This new virtual currency platform wants to give wages to everyone on Earth, you don’t need to do anything just let them scan their irises

If you thought the crypto craziness had already peaked with Dogecoin and NFT, then nothing could be more weird and shocking? Now maybe it’s time to sit down, take a deep breath, and prepare for some breaking news:

Sam Altman, former CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, is said to be working on a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. The market for this coin will operate according to a theory known as “unconditional basic income “. Altman was a strong proponent of this economic theory.

Sam Altman, former CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator

In short, an unconditional basic income is how governments periodically distribute money to all of their citizens, helping them to earn enough to live on. Wolrdcoin will therefore also be freely distributed to all people on Earth after its launch.

There is only one condition before receiving money, you must allow the Wolrdcoin platform to scan your iris for identification. This technology is said to be used to prevent fraudsters from trying to get themselves lots of free virtual currency.

Welcome to the era of not working and still eating

If you don’t know who Sam Altman is, he was the founder of the social network Loopt when he was 19 years old. In 2014, Altman founded Y Combinator, an incubator for startups that have given wings to many billion-dollar startups such as Airbnb Inc., Dropbox Inc. and Stripe Inc.

In 2019, Altman left his position as CEO of Y Company to focus on artificial intelligence at OpenAI LLC, a research firm he founded in 2015 with Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk. But then they also parted because of disagreements over the development plan of OpenAI.

A few months later, the company raised $1 billion from Microsoft Corp as part of a partnership where the software giant will be the exclusive provider of cloud computing services for OpenAI.

Around the same time, Altman revealed his new direction in a 2019 interview with economist Tyler Cowen. The two then discussed the idea of ​​a system that would distribute money to everyone without the need for a government.

” I am someone who is very interested in things like unconditional basic income and what will happen to the global redistribution of wealth, ways that we can do it better ,” Altman told Blooomberg. ” I wonder if there is any technology that can be used to do that on a global scale?”

The event that the truck dumped 8 million VND 5 cents (one coin per resident) in the Bundesplatz, Switzerland – a symbol of the theory of unconditional basic income.

Unlike other forms of social welfare such as pensions and unemployment benefits, which require recipients to have certain commitments to employment, universal basic income is the amount that distributed by the government or a local government agency to all its citizens, regardless of their condition.

For example, if you are a resident of the US state of Alaska, you will receive an amount of more than $1,600 each year regardless of whether you are employed or have another source of income. A child will also receive the money from Alaska Permanent, a $64 billion perpetual investment fund established in 1976 under the state’s constitution.

Alaska Permanent was created shortly after the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was inaugurated and the first drops of oil in the North Slope field were sold to the market. Their forefathers thought that oil would one day run out, so they extracted 25% of the revenue from that resource to set up an investment fund for future generations.

In addition to Alaska, in some other countries such as Sudan, Brazil and Switzerland, there have been programs to distribute money to people based on the theory of unconditional basic income. Now, it is what Altman is pursuing with the help of technology and digital currency.

Scan irises to exchange for Worldcoin

In an interview with Bloomberg, Altman shared that Worldcoin has raised $25 million from investors and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Day One Ventures.

What sets Worldcoin apart from other cryptocurrencies and unconditional basic income distribution systems is that it adds an iris scanning hardware. Bloomberg describes it as a silver spherical device the size of a basketball that can be carried around and collects people’s biometric information.

Because each person’s iris is unique, it will be converted by Worldcoin into a cryptographic identifier for the user. The aim is ” to protect the humanity and uniqueness of everyone who signs up, while maintaining their privacy and the overall transparency of a permissionless open blockchain”.

Worldcoin team understands this is a private biometric information, so they will only use it to identify the user, to prevent a person from trying to register multiple times with the intention of fooling the system. Once the iris biometric data is converted to an identifier, it is permanently deleted and never stored. Worldcoin is committed to its transparent user data.

Currently, they have deployed 20 iris scanning devices, each costing $ 5,000, in a number of cities around the world. Since Worldcoin has not launched yet, participants will be given free Bitcoin once the iris information is collected.

It is expected that in the future, Worldcoin will improve its device, making it cheaper and simpler. The goal is to help everyone on Earth can access and register to receive this virtual currency.

“ A lot of people in the world don’t have access to financial systems yet, ” said Alexander Blania, a former theoretical physics student at the California Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Association who co-founded Worldcoin with Altman. know .” Now, cryptocurrency will provide an opportunity to help all of us do that”.

See Bloomberg, Gizmodo