Meet WorldCoin: How This Project Wants to Scan Everyone’s Eyeballs For Money

Reynaldo Marquez

1 year ago

3 mins read

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According to a Bloomberg report, Sam Altman has a new startup and is looking to give everyone on earth free money, but there is a catch: you must let them scan your eyeballs. Altman was a former partner at Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” platform that has helped launch thousands of companies.

Altman left Y Combinator in 2019 after 5 years. Later, he will go on to cofound OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Their partnership lasted two years due to disagreements. One of OpenAI’s products can create news articles using only a few inputs.

His new project has raised over $25 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, part of Coinbase’s venture capital division, Reid Hoffman a founder of social media LinkedIn, and others. To fulfill its objective, WorldCoin has created a device that will scan and store the person’s unique biometric information.

The idea of the project has been attributed to Altman, per the report, but the entrepreneur claims to only serve the company as an adviser. Altman conceived WorldCoin as an instrument to aid in the distribution of Universal Basic Income (UBI).

I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better. Is there a way we can use technology to do that at global scale?

WorldCoin, A Dystopian Tool For Control Or The Future Of Income?

The project is headed by Alexander Blania, a former physics student at the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH). Blania, Altman, and Max Novendstern, a former employee at investment firm Bridgewater, cofounded WorldCoin.

The founders of the project want more people to access the international and believe cryptocurrencies can enable this vision. At the moment, the project has begun testing their biometric scanner in “various cities”, Bloomberg claims.

Thus, they are far from ready to distribute WorldCoin. Therefore, the company seeks volunteers willing to let themselves scan to earn rewards in various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. The founders said that the scanning is critical to the project because it prevents people to “defraud the system”.

(…) a new global digital currency that will launch by giving a share to every single person on earth. Through a novel approach: a dedicated hardware device ensuring both humanness and uniqueness of everybody signing up, while maintaining their privacy and the overall transparency of a permissionless blockchain.

The crypto community has expressed mixed feelings about the project, but most people have compared it to something out of a James Bond movie or directly from the plot of the popular T.V. show Mr. Robot. Alex Gladstein, CSO at the Humans Rights Foundation, classified the project as “madness”.

So much wasted that could be helping to liberate and empower people via Bitcoin education/UX initiatives. Future regret will be big.

The founders of WorldCoin spend around $5,000 on each scanner prototype. In the long run, they expect to lower the production cost. In addition, they assured people that their information and privacy will be protected. For a few satoshis the scan, surely more than one volunteer will be at the front of the line.

At the time of writing, BTC trades at $36,200 with sideways movement in the lower timeframes.

Bitcoin BTC BTCUSD — BTC moving sideways after a big breakout. Source: BTCUSD Tradingview

Reynaldo Marquez

A literature major, Reynaldo Márquez has been deeply immersed in the crypto industry since 2017. His journey began with translating articles for various crypto news outlets, a role he took on with zeal. In 2018, amidst a challenging market, he embraced his first writing assignment, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the nascent industry and the promise of change it bears for many people worldwide.
In March 2021, he joined the prestigious crypto news outlet NewsBTC and Bitcoinist, where he not only reported on the latest crypto news but also had the privilege of interviewing some of the industry's most influential figures. A year later, his dedication and hard work were recognized, and he was promoted to Managing Editor, a position he currently holds with pride.
He believes in honesty, good communication, hard work, and the power of cryptocurrency and its potential to transform people's lives, especially those alienated by the legacy financial system. Born in 1992 in Venezuela, Reynaldo is familiar with how governments and central banks can negatively affect people, their everyday lives, and their futures by creating inflation and erasing their hopes for a better future. Thus, like many Venezuelans, he embraced this new technology to help him and his family navigate difficult times.
In another life, Reynaldo would have pursued a career as an investigator, most likely tracking down the origins of the Cyberpunk movement with the publication of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer.’ The intersection between fiction and reality, with the materialization of Bitcoin in 2009, would have allowed him to dive deep into the crypto sphere as something more than a financial phenomenon but also a cultural shift in society that was brewing since the XX century, and maybe even sooner, in the XIX century with the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience.’
But that’s for another life. In this one, Reynaldo has been trading to improve his trading skills. Since 2023, he has been trying to learn Python to create successful strategies and find ways to execute them. It is a difficult task, which continues to keep him busy today and will most likely continue to keep him busy in the near and long term.
In his free time, he enjoys lifting heavy objects, reading, watching movies, and listening to his favorite music. Some of his favorite authors are Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Mario Vargas Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Rafael Cadenas, and many others. Lately, he has been primarily interested in reading about dystopic societies, a topic that deeply resonates with the crypto industry.
Since 2023, he has lived in Spain with his wife. He loves the weather, the food, and the people and their culture. They both expect to travel much more within the country they now call home and beyond its border. He hopes to retire with his wife, maybe in a quiet place near a beach, but most likely in a city close to a library and a university with his kids and, hopefully, grandkids.

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