Sam Altman, the guy behind the company behind ChatGPT, also cofounded a project called Worldcoin. The purpose of Worldcoin is to support Universal Basic Income (UBI), which is the concept of giving free money to all people on a regular basis. Maybe it’s obvious A.I. will replace most jobs and without jobs, even soul-crushing ones, there would be chaos. Or maybe, even though some people would work less with a guaranteed income, they could also engage in that, much promised, pursuit of happiness in healthier and more productive ways.

UBI requires that each person get paid only once, but linking one account to one human is something Ethereum can’t do by default. The network lives in its own universe with no natural link to the outside world. But once you solve this “Proof of Humanity” issue, then you know people can’t double dip on UBI. You know the money is going to one person and not ten bots.

Worldcoin’s approach to Proof of Humanity is to use shiny metal orbs to scan human eyeballs because your eye, specifically your iris, is more unique than your fingerprint. Your eye is a reliable, and hard to fake, sign of your identity. Your data is kept private by a type of cryptography called zero-knowledge proofs that lets you prove who you are but keeps everything else secret.

The next part is where cryptocurrencies (numbers/ points/ tokens created out of thin air with guaranteed limits thanks to math) come in. The Worldcoin project pays people with the worldcoin (WLD) cryptocurrency. This coin is sent to everyone who has been verified as human by the metal orbs. The price fluctuates and the amount is not very high, but it is global by default so nearly anyone can receive it. The only exceptions at time of writing are people who can’t get physically close enough to an orb to get scanned, and U.S. residents who are protected from receiving UBI by U.S. regulations.

Crypto is full of spectacular scams and failures. But crypto does not have a monopoly on failed money schemes. Nearly every man-made type of money – whether issued on paper or metal – has blown up with enough time. What really scares people about crypto is it gives nearly everyone the same power as the Kings, Emperors, and Company men of the past. And unlike these men of the past, this technology forces you to keep your promises via smart contracts.

Money is simply a story shared by a group of people. There must be common faith that the numbers being passed around are either worth showing off, worth keeping, or worth trading for something else. This story can quickly evaporate, but when it endures or the story spreads widely, it can become a powerful tool for creating leverage. What Ethereum can do is pass this tool around to more people.

Like UBI, a free-flowing multiverse of currencies would change things. Most of these new moneys would fail, but a few would succeed, and it would be easy to switch between them. We would eventually settle on a few numbers most people agree on so price tags make sense. What we don’t know is how things would change if instead of having one big faucet at the top, we had many faucets flooding the ground from below.

It would be messy at first, with all sorts of entities, big and small, local and global, adding more and more to this swirl of scarcity, but, obviously, the best way to structure society is with an iron floor and no ceiling. If the discrepancies between rich and poor were not so extreme and everyone else could be defended from their excesses, then most people would not care about rich people being assholes. If getting there requires a bit of chaos and the hands on the faucet have lost their legitimacy anyway, then the trade may be worth it.

Providing more money to more people is possible. We have a foundation to build on. We have materials to build with. What remains to be done is best captured by a Depression-era FDR quote: "The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

Unlike Worldcoin, governments don’t need to scan eyeballs as the starting requirement. Governments are already good at identifying humans. Birth certificates, passports, driver’s licenses – and their non-U.S. equivalents – are old school ink and paper methods that are trusted by most the population. Democracies need a registry of unique humans to run legitimate elections. And all governments need to know who to collect taxes from. If you live in an environment with high-quality forms of identification, then it is possible and fairly simple to bring the benefits of the blockchain to the masses because the Proof of Humanity problem has already been solved.

Blockchains are built on the assumption that one piece of information is kept secret: the private key. Private keys take the form of a long string of numbers and letters that look something like this: 8da4ef21b864d2cc526dbdb2a120bd2874c36c9d0a1fb7f8c63d7f7a8b41de8f

Private keys can be thought of as the ultimate password on a blockchain. They let users control their accounts, allowing them to move assets and interact with programs and other users on the network. Private keys are also the source of public addresses, which are like mailboxes that let users receive tokens, NFTs, and UBI. One private key can control many public addresses on Ethereum.

Governments can fulfill a role they are uniquely qualified for: identifying humans and providing them with private keys.

Private keys must be kept safe and there should be a way for a person to get a new private key regardless of income level and technical knowledge. If you can get a driver’s license, you should be able to get a private key and corresponding public address. It may even be a good idea to have a basic test, similar to a written driving test, before getting a government-issued private key so people are equipped with at least some understanding of digital money and best practices.

Ethereum is like a giant, open box of Legos. Because the platform is neutral and permissionless, developers can come from anywhere, willing to invest precious time and energy knowing that their creations can be copied and built upon, but not corrupted. Code is constantly being created, used, re-used, and battle-tested in a live system. These building blocks are free for anyone to investigate, audit, and copy-and-paste, including you, your local government, and your book club.

It is messy, but rugged and secure pieces have already been created and thoroughly tested with more being created every day. If we started a new set of Legos, it is likely that few would use it, and it is almost guaranteed to be much more fragile than what already exists in the public sphere. A closed-off system could never imitate an ecosystem, which becomes stronger and more robust as more people join, contribute, and test it. Even hacks are productive because every vulnerability discovered and fixed means one less loophole to exploit in the future.

This is all meant to give more people, more options. Right now, users must be sophisticated enough to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of applications, protocols, networks, chains, layer 2s, etc. They not only must decide who to trust, what to use, and how to use it, but also where to even begin. A trusted and safe first step is missing. As we increasingly move our lives online, a public option with no profit motive for how we build our digital identities and interact with digital objects and assets will become more of an obvious basic necessity.

Disclaimers

Experimenting with money can have unintended consequences, but there are three ways to keep us from going too far off the rails:

1. Protect individual privacy

2. Make the system transparent

3. Use a Layer 2

Privacy
At the level of the user or individual, privacy must be preserved. As private keys are linked to people’s identities, financial histories, and control their funds, the responsible management of private keys, and general protection of privacy, is the most important responsibility of organizations managing private keys.

Transparency
At the level of the system itself – at the layer of its governing structure – there should be as much transparency as possible. Who has power and who leads can change drastically. No matter who is in charge or what their agenda is, transparency keeps the powerful auditable and accountable. The public should always be able to tell what is going on and this is especially important when money is involved.

Transparency is not for the purpose of surveillance over citizens, but accountability over the system itself. Privacy is for the weak. Transparency is for the powerful. Anyone in the world should be able to look at the code and be able to tell how it works. If you can’t read code, trusted engineers can take a look and report back. A.I. systems make it increasingly easy to copy-and-paste code and ask for a translation in any language. The A.I. has no incentive to lie. And a truly transparent system has an incentive not to cheat because it will be caught.

Transparency can also mean more efficiency. Over time, bureaucracies tend to get more complex and difficult for people outside the system to navigate and reason about. The levers and control valves get rusty from neglect or simply become outdated. Starting on a new foundation means a clean slate for the entire system, and if transparency is built-in, it becomes possible for everyone to follow along with how the system changes over time. It’s easier to fix things when we can clearly see what is happening.

Layer 2
Worldcoin uses Layer 2 technology. What is a Layer 2? It’s a more customizable blockchain that is connected to a bigger, more secure layer. It inherits the consensus and security properties of the Ethereum Layer 1. The existing, battle-tested, and composable Layer 1 code – the Legos – can also be re-used. It can be made faster for the user and cheaper to maintain overall. Fees could be subsidized or abstracted away. Privacy preserving features could be added as modular pieces.

Whereas Layer 1 is accessible to anyone with an internet connection by default, a Layer 2 can be tweaked to become more permissioned with more control over who and what can come in or out. Unwanted users or programs can be blacklisted. Only high quality, approved programs could be allowed into the system. The control valve could be loosened or tightened depending on how the public wants to balance safety and opportunity – access and protection.