Worldcoin Wants to Buy Your Eyeball — Should You Sell It?
Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency and biometric identity verification project co-founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman. Here's what you should know about it.
Worldcoin might be the most important financial innovation since Bitcoin. Yet, very few people are talking about it.
What is it exactly? Worldcoin is a crypto project that combines biometrics with decentralized finance. You open an account by scanning your eye, which provides the basis for verifying your identity. Once you’re in, you can earn Worldcoin’s native token, WLD.
In theory, Worldcoin solves two major problems in the age of AI. It has found a way to differentiate a human from a machine while providing that human with a pathway to earn an income once automation takes their jobs.
In practice, however, nothing of this scope or scale has been attempted before. Biometric scanning tied to a digital financial record could have unintended consequences that the world might not be prepared to handle just yet.
This essay will dive into what Worldcoin is, how it works, and why you should be skeptical of it. If you weren’t previously aware of Worldcoin, you will want to start paying attention to it after reading this.
Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency project and digital financial system that validates human identity through an iris scan.
Worldcoin was founded in 2019 by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern. According to its website, Worldcoin:
“aims to establish universal access to the global economy regardless of country or background. It is designed to become the world’s largest human identity and financial network, giving ownership to everyone.”
Its goal: create a more human-centric economy in the age of AI.
Worldcoin believes it can do this by leveraging blockchain technology. It is built on Optimism, a Layer 2 scaling solution built on top of Ethereum. It uses what it refers to as Proof of Personhood to allow users to engage in transactions with one another.
Worldcoin argues that Proof of Personhood is an essential building block to establish a digital identity. This is becoming increasingly necessary thanks to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence where traditional ways of verifying human identity — such as a state-issued ID or a knowledge check question — are no longer sufficient.
To identify individual personhood, Worldcoin scans your iris using an Orb. This is similar to Apple’s FaceID with one major distinction. While FaceID uses facial recognition to unlock your individual iPhone, the founders of Worldcoin envision its iris scans being used at scale to differentiate humans from non-humans. A World ID would not only identify ownership of your digital wallet and the digital assets in it, but it would also denote your uniqueness compared to everyone else in the world.
The founders of Worldcoin believe that its cryptocurrency ecosystem will be the baseline for a new model of equitable participation in the global economy. Like other crypto projects, Worldcoin has issued its own cryptocurrency token WLD. Users earn WLD through their World ID and can purchase WLD tokens on exchanges like Binance.
Right now, Worldcoin excludes users based in the United States. Americans can create a World ID but cannot purchase WLD tokens and are not eligible for WLD drops.
As of this writing — a month after Worldcoin’s public launch — there are 2.2 million “unique humans” registered on the platform. This is up from around half a million registered users in mid-2022.
The inventors of Worldcoin argue a biometrically verifiable digital identity is essential for a future AI-funded UBI program.
In their July 2023 letter announcing the public launch of Worldcoin, Altman and Blania outline their reasons for founding Worldcoin:
“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.”
The foundational premise for the existence of a financial system that is biometrically verifiable is to facilitate the equitable transfer of wealth from the Haves to the Have Nots through a Universal Basic Income — or UBI.
Many Americans assume UBI is a government-funded next-generation welfare program. Just like Social Security or Medicare, a future UBI would be funded by taxpayer dollars leading to a dramatic increase in taxes. Hence, most Americans are skeptical, if not outright opposed to UBI.
UBI will most likely be funded by large corporations. That could come from companies that have spent decades skirting tax laws and building massive balance sheets in the process. Or, it could come from emerging AI companies that displace place human workers and eliminate their ability to earn an income. It doesn’t matter where it comes from; what matters is how a future UBI-based economic system is operated.
This is where Worldcoin is stepping in to create the infrastructure for the deployment of UBI. World ID holders are compensated for joining the project and the founders have indicated users are eligible to earn weekly distributions of WLD tokens.
There’s an obvious implicit incentive for early adoption: the sooner you join, the sooner you can begin accruing WLD tokens. If WLD tokens take off and the value increases, early adopters could be handsomely rewarded just as early adopters of Bitcoin have been.
From a non-American point of view, there are other implications of this as well. In many parts of the world, economies still function with cash, and few citizens have bank accounts. The jump to crypto is a tremendous opportunity. It allows residents of the Global South — many of whom have smartphones — to access the global economy in a way they’ve never been able to before.
This is why a unique human identification protocol is needed alongside a widespread AI-funded UBI project. It’s not just about proving your ownership of a digital asset; it’s about proving your uniqueness and authenticity compared to every other human in the world. If everyone is to have equitable opportunities to play in the new digital economy, the right tools have to be in place to make that happen.
While Worldcoin sounds great on paper, there are several unintended consequences that need to be addressed.
Worldcoin appears to be a panacea to myriad global economic problems. It could help redistribute wealth and verify human identities against AI-powered machines. But it could also be a double-edged sword.
The first question that comes to mind is equity. Worldcoin will disperse weekly payments to World ID holders. In the short term, those payments are essentially prototyping what a future UBI program could look like. Early adopters will be rewarded for their curiosity up front by being some of the first recipients of Worldcoin disbursements.
But if UBI is to be successful, there must be a protocol for determining how much each recipient gets. Will it be based on meritocracy? Economic utility? Reparations? These are important questions that need to be addressed. What seems fair to one group of people may offend another. This could exacerbate social strife rather than ameliorate it.
Another question is regulation. According to Worldcoin’s founders, the entire project will be decentralized — including hardware development. Worldcoin registers users through its Orbs. Orb Operators basically earn a commission for every person they register. Just like early crypto adopters built massive rigs to mine crypto, early adopters of Worldcoin will have an opportunity to generate income by building hardware to register users.
Without sufficient regulations in place, Orb Operators could build dual-purpose devices. Iris scans could be uploaded to decentralized Worldcoin databases, but they could also reside on an Operator’s personal server. There’s no doubt that existing biometric data like fingerprints and palm scans are being stored on servers in Cupertino and Seattle. Little, if any, regulation is in place for data governance as it is, let alone biometric data. Should individual operators be allowed to create hardware that captures such unique — and valuable — information on their own accord?
New technology can also be co-opted for malevolent purposes. Look no further than Facebook Ads. What started as a more efficient way to target customers became an opportunity to harvest and manipulate voting data. It doesn’t matter who initiated and funded the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal. What matters is that something intended for advertising was leveraged for an entirely different purpose. It changed how people voted and undermined the integrity of the election.
While Worldcoin aspires to put power back into the hands of the people, it’s also building a global financial system. A system that governments currently control and will not want to give up power to anytime soon.
While a global digital ID could give users access to UBI, it could also be used to limit how they participate in that economy. Anyone who has watched or read The Handmaid’s Tale will understand the slippery slope this will lead us toward. With a universal global ID, your access to banking, credit, flights, and in some dystopian future, even food could be turned off at a moment’s notice.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion teaches us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is true in life as it is in physics. The more freedom you pursue, the greater the risk of oppression becomes.
Final takeaway.
Worldcoin launched in late July 2023. It has barely come into existence yet.
What makes Worldcoin noteworthy is that it is the first crypto project of its kind to marry decentralized finance with biometric verification at scale. If successful, the founders expect almost every human on the planet to have a World ID within the next 10 years.
Venture capitalists and Silicon Valley Tech Titans are undoubtedly salivating at the data mine this could provide. The combination of blockchain and biometrics changes commerce from something you can do to something that can be programmed.
The implications of this are profound.
On the one hand, as Worldcoin’s founders are right to point out, programmable economics is a pathway for universal basic income. Existing welfare systems, like Social Security, are inefficient and overly bureaucratic. They are rife with opportunities for fraud and difficult to deploy at scale.
On the other hand, programmable economics is a tool that can limit one’s ability to participate fully in the economy. Look no further than China’s social credit scoring system as evidence of this.
Like a financial credit score, social credit scores assess your status as a contributing member of society. Everyone starts with the same score, but points are deducted if you behave poorly. What constitutes bad behavior? Anything ranging from plotting a terrorist attack to playing too many video games. If your score drops below a certain level, you could be punished with slower internet speeds or find yourself blacklisted from certain modes of transportation.
If this sounds like that episode from Black Mirror, that’s exactly what this is.
To prevent that from playing out in real life, important questions need to be asked about how World ID will be used and for what purposes. While Worldcoin operates a foundation, it is not a charity. It is a business that has raised $125 million in two rounds with Andreessen Horowitz leading the vanguard.
Its goals may be well-intended, but at the end of the day, capitalism is capitalism. Worldcoin exists in an economic paradigm that rewards profitability over altruism. Investors will determine the direction Worldcoin takes — not its users.
Digital biometric IDs are here, but they have yet to be adopted at scale. As the new digital economic age unfolds, it’s important to be both curious and skeptical. Understand the potential opportunities in these new technologies but be aware of the trade-offs.
Many of us were unaware of how much data we gave away freely when we started logging onto social media a decade ago. Let’s not make the same mistake this time around.
If you’ve read my work, then you know I like to ask questions about the unintended consequences of emerging technologies.
Worldcoin is still in the very early stages of its launch. It’s too soon to say what will happen. Maybe World ID takes off or maybe it fizzles.
What I’d like to know is what interests you most about this project? What questions do you have about it that you’d like answered before you rush to your nearest Orb Operator to get an iris scan?