“Worldcoin” Is Here: what is it?

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Introducing Worldcoin

More than three years ago we founded Worldcoin with the ambition of creating a new identity and financial network owned by everyone; the rollout begins today. If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.

Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and, where laws allow, a digital currency (WLD) received simply for being human. We hope that, where the rules are less clear, such as in the U.S., steps will be taken so more people can benefit from both.

You can now download World App, the first protocol-compatible wallet, and reserve your share. After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID. This lets you prove you are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private. As the global distribution of Orbs is ramping up, you can find the closest one and book time to be verified with World App and at worldcoin.org.

Worldcoin is an attempt at global scale alignment, the journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain. But finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time. We hope you’ll join us.

Alex Blania & Sam Altman

As issues with cyber safety and data leaks spread, a much-hyped new crypto project from Y Combinator founder Sam Altman aims to mitigate scams and breaches caused by bots and bad actors by scanning your eyeballs and awarding you crypto.

Worldcoin, which already touts a $1 billion valuation, aims to onboard more people into crypto by doling out free coins to anyone who scans their eyes on a device called “the Orb” that will convert an image of your eyes into “short numeric code” to check whether you already have Worldcoins.

“To rapidly get its new currency into the hands of as many people as possible,” the project says on its website, “Worldcoin will allow everyone to claim a free share of it.”

But privacy advocate Edward Snowden, the man famous for leaking government documents, has a lot of issues with the concept.

Snowden took to Twitter to tell his 5 million followers his issues with Worldcoin: the use of the human body for crypto.

This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people's iris scans (for "fairness"), and waves away the implications by saying "we deleted the scans!"

Yeah, but you save the hashes produced by the scans. Hashes that match future scans.

Don't catalogue eyeballs. https://twitter.com/sama/status/1451203161029427208

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021

“This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people's iris scans (for "fairness"), and waves away the implications by saying we deleted the scans!’” Snowden tweeted.

Continues.

Have you had your eyes scanned by “The Orb” yet? All it takes is just one trip, and once your biometric data is in the database you will receive some free money and a new “digital identity” that you will be able to use all over the Internet. Doesn’t that sound grand? As you will see below, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe have already signed up. Those that have created Worldcoin intend for it to be “a new identity and financial network” that is owned by everyone on the entire planet. The following comes directly from the official Worldcoin website…

More than three years ago we founded Worldcoin with the ambition of creating a new identity and financial network owned by everyone; the rollout begins today. If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.

That initial paragraph certainly sounds wonderful.

But once you start digging a bit deeper you quickly discover the dystopian details of this scheme.

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Once you sign up for Worldcoin, your new “World ID” will be issued to you. Ultimately, the goal is for the entire Internet to start using this new “World ID” system…

Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and, where laws allow, a digital currency (WLD) received simply for being human. We hope that, where the rules are less clear, such as in the U.S., steps will be taken so more people can benefit from both.

Needless to say, just offering a “World ID” is not going to motivate a lot of people to embrace this new system.

So the founders are also offering free money to everyone that signs up where laws allow for such a thing.

Ultimately, the goal is to “freely distribute tokens to all eight billion people on the planet”…

The goal is simple and modest: To create a system that will, eventually, freely distribute tokens to all eight billion people on the planet, as a form of universal basic income (UBI). But because the rise of AI will make it tricky to figure out who is human and who’s a digital fake, Worldcoin first needs to create a system that lets people — all people, across the globe — prove that they are in fact human beings.

The idea of a “universal basic income” certainly appeals to a lot of people out there.

Especially the lazy ones.

But if you want your free money, you have got to visit “The Orb”.

The plan is for “The Orb” to eventually scan the eyeballs of every single person in the entire world. Here is more from the official Worldcoin website…

You can now download World App, the first protocol-compatible wallet, and reserve your share. After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID. This lets you prove you are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private. As the global distribution of Orbs is ramping up, you can find the closest one and book time to be verified with World App and at worldcoin.org.

Worldcoin is an attempt at global scale alignment, the journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain. But finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time. We hope you’ll join us.

I don’t know about you, but I never plan to visit “The Orb”, and there is no way that I am ever going to allow these freaks to scan my eyeballs.

Upgrade to paid

But it is imperative for all of us to understand that this is a very serious threat, because one of the guys heading up this project is also the CEO of the company that brought us ChatGPT…

If Worldcoin was the brainchild of some random crypto bro, maybe it could be laughed away as a delusion of grandeur. But the project has real intellectual heft. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), who’s arguably the most central player in the development of AI. Altman suspects that the world will change forever if — or when — AI becomes so advanced that it achieves AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, meaning it truly surpasses the abilities of humans.

Sam Altman is certainly a force to be reckoned with.

And now he is absolutely determined to get as many people into this new system as he possibly can.

According to Zero Hedge, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe have already had their eyeballs scanned and have been issued a “World ID”…

If reports are to be believed, the uptake in Spain, where the scheme first became available a year ago, is better than elsewhere – 150,000 participants in total, 20,000 new ones each day, and Barcelona is the place where a number of Orb scanners will be installed.

Portugal is not far behind, with 120,000 participants, and Germany is said to also be warming up to the project, ever since it started expanding two months ago.

All in all, some 2 million “biometric credentials” are now operated by Worldcoin.

It is quite interesting that Europeans are embracing Worldcoin so enthusiastically.

Whenever some new dystopian scheme comes along, Europe always seems to be the most fertile soil.

Why is that?

Whether this new scheme ultimately succeeds or fails, it appears to be inevitable that the powers that be will try to force digital identification upon all of us one way or another.

And whoever controls the global system of digital identification that ultimately prevails will have immense power over the entire planet.

We really are living in perilous times, and things will continue to get a lot more “interesting” in the months and years ahead.

So I hope that you are ready for what is coming, because our world is starting to change at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.

...

Elon Musk just launched X or rather renamed twitter as X a day before the launch of Worldcoin in competition with Sam Altman the founder of ChatGPT. Elon and Sam were the founders of OpenAI from which ChatGPT was developed, however the two of them had a falling out when Elon decided that he wanted to run the company. Elon has this vision around X being Twitter, saying: "If done right X would serve peoples financial needs to such a degree that over time it would become, I don't know, maybe become half of the global financial system." So these to Billionairs are now in competition to see who will be able to develop the biggest financial institution using perfect technology to capture all of our bio-metric data and link it to a CBDC and eventually UBI for the people that survive the coming difficulties IE. WW3 etc. on this Hellish planet.

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@21WIRE

HERE WE GO FOLKS: Hundreds of youth voluntarily line-up to have their eyeballs scanned with a Worldcoin orb to get their new digital ID with “free money” Worldcoins in their new digital wallet. This is exactly how #CBDC will be rolled out globally…

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Sam Altman, head of OpenAI and ChatGPT, is further demonstrating his twisted Technocrat mind with the launch of Worldcoin. Worldcoin bluntly states that everyone will be identified (with the Orb’s iris scans) whether they like it or not. Further, that it will be the vehicle to promote Universal Basic Income (UBI) to the whole world. So, ChatGPT will wreck the world and Worlddcoin will save it?

Altman speaks out of both sides of his mouth. With OpenAI, he pleads for government regulation while openly fearing AI’s threat to humanity, even as his development teams race forward to release the next and more advanced version. This is Hegelian Dialectic at its extreme. Worldcoin is just another example of the same scheme: Just trust us, they say, as you peer into the shiny iris-scanning orb. ⁃ TN Editor

Worldcoin — a new financial system connected to sensitive biometric information, mostly harvested from poor people — sure sounds like a terrible idea.

“Terrible” doesn’t do it justice.

Worldcoin will need to assemble a vast database of iris data. But not everyone is eager to gaze into an Orb. In the bootstrapping phase, at least, you had to pay people to scan their eyes. And so Worldcoin turned to the global south — home to the cheapest eyeballs — and played a dark game of ‘what will people do for money?’

Incredibly, Worldcoin was unprepared for an obvious consequence of this rollout strategy: A black market for verified credentials. You can now seemingly buy a World ID for as little as $30. Anyone, then, with more than $30 on hand can command more than one digital identity (although Worldcoin is aware of this issue and has proposed solutions to resolve it). Connecting real people to digital identities is a thorny puzzle.

Worldcoin does not fix this. And it’s unlikely it ever can, since nothing in the design can stop professional sybil attackers farming eyeballs on the ground level through nefarious means.

This does not inspire trust in the system or its designers. And yet trust is what they demand. Worldcoin’s promotional materials are full of promises — to delete sensitive biometric information, or keep it hidden from view, or not use it in nefarious ways. One blog post (quoted here; the original appears to have been changed since initial release) put it this way: “During our field-testing phase, we are collecting and securely storing more data than we will upon its completion… We will delete all the biometric data we have collected during field testing once our algorithms are fully-trained.”

“Trust us,” in other words. “We’ll totally delete the eyeball database.”

But when it comes to sensitive information, promises aren’t enough. And the very people who insist that you trust them are the ones who should command the most suspicion. The fact that Worldcoin’s co-founder Sam Altman also heads up OpenAI — a firm currently being sued over allegations of dubious uses of large data sets — asks more questions than it answers.

Sometimes Worldcoin’s privacy promises are conjoined with dazzling technical details. Zero-knowledge proofs, we’re told, will save the day, and allow users to prove humanity without connecting any particular financial activity to a World ID or other associated transactions.

There’s a grain of truth here. Zero-knowledge proofs can generate impressive privacy guarantees. But in the case of Worldcoin marketing, they’re more theater than substance. Taking off your shoes at the airport makes it look like important precautions are being taken (but doesn’t actually make you any safer); and long blog posts about zero-knowledge proofs distract from, but don’t in fact address, the problem of Worldcoin asking for users’ trust.

Linking immutable biometric traits to money could have dystopian consequences.

Imagine that your digital identity has been lost in some way — shut down by authorities for non-compliance, or otherwise blocked. With traditional cash — and other cryptocurrencies — you can always make a new wallet and stash some fresh coins in it. But this isn’t Minority Report, and you can’t get a new iris from your neighborhood surgeon.

When your immutable digital identity is locked — imagine merchants who won’t take your coins from you without a digital signature announcing your World ID — it’s over for you. No old account. No new account. No soup for you. You just lost your digital personhood.

Boosters might reply that, thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, one could prove that a given transaction is associated with a valid World ID without disclosing which World ID that is — thus reducing the risk of total identity blockade. But this reply misses the point.

Zero-knowledge proofs could be used in benign ways or to preserve user privacy. Or authorities could demand more; they could demand that users reveal all, or be locked out altogether. Setting up a system and simply hoping its full powers of surveillance and control won’t be used is naive, at best.

Dystopian premise… dystopian premine?

Worldcoin is billed as a network “owned by everyone.” Early promotional materials claim giving “every person on the planet an equal share of a new cryptocurrency” as a premise of the project. It sounds laudable. But a glance at the actual plan for distributing tokens casts doubt on whether equal distribution is an aim of the project at all, much less one it will achieve.

It’s a curious ‘world’ coin that isn’t even available in the United States, Turkey, Sudan, or China. And if equal distribution is a goal, allocating a significant chunk of all the tokens that will ever exist to insiders is another curious choice. Early documentation put that insider number at twenty percent; it’s now slated to be at least twenty-five.

Who are these insiders? It’s some combination of Worldcoin developers and their partners, Orb operators (with signup bonuses that exhibit a pyramid-like structure), and a slate of (in)famous investors including Sam Bankman-Fried and Three Arrows Capital. Such self-dealing is not the plan one would expect, to put the point mildly, from an operation with genuine egalitarian ambitions.

Read more from our opinion section: Worldcoin hackable by cutting off someone’s face, draping it over your own

Now that Worldcoin has launched, we know a bit more about how token distribution will work. It is not entirely reassuring.

There’s a well-known crypto trick; they call it a “Sam Coin” (yes, after that Sam). The idea is to release into circulation a very small percentage of all the tokens that will ever exist. Despite low liquidity and trading volume, some eye-popping fully diluted market cap numbers can result, which make for great marketing and creative accounting.

Worldcoin — much like MAPS, a notorious crypto dud — is a Sam Coin.

About one percent of the ten billion Worldcoin tokens that will ever exist are in circulation, mostly in the hands of market makers partnered with Worldcoin.

And yet Worldcoin’s fully diluted market cap, at the time of writing, is somewhere around twenty billion dollars. It’s a great setup to attract speculative retail investors. And those market maker insiders, furthermore, have a deal that guarantees them access to tokens at a fixed price. Their profits are secure. The result is a market structure primed for manipulation and pump and dump dynamics — familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to crypto.

Worldcoin is no radical new financial system, and certainly not one aimed at equality or fairness.

It’s just more of the same, but with extra data harvesting steps.

Do not look into the Orb.

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Article is dated May 2023.

OpenAI Founder's Worldcoin Reportedly Perpetuates Black Market for Iris Data

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DAY 3 OF WORLDCOIN LAUNCH, CRAZY LINES AROUND THE WORLD. IRIS SCANS TO BE “VERIFIED HUMAN.”

Sam Altman's Worldcoin Integrates With Identity Management Software Okta as It Pushes Into Germany

Worldcoin, the blockchain identity project founded by the duo behind OpenAI, has integrated with Okta and is launching its identity protocol, World ID, in Germany, the firm said in a Thursday press release shared with CoinDesk.

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SCAN YOUR EYEBALL, GET FREE MONEY! MEET WORLDCOIN THIS IS HOW THEY WILL CONTROL US | REDACTED

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Here's what I recommend *

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Agreed. However no electricity no XMR & no Internet no XMR. Do we have a decentralized Internet run off mesh networks yet? Not where I am? Is Silver better?

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Yeah, exactly.

The people have money
Digital money
Turn off the power - no money

Problem - reaction - solution

No. I strive to into the situation and tech from time to time.

I don’t know. Best to let Father give advice on what do invest in.

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This is not investment advice!

I mean it has the to me most interesting aspect
that different cryptocurrencies offer. Strong anonymity which makes it closer to cash than any other cryptocurrency.

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Agreed.

6:29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
6:30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, [shall He] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith?
6:31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
6:32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
6:33 But seek ye FIRST The Kingdom of God, and His Righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

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World Coin Eye of Sauron