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Wist je dat Sam Altman, de oprichter & CEO van Open AI, de mensen van ChatGPT, een wereldmunt mét basisinkomen willen installeren?

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Wist je dat Sam Altman, de oprichter & CEO van Open AI, de mensen van ChatGPT, een wereldmunt mét basisinkomen willen installeren?

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Over the past few months, shiny metallic orbs have materialized cities around the world, from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. Its creators hail the orbs as revolutionary devices ushering in a new era of global humanity and financial stability. Its detractors slam them as invasive, dystopian and exploitative.

Welcome to the rollout of Worldcoin, an AI-meets-crypto project from OpenAI founder Sam Altman that has stirred endless controversy. The startup uses orbs to scan people's eyes in exchange for a digital ID and possibly some cryptocurrency, depending on what country they live in.

Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania hope that Worldcoin will provide a new solution to online identity in a digital landscape rife with scams, bots and even AI imposters. But privacy experts are concerned about the Worldcoin's collection of biometric data and how, exactly, the project will keep and protect that data going forward. On Aug. 2, Kenya became the first country to suspend Worldcoin's activities and its government launched a multi-agency investigation into the project's practices.

Here's what to know about the new technology.

What is the aim of Worldcoin?

Navigating the online world in 2023 can often feel like an endless obstacle course of lurking dangers. Many websites require a login and password. Scammers have all sorts of strategies to get you to click on links and send them money. Bots run rampant on social media platforms.

And with the rise of AI, our collective ability to discern who is a human online and who isn't is about to become much worse. Earlier this year, OpenAI's GPT-4 was even able to convince a human to solve a CAPTCHA -a technology designed to differentiate humans from bots-on its behalf.

As a founder and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman bears responsibility for problems like this. Worldcoin, then, serves as his potential solution: a way to definitively distinguish between humans and AIs. If all humans online could prove that they were, in fact, humans, then scams and imposters would dramatically decrease, and the digital landscapes would become more accurate representations of us as a society.

So in order to prove that humans are humans, Worldcoin scans irises, which are unique to their owners. This technique is not unlike the biometric scans conducted by CLEAR or Apple's Face ID.

Once Worldcoin has received a unique iris scan, the project issues a digital identity called a World ID. The ID is not a user's biometric data itself, but an identifier created using a cryptography method called zero-knowledge proofs.

If World IDs catch on, then holders could theoretically use them to sign on to all websites, just like Google offers single sign-on services. The difference, Altman argues, is that a Worldcoin login will be more secure and unlinked to other information, including a user's email, name or photograph. If the zero-knowledge proof aspect of the tech works properly, Worldcoin would allow ID holders to log into a website without that action being traceable by other people or any government.

In June, Okta became the first major company to allow users to sign in with Worldcoin.

Why are people signing up?

Worldcoin officially launched in July, with the project embarking on a multi-city sign-up tour. Altman posted a video of long lines outside Orb centers, and said that the project was scanning in a new user every eight seconds.

Worldcoin claims that more than two million people have registered for World IDs. Some people have signed up out of curiosity or affinity for the technology. But many more, it seems, signed up for a simpler reason: money. In order to galvanize interest in the project, Worldcoin created its own crypto token, called WLD, and has offered 25 units (currently worth about $60) to anyone who scanned their eyes into an orb. That offer does not extend to the U.S., however, due to the country's strict regulatory environment related to crypto products.

Worldcoin's cryptocurrency element serves as a marketing ploy, a global financial infrastructure, and a way to entice continued venture capital funding. (Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, just raised $115 million in a funding round and was valued at $3 billion last year. Around 14% of all WLD tokens have been earmarked for investors.) Worldcoin, which Altman says he conceived of in 2019, has for years been entwined with the crypto ecosystem, for better or worse. It was publicly announced in the summer of 2021, when crypto was near its height, and the project's original backers include Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, accused of perpetrating an $8 billion fraud, and the collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

Sam Altman says he hopes that Worldcoin's financialized element could lead to universal basic income (UBI) for its users. Altman has long been interested in UBI. When he was the president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, he led a pilot trial that aimed to give $1,500 a month to Oakland families. But the project was significantly delayed and reduced in scale. Elizabeth Rhodes, project director of YC Research-the incubator's nonprofit arm, which has since spun off -in 2018 that "it's harder to give away money than you might think."

Worldcoin also isn't the first project to entwine digital identity with universal basic income. Last year, a project called Proof of Humanity attempted something similar-and for a while, was handing out $50 to $100 monthly in crypto to everyone who signed up. But the token's value cratered along with the larger market.

Read More:How Blockchain Could Solve the Problem of Digital Identity

Santiago Siri, a board member of Proof of Humanity, says that Worldcoin's cryptographic mechanisms designed to protect identity represent a step forward from his project, which required new users to post a public video to verify their identity. Siri hopes that Altman will leverage Worldcoin and his growing revenue from OpenAI to redistribute wealth. "AI can certainly hold true the promise of delivering a global universal basic income, because it can generate that kind of sustainable wealth throughout time. And because it will displace jobs, they have the ethical obligation to actually support UBI initiatives," he says.

How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin's UBI, however, remains murky. "The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively," Altman told Coindesk recently.

While Altman hopes that the price of WLD will go up, its value so far has been somewhat volatile. WLD debuted at $7.50 but has since dropped threefold, and has hovered between $2 and $3 over the last week.

Why is Worldcoin facing criticism?

Many critics have called Worldcoin's business-of scanning eyeballs in exchange for crypto-dystopian and some have compared it to bribery. Many people are understandably hesitant to surrender their biometric data to a private for-profit startup with uncertain aims; even Altman himself acknowledged a "clear ick factor."

Worldcoin says the biometric information on the orbs is deleted after being processed and converted into cryptographic code. But a history of Silicon Valley companies mishandling data has left a sour taste in peoples' mouths, and some fear that the iris scans could be used for surveillance or be sold to third parties. "Don't use biometrics for anything," Edward Snowden wrote on Twitter in response to Altman's post about Worldcoin in 2021. "The human body is not a ticket-punch."

Meanwhile, Worldcoin's rollout has been plagued by troubling reports from around the world. An extensive 2022 article from the MIT Technology Review found evidence that the project used deceptive practices to sign people up in countries like Indonesia, Kenya and Chile. Spanish-language speakers, for instance, were given terms of service notices in English, and people in Sudan were enticed with AirPod giveaways without being told what exactly they were scanning their eyeballs for.

A representative for the Worldcoin Foundation responded to the Technology Review article in a statement to TIME, writing: "The article is not representative of the project's operations, included inaccurate information and offered a narrow, personal perspective of the incredibly early stages of the project. It is also not an accurate representation of the project's global operations today."

This year, hackers stole the login credentials of Worldcoin operators who are tasked with signing up new users, allowing the hackers to view internal information. An article by the crypto publication BlockBeats alleged that people in Cambodia and Kenya were selling their iris data for as little as $30 a pop to speculators on the black market, who hoped that the WLD they collected from the scans would increase in price.

"I think that there are important questions to be asked about whether or not this opens the path towards artificial intelligence colonialism," Proof of Humanity's Siri, who is Argentinian, says. "We have seen the orb being deployed in third-world developing countries whose rules about identity and privacy might not be as strong as they are in the European Union or in the United States."

Regulators around the world have been watching Worldcoin's rise closely. The French data protection watchdog announced a probe into the project over its "questionable" data collection and preservation. A U.K. regulator issued a similar warning. And the Kenyan government demanded Worldcoin cease its data collection activities there, writing the project posed "legitimate regulatory concerns that require urgent action."

A Worldcoin Foundation representative responded to the news in Kenya in a statement to TIME, writing: "The demand for Worldcoin's proof of personhood verification services in Kenya has been overwhelming, resulting in tens of thousands of individuals waiting in lines over a three-day period to secure a World ID...Worldcoin remains committed to providing an inclusive, privacy-preserving, decentralized on-ramp to the global digital economy and looks forward to resuming its services in Kenya while working closely with local regulators and other stakeholders."

When Worldcoin co-founder Alex Blania was asked by Bloomberg News about login theft and black market sales, he dismissed their impact. "Of course there will be fraud," he said. "It will not be a perfect system, especially early on."

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What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It

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Worldcoin, founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman, scans peoples' eyes in exchange for a digital ID and in some cases, cryptocurrency.

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Dorpszalen in 200 Vlaamse dorpen dreigen te verdwijnen: "Cruciaal voor het leven in een dorp"

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Dorpszalen in 200 Vlaamse dorpen dreigen te verdwijnen: "Cruciaal voor het leven in een dorp"

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Dorpszalen in 200 Vlaamse dorpen dreigen te verdwijnen: “Cruciaal voor het leven in een dorp”

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In the classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, depositors demand their money from a small-town building society. Its manager, George Bailey (in an unforgettable performance by James Stewart), explains that the money is not in the building society's vault; it has been lent to other people in the town. "The money's not there," Bailey pleads. "Your money's in Joe's house ... And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs Macklin's house, and a hundred others."

Bailey's explanation reflects a widespread idea of how banks work.

According to this idea, banks gather funds, such as through retail deposits and wholesale borrowing, then lend out those funds - or a proportion of them. This picture of banking permeates popular culture and popular notions of finance.

In 2008, during the crisis that rocked the foundations of western capitalism, the author and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson published The Ascent of Money. His goal was to explain the underpinnings of the global financial crisis and put it in its historical context.

Ferguson's book repeated uncritically the It's a Wonderful Life explanation of how banking works. Seventeenth-century banks, he explained, had pioneered what would become the foundation of modern finance: "fractional reserve banking". That mode of banking exploited the fact that "money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money needed to be kept in the [bank's] reserve at any given time."

The George Bailey-Niall Ferguson explanation of banking is widely held, and, long ago, it was a valid explanation of how banks worked.

Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence

But as a descriptor of banking today, it is incorrect. Banks don't lend out money from reserves or deposits or other sources of pre-existing funds. Counterintuitively, the loans come first.

When you borrow money and your bank credits your loan account, the account balance is created anew, "from thin air", not from or in relation to existing deposits or other existing money. And as you repay the loan principal, the money created at the time of the loan gradually disappears, reverting to its previous form of airy nothingness.

The Bailey-Ferguson picture of bank lending is back to front, and the nature of bank deposits is also widely misunderstood. The unnerving reality: a positive balance in your bank account does not correspond to a stock of "money" held somewhere for you, over and above the account balance. The account balance is all there is. It is the record of a promise from the bank, effectively an IOU.

Your deposit account is a liability for your bank and, as a depositor, you are no more than one among many of the bank's unsecured creditors.

In normal times a promise from a private bank is nearly as good as a promise from a government or a central bank. But in a crisis the promise is worth much less, and can be worth as little as nothing at all.

These differences in understanding are the tip of an iceberg of confusion that also extends to public finance and fiscal policy.

According to the standard picture of public expenditure and revenue raising, governments can only spend if they first gather money through taxes or asset sales or borrowing. The reality, however, is again the reverse. Just as banks lend money into existence in the form of IOUs, governments spend it into existence.

(From time to time, governments and central banks also make loans, such as for monetary policy and economic development purposes. In those instances, governments and central banks lend money into existence just as private banks do.)

As with money created through bank lending, money created through government spending does not persist and circulate indefinitely through the economy. The slightly shocking and dispiriting reality is that, when you pay your taxes, the money doesn't go into an account or a vault. It is vaporised. The tax payments cancel out the money that was created at the time of the original government spending.

These differences in understanding are not peripheral or inconsequential. Their implications extend far beyond the practical administration of banks and governments.

The standard view dominates the politics of taxation and fiscal responsibility. It also prevails in sections of the academy, where some economists are wedded to the idea of money continually circulating through the economy as a persistent element in a closed system. In reality, money is regularly being created and destroyed, and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful.

(The New Zealand economist Alban William Housego "Bill" Phillips became famous for the Phillips curve, postulating a relationship between rising inflation and unemployment. In 1949 he invented the monetary national income analogue computer, or Moniac. Also known as the financephalograph, this heroically clunky contraption used real liquid, hydraulics and pipes to illustrate how Phillips thought a sealed, circular, money-fuelled economy worked.)

Misunderstandings about money and banking affect the incentives and tactics of the largest private banks, and how well citizens and taxpayers hold governments and financial regulators to account. They prevent us all from having an adult, evidence-based conversation about debt, taxes and monetary policy. Without such a conversation (knowledgeably adjudicated by finance writers and journalists) citizens will forever be bit-part players in capitalism - the irresistible targets of participants with better information.

Protecting customers, taxpayers and the community as a whole from the excesses of modern banking requires a new understanding of the roles of banks and governments in finance; a new understanding of loans, deposits and derivatives as one family of financial contracts; and a new awareness of the privileged position of private corporations in the global financial system.

Crucially, society as a whole needs to think differently about the nature of money -possibly by first discarding the term itself. "Money" encompasses a range of phenomena that have intrinsically different purposes and risks. Commercial bank deposits are materially different to banknotes, for example, which are different to reserve funds. Money as a concept is increasingly outdated and misleading.

A better understanding of money would open up the possibility of important innovations such as lending-only and deposit-only institutions; new mechanisms of financial prudence and oversight; and an integrated monetary and fiscal policy that uses monetary and fiscal levers in concert.

A new financial conversation would make the causes of inter-generational inequities more explicit, and it would allow the community to rethink allowing "too big to fail" banks to earn, year in year out, enormous risk-free profits.

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'Outdated and misleading': is it time to reassess the very concept of money?

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It's regularly being created and destroyed - and economic models that don't reflect that fact are not even slightly useful

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pijnpunt handelaars wegnemen

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Veel initiatieven rond gemeenschapsmunten doven na een aantal jaren uit. De vraag stelt zich dus ook hoe we dit 'hot' kunnen houden en ook voor duurzame financiering kunnen zorgen?

E.g. Transitiemunten sterven uit (Totnes, Bristol,...) of veranderden van koers (Financité -> cashbacks,... Bristol Pay -> tokens) om meerwaarde te creëren

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Slimme marktplaats technologie om organisaties slim te helpen groeien.

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Lokaal geld doorheen de geschiedenis belangrijk in tijden van crisis

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Lokaal geld doorheen de geschiedenis belangrijk in tijden van crisis

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Nieuwe positie: hoezo gebruik je géén lokaal geld in deze tijden?

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Nieuwe positie: hoezo gebruik je géén lokaal geld in deze tijden?

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Firefly een illustratie van een winkelstraat waarbij munten tussen mensen rondzweven, de munten hebb

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Stadcentra lopen leeg, leegstand van panden, kleine lokale handel heeft het moeilijk

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Stadcentra lopen leeg, leegstand van panden, kleine lokale handel heeft het moeilijk

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Term 'gemeenschapsmunt' draagt veel vooroordelen

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Term 'gemeenschapsmunt' draagt veel vooroordelen

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Oostenrijk/Duitsland: regiogeld

Zwitserland: complementair geld

Nederland: lokaal geld, circulair geld, lokale rekeningen

VK: lokale betalingen

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Gemeenschapsmunten hebben het potentieel om aanzienlijke positieve veranderingen teweeg te brengen in onze samenleving, van het opbouwen van sociale cohesie tot het stimuleren van lokale economieën. Maar om de echte impact van deze initiatieven te begrijpen en te meten, is onderzoek nodig. Dat is waar deze impactbevraging om de hoek komt kijken.

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Instant betalingen verplicht.

4 op 5 Vlamingen betaalt liever digitaal

Transactie kosten zijn goudmijn

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"Geld naar duurzame sectoren laten stromen" (naast "geld lokaal houden")

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"Geld naar duurzame sectoren laten stromen" (naast "geld lokaal houden")

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Duurzaam in de brede betekenis. & Zie ook doelstelling van EU met hun regelgeving.

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Firefly -Geld naar duurzame sectoren laten stromen- rivier illustratie 33266

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Banken werken ook met complementaire munten. 

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Banken werken ook met complementaire munten. 

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Dichtbij huis zetten Belfius, KBC hierop in. Het Muntuit verhaal is genoeg onderscheidend, maar het gebruiksgemak zal op termijn wel hetzelfde niveau moeten halen.

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Het netwerk element van lokaal geld is en blijft nog steeds erg belangrijk. Zowel voor particulieren (sociale cohesie) als bedrijven.

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Het netwerk element van lokaal geld is en blijft nog steeds erg belangrijk. Zowel voor particulieren (sociale cohesie) als bedrijven.

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Sandrine Dixson-Declève, co-president of The Club of Rome, co-author of Earth for All and co-lead of the Earth4All initiative

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Christian Gelleri is a research associate at the University of Würzburg and works on the project "Democratizing Money and Credit", part of the research association "ForDemocracy". He is a trained graduate teacher of economics and was awarded with degrees in business education at the University of Munich and business administration at the Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences. He has founded the Chiemgauer, the most successful local currency in Germany. As CEO of the Regios social cooperative he has significantly shaped the dissemination of local currencies in Europe and has a broad knowledge of the status and prospects of complementary currencies. His current research focusses on complementary currencies designed to promote sustainable value chains with a low carbon footprint ("Climate Bonus"). He has published in the field of Law & Economics with recent articles on "Reshaping the Future of Europe with Complementary Currencies" (2022) and "The Phenomenon of Complementary Currencies" (2021).

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Christian Gelleri is a research associate at the University of Würzburg and works on the project "Democratizing Money and Credit", part of the research association "ForDemocracy". He is a trained graduate teacher of economics and was awarded with degrees in business education at the University of Munich and business administration at the Rosenheim Technical University of Applied Sciences.

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Leander Bindewald holds a PhD in economics from the University of Lancaster, UK, and master degrees in neurobiology (2007) and philosophy (2009) from the University of Freiburg, Germany. For the past ten year he has worked on the topic of currency diversity as a consultant and advocate in various countries in Europe, Asia and North America.

From 2012 to 2015 he worked as senior reseacher at the New Economics Foundation, an independent Think Tank for a post-growth economy and sustainable economic systems in London and was the project manager for its EU-supported project "Community Currencies in Action" (CCIA).

Since then he had worked as an independent collaborator for MONNETA.

More on his personal website: www.CriteriCal.net

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Leander Bindewald holds a PhD in economics from the University of Lancaster, UK, and master degrees in neurobiology (2007) and philosophy (2009) from the University of Freiburg, Germany. For the past ten year he has worked on the topic of currency diversity as a consultant and advocate in various countries in Europe, Asia and North [...]

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Research Association on Monetary Innovation and Community and Complementary Currency Systems

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Nieuwe deelnemers vanaf ze verhaal kennen

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Community wealth building - geld lokaal houden

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Eerst zeggen waarom moeten ze ‘munt’ kennen?

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Buurtijd & Urbain?

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Firefly mensen die met elkaar praten in een community illustratie 33266

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Een uur voor je buur en een Buur voor je uur!