"Don't let yourself be deceived" {something to do with Worldcoin 😱}

A sentence that crossed my mind more than once last weekend. A weekend of pleasure. In a setting of music, art and super friendly and open-minded people, all tried to enjoy the here and now. As I did 🙃 With here and there a sidestep going over previous conversations with some peeps about this new crypto-based project: Worldcoin.

The Good

At first, I was quite positive about Worldcoin. It is the combination of a service that we need - web3 based ID systems in which the user can control what and who can make use of our identity - and a team that is entrepreneurial enough and able to reach a wide audience. From a distance, three ticks in the box, no doubt about that.

1. The service: that's a 100% clear one, we need such a service to be able to progress in web3.
2. Entrepreneurial: I think that must be clear as well with founders that are well known and likely will be prioritised by anybody with influence when they receive a phone call from the team.
3. Reach: by now the mass familiarised themselves with at least one of the founder's names, Sam Altman. With OpenAI and ChatGPT, his name is everywhere. I believe this is a recipe for success.

However...

The Bad?

In all my convo's with peeps I had about Worldcoin I was told I take a bit of a naive view. Perhaps, but the ingredients combined are the recipe to bring an idea to a successful implementation. Though a successful implementation, may not be the implementation we want. Assuming the team has all our interests at heart, and will do nothing that harms our interests, we are in good hands. But can we (or better said, I) take such an assumption? My standard response in said conversations was: "Sam Altman has too much to lose to play dirty". But is it? Since playing dirty doesn't prevent peeps from using the service. We all know this from many of the free and popular internet services. Many private companies running these services, take our data and monetise it. Those who understand the simple model of commercials understand that nothing can be offered for free. Everything has associated costs and must be covered somehow. And this is where we are in the dark about the plans around Worldcoin.

Revenue models are not clear. Or better said: Unknown. The ambition is to provide a universal basic income (UBI) to everybody on our planet (and perhaps those who may live somewhere else in our Milkyway system). Nothing is mentioned about the HOW though. To provide all people on our planet with 1 Euro UBI, a value of 8 Billion Euro is needed. This scales linearly: For just 1000 Euro per world citizen, 8 Trillion Euro is to be provided for. Assuming every year on average a world citizen requires 5000 Euro income to be able to pay for all basic necessities, a staggering amount of 40 Trillion Euro is required to fund and execute the UBI idea, per year. How the team is planning to bring such value to Worldcoin is left unspoken.

Taking the side of a positive thinker, we can argue the unclarities around revenue models as well as how UBI will be funded, is a good thing. In the crypto space, too many promises are made by too many projects. Promises that stay words, but never brought to life. Added to the fact we still need to learn a lot, we can argue it's better to underpromise than to overpromise.

But there is a risk associated with this. Companies like Meta, 𝕏 (former Twitter), Google and so many others, started their business without a revenue model. At some point, their investors wanted to see an earning model, and most of these companies started to use our data to create such a revenue model. In essence, it is not bad perse for such companies to use and sell our data, but in the end, it all depends on what data we share, hence what data these companies can monetise.

With Worldcoin we will provide our most sensitive data, our identity in forms that are unique to us, from ID information we have in our passports and driving licenses to iris scans and perhaps fingerprint scans. "What if this data ends up in the wrong hands?" Assuming these guys at Woldocin know how to develop hackerproof systems (nothing is 100% hackerproof though), what if a revenue model is created by providing access to our identities to e.g. government institutes and/or private organisations who will start using this data against us? For a reason, centralised digitised healthcare data was denied in my country of the lowlands (aka The Netherlands). It was deemed too dangerous; Not hackerproof enough; With a single company being responsible for the whole setup; With data that is too personal and can easily be held against us. I never had the problem of my identity being leaked or stolen and subsequently abused, but I heard numerous stories of peeps whose identity ended up in the wrong hands and used to open new bank accounts, get loans and such. BIG problems these peeps got into. When our identity is abused by others, suddenly our law system turns against us. Instead of protecting us, it makes us responsible. The system requires proof it wasn't us, giving all the advantages to the criminals making use of our identities.

At this stage, we simply don't know what the Worldcoin team is gonna do with our data. Hence it is better to be safe than sorry.

What we do know is that Sam Altman is CEO of a commercial company that at its core was supposed to be a fully open-source company without a commercial model to benefit mankind. By now we know they are not. OpenAI should be rebranded to CloseAI, in my honest opinion. And it's not only OpenAI influence anymore but also from stakeholders like Microsoft. With their latest 10 Billion Dollar funding and the contractual lock-in to run all OpenAI software on the Microsoft Cloud (Azure), OpenAI ended up on the corporate side of things where stakeholders (equals shareholders) value is the sole driver.

Can we trust this same guy to evolve Worldcoin in such a manner it actually benefits all of us? That he and his team aren't going in directions it only benefits some peeps, or groups of peeps, while the rest is falling victim? As mentioned before: My initial argument was: "Sam has too much to lose". But has he? And even when he doesn't want to play dirty, will he be able to counter external forces? His track record with OpenAI doesn't speak for him.

Added to the arguments I already made, I was a bit baffled by the chat message that reached me last weekend. Supposedly, the earliest investors (private seed rounds for Worldcoin) only paid 7 Dollarcent (0.07 US Dollars) for a whole unit of Worldcoin. While the token got listed for something like 2 US Dollars, or 2.5 US Dollars or something like that. Since we don't know anything about the tokenomics of Worldcoin, we enter dangerous territories. The rules of the game for early investors are unknown. We know most early investors monetise their tokens as early and as much as they can. When they can make a 20x + profit, they for sure will sell as quickly as they can. We run the risk to see the value of Worldcoin plummet big time. We may not only lose our investment but what to think of what this can do to create a revenue model that works? In essence, a Worldcoin value of 10 Dollarcent, or even 1 Dollarcent may not be a problem, however, it makes the creation of a business case a lot more difficult. With a current fully diluted market cap of around 20 Billion US Dollars, we can also assume whenever the early investors are able to sell their tokens, they will do this. Likely it will take years before big steps are made, putting today's value under a lot of pressure.

25 Worlcoin is given to someone who enters the system with all their ID information. 25 Worldcoin is around 55 US Dollars with today's value. For many 55 US Dollars may seem a lot, especially when earning e.g. 200 US Dollars per month. But even then, a weekly income in exchange for our most sensitive data isn't the smartest action for any of us.

The large difference between the early investors and public sales and launch price gives a wrong taste of how this team is operating. It isn't giving the trust that this team is there to benefit all of us. True: I didn't research the 0.07 US Dollar early investor price and assume this is correct. So I may be wrong here 😉

Time will Tell

I suppose time will tell. I just know that after I downloaded the "World App" and subsequently reserved my 25 Worldcoin, I stopped entering any further information. At the same time, I'm not planning to get myself scanned. Even though I think it is kinda cool to be part of this massive project aiming to solve one of the key elements required for crypto-based projects to displace any system we have today.

My thanks to those who tried their best to warn me of being a tat to naive. Thanks to those that entered debates and discussions with me to bring forward their concerns. It did change my mind. Perhaps this festival last weekend was needed for me to put everything in perspective. To not make assumptions with big implications. Rather take an objective view as much as possible and weigh the pros against the cons. To assess the risks and bring these into the equation. 55 US Dollars for our own identity. To be given out to a team that isn't giving us insides into how they will use the data. To a team that started on the wrong foot with the BIG ass delta between early bird investors and launch price. "Better to be safe than sorry", is now my credo for Worldcoin, replacing my initial one: "Sam has too much to lose."

Your Thoughts?

Any information and/or opinion you may have on Worldcoin project, you may share in the comment section below. I like the debate and open discussions. Perhaps my change of view isn't justified. Perhaps it is. Let me/us know your thoughts. Will you enter this project? Will you get yourself scanned up? What application do you think such a project can and shall allow? What applications it shall stay away from?

Links

For more information, you may check the following links:

• Worldcoin project: https://worldcoin.org/
• Worldcoin whitepaper: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/
• Worlcoin tokenomics: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/tokenomics
  -- may not be accessible in your country --
• Worldcoin blog: https://worldcoin.org/blog
• Worldcoin trade financial: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin