only one vote).
Methinks you're committing the etymological fallacy. Crypto is not cryptography. Crypto is a specific subset of cryptography, quite far removed (in purpose, if not in technology) from normal cryptography.