Value and Ambition of Worldcoin

Worldcoin's Worth and Goals

chatGPT has been gaining popularity in the first half of the year, and many bloggers in the cryptocurrency circle have begun to daily post about prompt techniques, and a lot of funds have gone into the AI field.

Web3 was almost all short-term memes and artificial hot topic narratives in the first half of the year, with few innovative products, and Worldcoin can be considered one of them.

This project has recently gained a lot of attention, and I personally think it is mainly because of the halo effect of Sam Altman.

What does Worldcoin do

Worldcoin is a UBI (Universal Basic Income) project. Its vision is to eliminate poverty in the world and ensure that everyone has the minimum basic living guarantee.

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UBI projects have been proposed for a long time. In the early stages of the last crypto bull market, several UBI projects were once very popular, and everyone was following each other, making it quite lively.

Most of the previous UBI projects revolved around how to effectively identify a real person, with some using facial recognition, some using social graphs, and some using node meeting verification.

Most of these projects focused on the underlying technology of identifying people, and the token mechanism of the projects was mostly a mess. Most of these projects used an infinite issuance model, where anyone with an identity ID could receive tokens every cycle. Lacking a real source of value, these tokens were naturally worthless, let alone any basic income.

Worldcoin and OpenAI

Worldcoin feels different in that it has a relationship with OpenAI, and they have a common founder, Sam Altman.

When chatGPT became popular, the biggest concern was that it would compete with humans for jobs and make many people unemployed.

Sam believes that AI’s high efficiency productivity can greatly benefit humans. It can free up the time of most people, allowing them to have income security without needing to work. Only a small percentage of people need to work to support the entire human population.

Getting income without working has already been achieved in many European countries, where their minimum living guarantee is very high. But in many poor areas, this is very difficult.

The vision of OpenAI is to make AI benefit humans. Its agreement with Microsoft is simple: when it has earned enough profit, OpenAI will become a public welfare organization. In the future, it hopes to distribute the money it earns to all humans. (Realizing common prosperity?)

Worldcoin’s Ambitions

With this vision, the core issue to be solved is to give it to real people, not fake ones (for example, during the period of the pandemic in the US when a lot of fake people were said to have gone to claim money).

The first thing that Worldcoin wants to do is to identify who is a real person, as only real people can have a verified account for claiming money. This is achieved through an Orb iris recognition technology.

Those who have been verified will have a validated identity and a corresponding encrypted wallet account. Why have an encrypted wallet? This is actually the problem that blockchain wants to solve. In developed countries, bank accounts/social security numbers are easy to obtain – almost everyone has a social security number, which can be used to identify a real person. But in many underdeveloped areas, let alone bank accounts, even identity documents are lacking. How can money be sent to them? There is no address for remittance, and no account for money transfer.

This is where blockchain can come in – a decentralized infrastructure can enable everyone to have a wallet address that can receive cryptocurrency for various payments.

This is also what FB’s Libra wanted to do – to enable everyone to have an encrypted account, and then use Libra, its issued currency, as the settlement currency to become the basic infrastructure for the settlement layer of the entire Internet.

Speaking of this, we can see another direction of Worldcoin – they hope to become the settlement layer of the entire Internet, and by providing basic income in the form of giving to every real person, they hope that everyone will register with Worldcoin and have a real encrypted account.

It wasn’t mentioned earlier how Worldcoin’s UBI is achieved. As long as a real user registers with Worldcoin and passes Orb verification, they can receive one Worldcoin per week. The total amount is 10 billion, and one will be deducted from the total amount each time it is issued.

Value Source of Worldcoin

UBI is achieved by distributing this Worldcoin, but where does the value of Worldcoin come from?

By distributing Worldcoin to each verified person, in the early stages this is actually a kind of user acquisition and everyone wants to get it for free. And it may be very valuable in the future. Through Orb iris recognition, it can effectively prevent fraudulent accounts from taking advantage of it.

With real users, Worldcoin also provides identity verification capabilities. It can integrate various web3 and web2 projects like logging in with WeChat QR codes. Yes, it can integrate traditional Internet applications.

Worldcoin provides a complete traditional identity and banking system, as well as internet-level identity verification capabilities. It also offers a “learn to earn” application, where users can earn cash rewards by learning about cryptocurrency. It provides a cash wallet (integrated with Circle’s USDC), a cryptocurrency wallet account, and a worldcoin token account.

With these capabilities, Worldcoin can actually serve as a unified gateway to the future web2 and web3, which will also bring in a lot of additional income. This income will be the source of Worldcoin’s UBI (Universal Basic Income).

Considering Worldcoin’s relationship with OpenAI, in the future, when artificial intelligence becomes highly developed, money earned may be distributed through channels similar to Worldcoin.

Don’t think that distributing money is unrealistic – during the pandemic in the United States, money was distributed indiscriminately, and at that time, the distribution channels were not yet smooth, and many people did not have bank accounts, especially many fake ones.

If Worldcoin’s infrastructure can be put into operation, this method of distributing money will be very efficient and closer to reality.

Summary of Biases

What is Worldcoin:

• It is a UBI project that distributes tokens to every registered and verified person.

What are Worldcoin’s capabilities:

• Verify real people through iris recognition and complete identity verification.

• Distribute worldcoin tokens to every verified person.

• Provide each person with a digital identity that can be used for identity verification in various applications, ensuring that they are real people.

• Provide each person with encrypted wallet and payment services.

• Provide “learn to earn” services, where users can earn money by learning about cryptocurrency.

Speculations about Worldcoin’s revenue sources:

• Worldcoin may be used for some kind of future service payment.

• Provide identity service capabilities to third parties to identify real people.

• Become a platform for application gateways, which can collect taxes.

• Distribute income from AI.

After all these words, these are actually just personal biases, because many of them are not what Worldcoin said, but rather personal conjecture.

Whether we can follow these scripts in the future is unknown. But with OpenAI’s GPT, I have been looking forward to the future lately, and the new technological revolution has actually broken out.

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