[drewry]

They address this in the whitepaper[0]:

> To validate the quality of the algorithms at scale, their performance was evaluated by collecting 2.5 million pairs of high-resolution infrared iris images from 303 different subjects. These subjects represent diversity across a range of characteristics, including eye color, skin tone, ethnicity, age, presence of makeup and eye disease or defects.

> It is important to note that many health conditions, like cataracts to a certain degree, do not impede iris biometrics. Already today, iris biometrics surpass the inclusivity of other PoP verification alternatives like official IDs since less than 50% of the global population has digitally verifiable identities. However, if the proof of personhood mechanism becomes essential for society, it is important that eventually every single person can verify if they want to. Although not currently established, there could be specialized verification centers to facilitate alternative means of verification for individuals with eye conditions, via e.g. facial biometrics. The introduction of alternative means of verification for World ID could potentially create loopholes.

[0] https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/

[wonderwonder]

Issue is that if I lose my eyes I am suddenly both blind and poor at the exact moment where being poor has the most negative impact

[kstrauser]

So eyeless people have to jump through extra hurdles that the rest of us don't have to. The Worldcoin grand misvision is that their terrible World ID would be required to get government benefits, and yet makes it harder for some of the people who most need them to get them.

[nickff]

I don't 'believe in' or support Worldcoin, but I don't think it's realistic to expect any one verification system will serve everyone who needs/wants any given service. Government ID, and even governments themselves don't serve everyone in need.

[d-cc]

Id imagine fingerprints will probably be sufficient no? Surely there are other biological identifiers that will serve as a functional replacement?