This project faces a few risks:

- Abuse of orb operators by Worldcoin, as outlined in the article. This is basically equivalent to abuse of Uber drivers by Uber. They are offering a job and they need to be good employers.

- Abuse of orb operators by other actors, again, as outlined in the article. Since they are "giving away free money," it's quite natural for legitimate and illegitimate authorities to imagine there's an opportunity to prosecute or profit from taking advantage of the system. So far as I can see, there is no such opportunity, but it won't stop people who don't understand what's happening.

- Abuse of the biometrics themselves to create an unfair distribution, as mentioned in the article. If the eye scanners actually don't create a unique hash for each individual, or if people learn how to create fake irises, or otherwise hack the device, people could sign up multiple times and receive more free money than other people. If this scam works at scale, orb operators could become targets.

- Abuse of Worldcoin "users." Orb operators could sign people up, then steal their crypto wallets from them. This could be done through coercion or through misinformation.

- Scams: namely, people creating fake orbs that do collect and abuse biometric information

- Unlikely, but: collecting more information than needed and then getting compromised by bad actors or by some kind of corporate takeover. As far as I know, Worldcoin only collects hashes of irises (and maybe telemetry). This data is pretty much useless for any purpose other than the intended one: providing people with a unique wallet. Abuses of such data could do one thing: given the original person and the device, prove that they signed up for Worldcoin. If Worldcoin accidentally collects some other kind of data, which has some other abuse potential, this could be a problem. I suspect they will be very careful not to do this.

In conclusion, the "retina blockchain tech" has, really, no risks associated inherently. Distribution, however, must be carefully handled to avoid abuse.

This is especially complicated because most people will not understand how the technology works and will attempt to exploit it in ways that, in the end, won't work. Nevertheless, they may cause harm in the meantime.

The problem is analogous to a bank offering free money to anyone who shows up. Provided they can prove identity, there is no problem inherently. People show up and get free money, then leave. However, how would you maintain order in the line that has formed? What to do about someone who shows up with a gun? What if the teller is assaulted? What if the tellers are not protected or paid appropriately for their service?

Worldcoin, if it succeeds, will merely put everyone in the world on more equal economic footing, and make a few people rich. It will also launch the first ever decentralized identity system with a significant user-base. If they can pull this off, I'm more concerned about the geopolitical, governance and economic consequences of a cryptocurrency with wider distribution than Bitcoin, and of the identity system. What happens when anyone in the world can airdrop cryptocurrency to more than a billion people?