Then it's also great to see that they seem to be pretty open about stuff, [including their hardware](https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-insi... ).
That said.. it's hard to see terms like "coin", "wallet", "Web3", "NFT", etc., without a bit of concern -- even if, admittedly, such terms might be appropriate and justifiable in this sort of application.
Is there a page that shows their overall economic model, perhaps with flow-charts and such? This is, where are the cash/token/hardware/etc. in-flows and out-flows?
And is there an early-adopter incentive? And if so, is it significant, or is the system designed to be fair to folks whenever they might join?
Asking in part because the classic pyramid-scam thing, where early-adopters end up collecting huge rewards at the expense of late-adopters, seems like a major hallmark of dubious projects. Projects without such asymmetries would seem more credible, both in terms of not being yet another pyramid-scam and long-term viability.
Yet their actual ethics are pretty abysmal. Worldcoin is a known scam. Notably, it’s also by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
In what way is it a scam? For example, is it a pyramid-scheme, pump-and-dump, pretext to trick people into downloading malware, etc.?
[That story (2022-04-06)](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... ) did offer one major concern:
> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.
20% of coins being in the hands of a few does sound potentially pretty corrupting -- at least, if it's a system like Bitcoin, where there's a cap on the total such that, if mass-adopted, that small group of people would end up controlling 20% of the total wealth. But does it work like that?
Beyond that, it sounds like the article's suggesting that it's a scam to get iris-scans:
> Meanwhile, those who fear that the whole thing may have been a scam want to know what they’ve lost. “50 KS is not enough to give an eyeball away,” says Okach, the university student in Nairobi that spent a weekend recruiting others to Worldcoin. “That’s manipulation, taking advantage of students without clear clarification about what it is they are doing or what they want.”
But the idea of a scam to get folks' iris-scans, especially iris-scans of people in less-developed areas, sounds a bit strange.
I mean, if someone has a database of folks' pictures, DNA, or fingerprints, then that database might help track folks without their knowledge or consent -- plus DNA might also reveal things about a person that they'd rather have kept private.
But what might scammers do with iris-scans that might potentially justify the trouble of collecting them like that?