Worldcoin suspended in Kenya as thousands queue for free money

Tazmanian@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 145 points –
Worldcoin suspended in Kenya as thousands queue for free money
bbc.com

The Kenyan government has ordered cryptocurrency project Worldcoin to stop signing up new users, citing data privacy concerns.

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Wait cryptobros still exist?

This is by the ChatGPT guy himself, all the rest of the crypto world is pretty much in flames

Even if it's the CEO of OpenAI, that doesn't change the fact that cryptos are an absolute mess

Oh yeah, although their pool of marks which they can scam is dwindling after more and more people are becoming familiar with them. Which is why they have to resort to this kind of nonsense to continue their scam.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The Kenyan government has ordered cryptocurrency project Worldcoin to stop signing up new users, citing data privacy concerns.

Worldcoin, founded by US tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, offers free crypto tokens to people who agree to have their eyeballs scanned.

The ministry of the interior has launched an investigation into Worldcoin and called on security services and data protection agencies to establish its authenticity and legality.

Mr Altman, who founded Open AI which built chat bot ChatGPT, says he hopes the initiative will help confirm if someone is a human or a robot.

Worldcoin told BBC that it chose Kenya as the first African country to launch the platform because of the already booming tech space, and the more than four million Kenyans who are already trading in crypto.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

if someone is a human or a robot.

I am sure there are lots of methods to find that and using this method is certainly not an efficient one.

Worldcoin is described by Altman as a for-profit venture. You have to ask who their real customers are if they're giving money away and they're for-profit.

Seems like scrip for the Worldcoin company store. Give us your eyeball data, get some Worldcoin, trade for a water bottle.

So why do they want people's iris scans? Like they say it's an easy way to verify someone signing up is a real person but is there some other nefarious reason I'm missing here?

I want to know too. Can someone EILI5 for me? If I let this thing scan my eye, what’s the worst that could happen? And how is it worse than all the rest of my info that is out there?

To be clear, my working assumption is that there is a nefarious reason, it's just not immediately obvious to me what it is.

As someone else mentioned though, you could be a bit fucked if your eyeball data is used to identity fraud you, so perhaps not the best idea for a security standpoint

also isn't the weird orb thing supposed to be local-only? idk. I don't expect them to keep their promises when it's actually connected to the internet 24/7