Worldcoin: A Coin For humanity?

$WLD: A coin for humanity?

In the words of the creators, it's "a new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible, regardless of who they are." With the stated aim being to bring in a more unified, equitable global economy driven by the internet economy, the earlier you sign up, give in your eyeballs, the higher you receive. With apparently there being a fixed supply of 10 billion $WLD coin tokens, 80% i.e. 8 billion distributed equally to everyone and the rest 20% being reserved for initial protocol development and orb operators. Fair game much?

Who’s behind $WLD Coin

Sam Altman the former president of Y Combinator, now the CEO and founder of Open Ai, a company whose aim is to make sure AI is used for the good of humanity, Alex Blania a theoretical physicist and Max Novendstern who’s a Social Science Harvard Graduate and has worked as an investment associate. It's being developed by a ‘for profit’ software company called Tools For Humanity Corporation. The project has also received a $25 million worth of funding from Coinbase Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, etc, giving it an ultimate value of $1 billion.

Multi Level marketing: Network effects: A slippery slope argument?

According to the creators of Worldcoin, a fraction of 3% of the world’s population dole out on the crypto market, the concentration of wealth is incredibly compact. And with Worldcoin they allegedly aim to allocate and distribute tokens to as many people as possible. How do they do it? They'll plan to allocate the majority of the currency to new users as a reward for joining the network. Basically, you sign up; you get some coin.

How it’d work: Biometrics & Proof of Person

The core challenge, based on which signees can claim the coin, would be via a biometric verification, subsequenting into a linked Worldcoin wallet application. To ensure that only the new users claim the currency, their eyes would be scanned by a sleek dystopian looking, shiny, metallic device called an orb, designed by Thomas Meyerhoffer who’s previously designed for Apple and Porsche. The orb captures detailed images of the eye and converts it into an IrisHash code, a unique color code, which is further stored in their database, with the image being deleted. As each iris is unique and cannot be easily modified, it'd ensure no bounty hunters and hoard hoovers hoarding on their one time claim, multiple times.

Orb Operators

We might want to call the orb operators, less of operators and more of franchise holders of the project. Because firstly, to become one they’d have to bid for an orb, they get for a month, secondly over the duration of that month, part of their act is to go out on the streets and villages, wherever with that shiny looking object of matter, to wherever people are and make them gaze into the orb. In other words, proselytise. As, the people who they’ll get to register might, might not have even a vague idea of how the cryptoverse works. Without their organic consent, in the name of network effects. And give into the cataloguing of eyeballs, in an exchange of an amount, that could range in between anywhere from $10 to $200 with 10% given initially and the rest be credited over the duration of 2 years! Apart from fundamentally shifting minds for free cash, the orb franchisees also get some Worldcoin, for every user they onboard, the more the users they bring in, the higher the reward. At the end of every month, the orb operators rebid for their contract. Only those who bid higher get the contract. Operators who scale in large numbers get to monopolise over more orbs. Was there no other novel way to work things out?

Magpie Effect

The orbs are shiny sci-fi looking dystopian objects, being manufactured in Germany. They reflect like mirrors do, throughout their non-technical exterior surface and would definitely attract you, if you’d see one in flesh, which is playing with psychology and fetishizing design. It’s made like that intentionally, first to bring in maximum appeal and then user traction eventually. There are pilot programmes already running with people buying into the shiny spell, in Chile, Kenya, Sudan, Indonesia, France and several others. Over 130,000+ pairs of eyeballs have already been catalogued. And they aim to manufacture 50,000 orbs every year. Except for France, all under-developing, third world countries. The minimum wage in Sudan is 425 Sudanese pounds per month, that’s $0.95 USD. What’s amusing is that the USA and China don’t yet have the jurisdiction to allow the Orb to catalogue. Sounds convenient, right?

UBI & Data privacy and security concerns

Worldcoin is not a UBI project but its ideas are very akin to the concept of UBI, a kind of a novel prototype cause, that sits underneath its immediate alter. Surely, perhaps its aims being very utopian are to fetch in financial freedom, cryptobase decentralisation via the free cash bait. But there’s a certain degree of tone deafness in there in respect to the crypto currency market, over the sanctity of our personal data and how it’s being collected. And it’s oddly anachronistic too, with the orb and the magpie pie. UBI might sound amazing on paper, but it might not work very well in practice. A study shows that most of the stimulus checks rolled out during the pandemic in America were used to buy shoes and clothes. That made companies like Adidas and Nike, billions of dollars. A real time example of why the world’s wealthy whales are advocating for UBI. They precisely know where the money would flow. The average transaction would end up transferring money to the giga corporations, not once but twice. One when they buy from the corporation, and second when the tax paid would again be given to someone who’ll again give it to the same giants. Worldcoin is certainly aware of the same, and promises nothing, but says it’s just an experiment.

What happens if this ‘experiment’ gets away with all the sensitive data and sells it?