I am deeply cynical of the crypto ecosystem as a whole and think blockchain is largely a solution in search of a problem outside payment processing and some aspects of ethereum.
But
I think Worldcoin is something we’ve been needing for years, and the need for it will grow exponentially in the coming years. The TLDR is that Worldcoin is proving humanness in online content. It’s working to prove that a human submitted something, or at least that it was submitted under the direction of a human that is staking their “reputation” (even if anonymous) against the submission.
In the past several years we’ve been seeing a massive growth in native advertising, platform manipulation, consent manufacturing, and general automated generation of online discussion content to make us all want to buy something, believe something, or vote in a certain way. An online platform that integrates with Worldcoin would eliminate this almost entirely, and allow us to block a specific human who allows this under their identity.
Critically, Worldcoin also preserves privacy. I think human interactions, even in person, benefit from some level of anonymity and privacy. It’s important that we retain this online.
I also recognize that we need to be deeply critical of any platform that makes a connection to our real identities and is also associated with our online activity. Worldcoin is no exception.
Lastly, there are some greater implications and use cases for Worldcoin, but that starts to get a little pie-in-the-sky at this phase.
I’ve been advocating for the need of a solution like this for many years, and was very happy today to discover Worldcoin even though it was announced like a year ago. I could talk for pages on the topic, but I’ll stop here. I’m sure I’ll mention it in person at future meetups.
Worldcoin was started by Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) and a few other people. Here’s more info here:
They haven’t launched in the US yet, but I’m looking forward to them doing so.