As the world continues to evolve at an extraordinary pace, artificial intelligence is meeting crypto where it matters most: in the eyeball.
Yes, you read that correctly. Eyeballs are the next big thing in the world of crypto and artificial intelligence. But not for the reasons you might think.
And one man is leading the journey to catalog every single eyeball on Earth. It is none other than the CEO of ChatGPT, Sam Altman. The AI pioneer founded the company far before ChatGPT ever made its debut on the world stage.
More Info About Worldcoin
What exactly is Worldcoin, and why is the chief executive of one of the most progressive and profound companies of this decade looking for investment in his lifelong career to catalog the human eye in more ways than one?
And will this company be the next great innovator in the crypto industry and at large? Well, quite possibly, let’s dive into Sam Altman’s latest (actually older) invention.
Worldcoin, co-founded by President Sam Altman, pitches itself as a “new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.”
It believes that if a cryptocurrency were adopted at scale, it would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make “applications possible that are now unimaginable.”
Will Everyone Really Get Free Tokens?
To bring this dream to fruition, it plans to allow everyone to claim a share of its tokens for free. However, there are two hurdles:
- Ensuring that every person on Earth can prove that they are human, not a bot.
- Making sure they haven’t claimed their free share of Worldcoin already without collecting and maintaining a database of personal data.
“This challenge is the longstanding problem of proving unique humanness without intruding on privacy: how can you prove you are you without having to tell us anything about yourself?” CEO Sam Altman says.
To solve this, they built a new device called the Orb. It captures an image of a person’s eyes and converts it into a unique numeric code, making it possible to check whether the person has signed up already.
The original photo is deleted, and no personal data is required for verification.
Worldcoin has about 30 orbs in circulation and has imaged almost half a million eyes so far.
When Will Worldcoin Launch?
Worldcoin’s launch has been delayed multiple times; it is now expected to launch in late 2023. It also reportedly faced attempts at fraud and has been forced to cease operations in several countries for different reasons.
Turkey banned cryptocurrency in April, and Sudan experienced a coup in September. In countries such as Ghana, France, and South Africa, local contractors reportedly found the work too demanding.
Early adopters are required to sign a release form allowing Worldcoin to store images of their eyes and three-dimensional mapping of their bodies and face in order to train its algorithms.
John Davisson, an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told the publication that this company and this currency should not exist since there is little assurance that Worldcoin will be able to protect the sensitive data.
There also needs to be confirmation that Worldcoin’s eye-scanning technology is watertight and can’t be bypassed. Projects like this, which could pose serious threats to user privacy, is why Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, told Time that crypto has “a lot of dystopian potential of implemented wrong.”
