After ChatGPT became popular all over the world, the encryption project Worldcoin (Worldcoin) founded by Sam Altman (Sam Altman) returned to the public eye. This project was born 2 years ago. At that time, OpenAI, which was busy iterating the GPT model, was not yet so well-known, and the company's CEO Sam Altman was also among the "fairy class" of technology giants.
Worldcoin, which was still a pure encryption project at that time, attracted various doubts when it was born. Among them, the vision of "realizing universal basic income" sounds like "giving money" to people on the earth, this kind of "pie in the sky" thing It was once questioned as fraud because of the delay in issuing coins.
Today, ChatGPT and OpenAI are world-renowned. Altman’s Worldcoin has come back and proposed the concept of "human identity card" in the era of artificial intelligence. It is necessary to unconditionally airdrop Worldcoin tokens for all people, with the purpose of offsetting the unemployment caused by artificial intelligence. This is even more magical than "realizing universal basic income".
Against all kinds of doubts, Altman asked Worldcoin to find another 100 million US dollars in financing. The project also launched the encrypted wallet World App to the world. Is it really going to send "money" this time? However, receiving "money" is not unconditional. Worldcoin has been caught up in doubts about the illegal collection of biological data of the poor.
Trade your iris information for "basic income"?
After 2 years of bleakness in the cryptocurrency market, Worldcoin, which wants to lift "billions of people out of poverty", is back in the Web3 arena. This time, it comes out with the encrypted wallet "World App".
From the official version launched on May 8 to the present, the World App including the test version has been downloaded more than 1 million times. The project party Worldcoin also released a commemorative NFT for the launch of this wallet, with more than 60,000 holders .
The reason why this wallet quickly triggered the installation of millions of people is largely due to Worldcoin's ever-expanding concept-from achieving a universal basic income to offsetting unemployment losses caused by artificial intelligence. The implementation method is "unconditional airdrop tokens".
In the cryptocurrency world, once a "token" appears in the secondary market, it means that it can be converted into money. The words "unconditional airdrop" are like saying that you will be given "unconditional money". Now, the World App wallet is here, and the airdrop seems not far away.
World App requires an iris scan to sign up
Compared with common Web3 wallets, in addition to being able to receive, send and purchase encrypted assets with legal currency, the World App features a "World ID" function, which claims to allow each user to have their own "human passport ID". Realize one code per person. As long as you authenticate to the ID and prove that you are a human and not a robot, World App will airdrop a certain amount of Worldcoin tokens to you every month. With this token, you can purchase daily necessities on the World App.
Regardless of which merchants will receive tokens for selling things, the "money" of Worldcoin is not unconditional.
After downloading the World App, you will find that it is not easy to register like other mobile applications. This is related to another feature of the App - it will not disclose any personal information. The way to achieve it is very simple, because it simply does not collect regular personal information such as your email address, mobile phone number, and ID number.
If you don’t collect it, you won’t disclose it. This is indeed a good way to protect privacy from the source, but if users want to register the client to “receive money”, what information do they use to register?
The Worldcoin team's solution: Surrender your irises.
The first device created after the Worldcoin project was founded in 2021 is called the iris biometric device Orb. Its main function is to capture human eye images and convert them into a unique IrisHash (a string of short digital codes), trying to scan the human iris To ensure the uniqueness of personal ID.
Soon, Orb operators brought a billiard ball-shaped instrument to engage in "ground push" in some places. Whoever scans his eyeballs against this instrument is eligible to receive Worldcoin tokens. The project first went to underdeveloped countries and regions around the world to start "sweeping", and tens of thousands of people were swept by these Orbs.
Why does Worldcoin have to use the "iris" authentication method, which is expensive to collect and very "sensitive"? Because it wants to "distribute money" to the whole people. When the project was founded in 2021, it set an ambitious goal: to create a UBI (Universal Basic Income) system supported by a decentralized network, to help an economy generate enough profits to transfer some of the money unconditionally distributed to the citizens.
The idea of UBI is quite utopian, but Worldcoin has really put it into practice. It believes that the premise of realizing UBI is to create a reliable identity authentication system to prevent "sybil attacks", that is, to prevent one person from controlling multiple wallet addresses to achieve profit. To achieve this, non-unique authentication methods such as mobile phone number and email address will not work, ID cards may also be faked, and the irises on human eyeballs are absolutely unique. Compared with fingerprints and faces, forgery is even more difficult. relatively high.
Thus, the Orb, which is all over the world, appeared like this.
However, the iris information collected by Worldcoin is actually personal biometric information like fingerprints and veins. In sovereign countries such as China and the United States, personal biometric information is included in the scope of legal protection.
Now, the World App, which still requires iris authentication, is coming. If you want to register, you have to go to the Orb device to scan your eyes. According to previous information, these devices are mainly distributed in 12 countries and regions in Africa, South America, Europe and Asia, and are operated by 25 operators. In October 2021, Worldcoin claimed to have 100,000 users.
Would you donate your iris for a token called Worldcoin? But wait, this token is not available yet.
Looking for another 100 million dollars in financing despite doubts
Since Worldcoin has not issued tokens for a long time, users whose irises have been scanned think that they have a "blank check" that cannot be cashed. Criticisms have been coming and going since 2 years ago. Worldcoin was accused of abusing biotechnology to violate user privacy, and then fell silent with the bear market of the cryptocurrency market.
After ChatGPT became the new darling of the technology circle, the outside world suddenly discovered that the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, was actually one of the founders of Worldcoin, and the project also showed a "resurrection" trend through the founder and the wave of AI hotspots.
In March of this year, Worldcoin introduced a new background of artificial intelligence to the old concept of "universal basic income". The project stated on its official website that "human identity authentication" needs to be established in the era of artificial intelligence. When artificial intelligence replaces most people's jobs, the establishment of a reliable human proof mechanism becomes an important prerequisite for realizing universal basic income.
The World ID protocol appeared, and the World App was born. Worldcoin tried to use the Web3 infrastructure to build a three-piece set, namely DID, Token and wallet, plus biometric technology, to talk about a "science fiction" of the economic system in the era of artificial intelligence in the future: several years In the end, robots took over most of the work of humans, and many people became a useless class. They could not find a job, but in fact they did not need to find a job, because each person had a World App, clicked to receive money, and after meeting their basic needs, they looked for creative jobs. way of new value.
Worldcoin is bringing the dream of "realizing universal basic income" into the future. At the end of 2021, Worldcoin announced that it would launch its mainnet in 2022 and planned to cover 1 billion users by 2023. Today, Worldcoin's mainnet launch plan has been postponed to the first half of 2023, covering about 1.7 million users, which is far from the target.
Even with the endorsement of Sam Altman, the project is difficult to make people feel "reliable", and even aroused a lot of criticism.
First of all, what is the value of the tokens issued to users as purchasing power? Ari Paul, founder of Block Tower Capital, an encryption investment agency, pointed out that the core business model of Worldcoin is to steal data from the poorest people in the world, test the data in a way that exploits the poor, and monetize it. The crime of stealing data there."
Hudson Jameson, a former member of the Ethereum Foundation, questioned the fairness of the distribution of Worldcoin tokens: 80% are provided to the public, 10% to investors, and the other 10% to the team. "How can this create a fair global currency? Are they Is there any analysis to prevent wealth disparities in certain areas?"
Regulation is also a risk that Worldcoin cannot avoid. Libra, a stablecoin project that once carried the vision of "world currency", even with a Facebook platform with more than 2 billion users around the world behind it, could not escape the fate of abortion in the end, because currency is the power of a sovereign state.
Altman is also aware of this. He said in a public event that you may never use Worldcoin in the United States, "It depends on how determined the US government is to ban cryptocurrencies." After leaving Worldcoin, it still has to face the game with the supervision of various countries.
In addition, collecting biometric information to achieve identity verification will always make Worldcoin walk on the edge of the legal bottom line related to personal information protection.
In March of this year, the World ID protocol launched by Worldcoin uses zero-knowledge proof technology to allow users to maintain control and anonymity over the use of ID data, thereby protecting user data. Altman also said, "Personally, I'd rather have the amount of privacy I give up to use Facebook or something than the amount of privacy I give up to scan my retina."
But the reality is that Worldcoin is still a commercial company, and most countries have clear regulations on how commercial companies use private data, including not transferring sensitive data such as personal information to foreign countries without authorization. Worldcoin, which intends to "benefit the world", is obviously contrary to these current regulations, which is also an important reason why its Orb equipment is difficult to promote in more countries.
Iris biometric device Orb "ground push" in some areas
To date, Worldcoin has not issued tokens publicly. A $100 million token funding round early last year valued the project’s total token supply at $3 billion. But the latest official news says that Altman is seeking $100 million in new financing for the project.
The CEO of OpenAI is going to venture into the special field of the currency circle, which inevitably makes people worry that the failure of the experiment will affect the reputation of OpenAI. As Liu Changyong, director of the Blockchain Research Center of Chongqing Technology and Business University, said, interlacing is like a mountain. Sam Altman is an authority in the field of AI, but he is likely to be a leek in the field of blockchain, and he needs to pay tuition. Ruined the main business."