Worldcoin Madness
Remember in 2017 when a company known as Facebook (today, Meta) wanted to dominate not only the world of social media, but to become the bank? It started a digital currency Libra, later renamed to Diem?
To quote Wikipedia: 'The project generated backlash from government regulators in the European Union, the USA, other countries, and among the general public over monetary sovereignty, financial stability, privacy, and antitrust concerns which ultimately helped kill the project'.
To create an illusion of independence from Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg created the Diem association. When the project was announced, the who-is-who of the money transaction world, VC firms and others jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them started leaving as quickly as they joined. Very quickly, the whole project became toxic and eventually was shut down.
Fast forward from 2019 to 2023 and another global project is here. This time it is even more ambitious and more <let's see what noun we can insert here after you finish reading this post>.
Welcome to Worldcoin, - a New Identity and Financial Network
The founders - Sam Altman of OpenAI and Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity have few lofty goals:
increase economic opportunity
create a solution to distinguish humans from AI
enable global democratic processes
show a path to Universal Basic Income (UBI), funded by AI
All that with a simple Worldcoin. With goals like that they can easily win any beauty contest hands down. The pretty girls who proclaim they want to 'achieve world peace and end world hunger' have nothing on these guys.
How do we achieve this panacea? First, we get everyone registered in the Worldcoin database. But how? Glad you asked. You can already do that in 18 countries around the world. Visit your friendly Orb station, get you iris scanned. In return, you get your World ID.
What is a World ID? 'The protocol to bring global proof of personhood to the internet.' As well, 'World ID is a digital passport that lets a user prove they are a unique and real person while remaining anonymous.’. I am not making this shit up.
And if you are in the right country (namely not in the US) you receive 25 Worldcoins just for being a human. If you are interested in reading more about the coin, here is the link.
There is a bit of a complication, though. For readers in some countries, where this is illegal (like in the US or Canada) you will get a page with 'This content is not available in your region.'
How can you read about it? Simply click on any other item in the menu and then click back on the 'Tokenomics' entry and you are there. If this is a sign how everything is well secured, this is one of them.
As with every proper scam, the people behind this project made sure that it is on solid ground.
The Worldcoin Foundation is an exempted limited guarantee foundation company, incorporated in the Cayman Islands. It is “memberless,” meaning it has no shareholders.
World Assets Limited is a business company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. The Worldcoin Foundation is the sole member of World Assets Ltd. This entity is responsible for issuing the 7.5B Worldcoin tokens (WLD) that have been allocated to the Worldcoin community.
Tools for Humanity (TFH) is a Delaware corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California (US), with a wholly-owned subsidiary, Tools for Humanity GmbH, based in Germany. Actually, not just in Germany but specifically in Bavaria, the birthplace of Octoberfest. Raise a beer stein for Worldcoin.
People operating Orb, the device for scanning your eye and creating the World ID are ... Worldcoin Operators who are not employees of the Worldcoin Foundation or Tools for Humanity but are independent. But if you want to become one and earn money by scanning people's eyes - here is the link where you can learn more.
If there is ever any lawsuit, only the person with the Orb will get punished for illegally operating a biometric device.
Surely the security of a project like this must be tighter than Fort Knox. After all, we are talking about Worldcoin and World ID. Their FAQ page addresses the question about data security with the following statement - 'Yes, any personal data shared with Worldcoin is encrypted in transit and at rest.' This reminds me of when in the early days of the Internet and eCommerce websites were proudly displaying the fact that any transaction was encrypted with an encryption key 128 bits long.
Even though this project was announced recently, it has been running in beta preview for a few years and, according to reports, it has amassed about 2.1 million(!!!) people.
As you can imagine, governments around the world are taking notice of this project. And for good reason. An unaccountable organization is running around the world collecting biometric information and distributing something which has a 'coin' in the name. All that to distinguish people from computers.
The recurrent pattern? I miss the Pinky and the Brain show, to which you can trace all this madness.