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🏆 You're getting UBI (Universal Basic Income)

🏆 You're getting UBI (Universal Basic Income)

PLUS: RFK Jr buys more bitcoin

Alex M.
July 27, 2023

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: the founder of ChatGPT thinks AI is coming for your lunch. So he wants to create a Universal Basic Income by scanning your eyeballs and sending you crypto. Utopia? Or dystopia?

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

In November of last year, Open AI released Chat GPT - your new 140 IQ personal assistant (or at least that’s the goal).

Chat GPT got 100 million new users in 2 months, and its CEO, Sam Altman, became a celebrity.

Around the same time, Sam Altman also released a controversial crypto project for which he raised $250 MILLION.

His thesis is simple:

1/ AI is going to take most people’s jobs eventually. That’s no bueno.

2/ As a result, we need Universal Basic Income (UBI) funded by AI. No matter where you are in the world, you should be able to get paid.

3/ The UBI is most easily paid in crypto.

4/ To receive it, you need to scan your eyeballs into an “orb” that looks just like the machines in Oblivion.

This is the beast:

And in reality, the process looks something like this:

Scan your eyeballs into a Worldcoin Orb
receive a unique World ID (proof of personhood)
claim $WLD tokens inside the Worldcoin app on your phone.

There are currently 150 Orbs in 35 cities worldwide (here’s the list).

And they’re signing up a new user on average every 8 seconds.

As you might imagine, people are going absolutely bananas over this.

Generally, people are worried about -

Scanning their retinas into a machine owned by a privately held company AND manufactured by another (2 points of failure)
Exploiting people in developing countries for who the initial token claim of 25 $WLD (∼$50 in total) is a lot of money (8/10 of the initial Orb locations were in the developing world)
The whole thing being too centralized: 25% of the supply of $WLD is owned by the team and early investors.

On the other hand, people argue that you already use facial recognition with your iPhone. So why not with Worldcoin?

On top of that, the Orb uses a form of crypto technology called zero-knowledge proof. This means your World ID cannot be reverse-matched to the iris scan, which is deleted after it is used to generate your ID.

And eventually, Worldcoin plans to open-source the entire project.

If it succeeds, Worldcoin could onboard billions of people into crypto. And it’s run by the team that brought AI to the masses.

The biggest VC investors in the world - A16z, Khosla Ventures, Coinbase Ventures - have all invested.

We’ll be watching the rollout of Worldcoin very closely. We don’t own any tokens yet (and haven’t had our eyeballs scanned, either).

But if that ever changes, we’ll let you know.

In the meantime, you can browse around Worldcoin’s website - and if you have time, read Vitalik’s spicy take on it.