Bankless - DEBRIEF - Worldcoin

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Ryan & David debriefing the Worldcoin episode. Want to listen to all past and future Debriefs for all Monday podcast episodes? Become a Bankless Citizen for access:  https://www.bankless.com/join  ----- 🎬 WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE: https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc    ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Hey guys, this is called a debrief episode. It's an episode that David and I record right after the podcast. This one was delayed by a few days. I think it took us a while to catch up after the episode with WorldCoin. But we wanted to release this on the public feed so everyone has access to it. And you can see our thoughts coming out of the conversation with WorldCoin. Usually this debrief is available only for bankless citizens available on the bankless premium RSS feed. But today, we are releasing it publicly. So we hope you enjoy. This should give you some insight into the conversation we just had with WorldCoyne. Thanks a lot. Hey guys, welcome in the debrief after the episode that I wasn't on with WorldCoyne.

Sam Altman. The cool thing about debriefs is it doesn't matter. Okay, what do you have on? Tell me about it. We had on Sam Altman and Alex Bologna of WorldCoyd. First time Sam Altman's been on the show. First time Alex has been on the show. And so, yeah, it was, so you weren't there.

so I have to tell you about what the episode was about. You guys recorded on Mother's Day. I couldn't be there. Oh, that's right. That's why you put there. It was also a Sunday. I don't think you would have, yeah. Sundays are rough.

I probably would have aped out anyway. Yeah. So it was just a straightforward download on WorldCoin. Okay. So for people who had never heard about WorldCoyne before, this would be a great episode for them. Talked a little bit about like the drama about WorldCoin's launch, which we actually had a,

not like a it wasn't like how we had play in the we had like a quick story about the the World Coin launch way back when because they were going to come on the show and then their PR company canceled because you sent out the tweet

what the fuck is going on with WorldCoin and the PR company thought it was hell of hostile so they're like we're out we're out yeah you don't remember you guys bring that up not in the recording but afterwards yes I brought it up with Alex and Alex was like oh yeah we fired those people for like a long ago and like

they were terrible. And I'm like, thank you. They were. That's so stupid, man. I, like, okay, so that put a bad taste in my mouth when that happened. That's not, the only two times that's happened, actually, besides, like, maybe, I won't count, Charles

from Cardano, but Gavin Wood. Okay. Gavin Wood, yes. Pocodot scheduled. Yeah. We were like, hey, could it? And then could Gavin come from the podcast, haven't explored the Pocodot ecosystem? and then like I think maybe a few days before.

Really close. Yeah, the comms lead at Pocod reached out and was like, hey, you know, we went back through some of your previous tweets like years ago. And like we don't like what you, I mean, and Gavin's not going to come on the podcast. So we should cancel this and try to substitute someone else at Pocod in the podcast. And I think I asked for like what the offending tweets were. and they were so tame. They were just so tame.

Anyway, that kind of puts a bad taste to my mouth when projects do that, but I guess they're saying it's their PR firm. It was the PR firm. It was the PR company. And I knew that it was. We knew that it was. Because like when the PR company

canceled on the show originally on us, I went to Alex just straight on Twitter, and it's like, hey, fuck your PR company. Like you need to, you're getting, WorldCoin is getting the absolute shit slammed on them right now. Like the backing away from like the public spotlight is this is not the right time to do that. Everyone is asking the questions that we would ask you on a podcast. Right. Yeah. And so I and I said,

I basically said that to Alex and DM. It was like, you need to ignore your PR company. You just come on. Mainly, A, that was very valid and real and authentic of advice. And B, I also did not want to emergency find another good guest. It takes more. He just like, he didn't, he didn't go for it. Anyways, the cool trivia about that episode is the episode that came out of that was ultra-scalable Ethereum, which turned out to be an absolute banger. Oh, the one that we did last minute? Yes, yeah. We put together a brush the agenda. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Anyway, so that was the precursor to this whole story. So finally, that was like a, that had to be over a year ago. That was a long time ago. Now WorldCoin

is still around, still building, has won some hearts and minds to have joined the team and support the effort. Mainly people I respect. DC Builder. I don't know if you know that name floating around on crypto Twitter. This is not DC investor. Not DC investor.

DC Builder. This is a zero knowledge cryptography researcher guy. Yeah, everyone generally trusts and appreciates in this space. He joined WorldCoin. A few other people joined WorldCoin. Optimism and WorldCoin are

collaborating on OP Mainnet slash OP stack stuff. I think they still have a major uphill battle. So I am... About what? Okay, so let me just say two things about this. One is, I am very excited to listen to this episode, actually.

And thankless listeners should know, I'm coming in the debrief, not having listened to the episode. So you guys are at an advantage to me. So we actually are recording this because schedules, David was in Zuzalu and just schedules permitting... We're recording this, I think, like, weeks later, really, this debrief. But I still haven't listened to the episode. I am excited to listen to it and I intend to go into this episode with an open mind. I also don't think it will answer all of my questions.

I think it'll be like, it's too high level. It'll be a high level. We only have 60 minutes. Yeah, it'll open up the door for other questions. And I think one of my big questions is around sort of probably the privacy of this network, probably like how decentralized really is it? like how public goodsy is it, how values aligned is it? I'm actually not sure what series of questions this will completely unlock.

But I guess I don't want to hear a VC marketing machine tell me these things. I want to hear like independent community like representatives in that people I respect and privacy and decentralization talk about these things. So but I guess so that's one part of it. other part I would say, I think that they are just, it's just hard. I mean, I said this on the roll-up last week, David, but like the crypto bros want to orb you, right? And like, it's not great. I mean, to what, to capture identity and who's behind it? It's the guy who's building the most powerful AI in the world, Sam Altman. And like, I don't know. That's an uphill marketing battle,

I think, and like, maybe it should be. It's a very, if you're going to do something of this type of magnitude and make these types of vision commitments, then I think, like, you owe the world a commensurate level of transparency, auditability, openness. like that's a pretty high bar to me. And they say all of that stuff is on their roadmap, they say. And I'm a trusting individual. I tend to believe them. I think like there are some projects out there that are very in the crypto world that are very like beloved.

Like Gitcoin comes to mind, protocol guild, optimism. I would say it has some of this. World coin has like the opposite of that. it's like, ooh, what is the opposite of beloved? I don't know, but it's like, it's easy to hate WorldCoyne, just by a nature of what it is, which is like, if you trust WorldCoin and believe WorldCoyn, then it's like totally unfair because they're doing the same thing. It's just like, yeah, we're trying to.

But you just said, so you just said, David, you're a trusting individual. Why are you a trusting individual after all the shit we've gone through in crypto? Like, why would you trust anybody in this space to do any? I was a trusting individual before crypto, first off. And so hasn't crypto like, I'm just a trusting individual. My disposition is to trust. Jaded you. Hasn't, hasn't crypto kind of like shown you to be less trusting in some cases, particularly

when you have sort of the setup of large VC allocation, a coin, super ambitious kind of promises, lots of ways to cut corners. Like, I'm not saying, World Coin could be fantastic. I have no idea, but I'm just saying the pattern fits many patterns we've seen in the past of like this not working out very well. And I think that's what that's what the white blood cells, the immune system of crypto is just kind of like indiscriminately attacking. And I think if you want to get more precise in the white blood cells, you really have to go dive deep. Most people don't have time to do that, including myself, honestly. It's like I'm going to be relying on third party privacy researchers, people in the crypto community.

I trust. I'm going to do a little more. Like, I'm going to be able to do levels of due diligence, but I can't vet this thing from the ground up. Anyway, this trust. Like, why should we trust what they say at all? Like, why shouldn't we default posture to like, oh, this is a bunch of bullshit?

And then, you know, work our way out of that. So I will, I'm not going to make the case for why one should trust WorldCoyne, but I will make the argument for, let's see i'm not okay let me just say that started that again i'm not saying that you should trust world coin but here is the argument for like why it why you could why why there there are some green flags here that are different from like all of the 2022 like mess that we don't want to go back to um one is like the idea if you accept that the idea that um biometric scanning is the most civil resistant mechanism to produce proof of humanity then then you get something like

the orb and so you can start to like cast away the negative connotation that iris scanning and the orb has which is like a source of like distrust is just like the whole aesthetics of the whole thing so you have so you can like try and shave that from your brain then there's like okay vc like allocation uh serializing humans like all like all that kind of stuff uh well like say like do you trust Sam Altman? Like maybe, maybe what does Sam Altman have in it that like Three Overse Capital or Doe Kwan or SBF?

He just doesn't fit those types. And neither does Alex Blania, right? Like maybe if Alex Blonny was loud on Twitter and And they're not populous You're not populace, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there's not that right. There's not, it doesn't seem like a get rich quick scheme.

They actually have a roadmap to produce something uniquely valuable and unique in and of itself to crypto. I don't think it maps onto like the whole like things that we should. Does it map onto like a VC coin, VC alternative layer one that we've seen so many times? I know it's not actually an alternative layer one. So that alone makes it kind of different. But you know, we've seen many just ridiculously funded alternative layer ones that kind of like go liquid and then you just sort of get this feeling and kind of see in the data that the VCs just dump on you once it gets

into the market. And they don't really go anywhere. They don't have product market fit. It just feels like corporate, top down. It doesn't feel organic. There's no builders. There's no community. And so I guess where that usually turns into is not an outright scam, but just like, I don't know, exit.

You become exit liquidity in some cases for VCs. And then it becomes sort of a zombie. chain, which is not like the worst outcome. That's not like a SBF, FTCS style outcome or a lunatera outcome, but it's still not a great outcome. It's so like it's, it is heavily VC weighted. There's, there's two things that there's two ways to approach like VC weighting. There are like the easy like, yo, let's fork Ethereum, fork the EVM, which the Ethereum researchers have been building for like almost a decade now, more than a decade now. And then like, let's raise on it and then like keep all the tokens for ourselves. and dump on the followers.

So like get other people to do the lift work, pump the token ourselves with our VC marketing dollars and then dump. So like not much work, a lot of upside. The WorldCCoin project is a ton of work. It's a ton of work. You're saying it's not like a fork. It's not like a me too of something else.

Right. Like the VC raise, the amount, the VC dollars are legitimate because there's no way that they could get the orb mass produced in a way that other people can produce the orb. and there's no way that they could get people to scan other eyeballs that aren't in the WorldCcoin employees. Like that whole lift side of things requires VC dollars. It's very legitimate use of a capital raise.

And then like the whole like so that just checks out to me. Like you need VC money for that. So it still doesn't fit the mold of a typical VC exit scam kind of thing. And I put scam in quotations because it's usually just ghost chain, low product market fit where you become exit liquidity if you if you buy this particular token but you don't have to right and also it's not even the the point of world coin isn't even the token like that's one of three points what are the three points uh proof of humanhood the the coin and i'm missing one maybe maybe it's just two i feel like there's there's world

id there's the world app which i think is pretty similar to world id it's like yeah it's the wallet your authentication but i guess that's pretty similar to world id this is built It's on a layer two, right? So right now they're deploying on OP Mainnet, and eventually they will make an OP stack chain. And so this will be their own sort of, will it be like a layer three type chain? It'll be an independent OP stack chain.

Independent OP stack chain. Which in theory, like, fits into the Optimism Super Chain model. I mean, that's kind of cool, right? Yeah. I guess. So like as an OP stack chain, the app, so it's like an app-specific chain. And what is that app-specific chain?

It provides proof of humanhood the world coin way. Okay. To the OP super chain, which is eventually just a theory. And by the way, the reason I'm coming in a little hotter in this is because I think this is how the white blood cells are. These are the questions. I guess maybe the last, we don't have necessarily full satisfactory answers on what you just raised already. But I think you are offering some valid points of how this kind of breaks the pattern, typical pattern we've seen. That's all I'm doing right now.

And I think that's what the crypto community is doing, pattern recognition. But there's this third kind of negative pattern that I think people see. And that is the figure of Sam Altman, which is like, all right, tech, bro. I put him in quotations billionaire. I don't even know if he's a billionaire. I heard him go in front of, okay. So, but he went in front of, he quacks like one. In Congress, I mean, he has no equity in open AI.

Like, I just don't even know how this works. Yeah. He has no equity in open AI. I think that you can't necessarily take that at face value because, like, he could have no equity open AI, and then open AI could get liquidity, and then he could get, like, a billion-dollar grant from open AI. So there's, like, roundabout ways where that doesn't really matter.

He feels like the Mark Zuckerberg of the 2020s in that he has created this technology that is clearly going to change everything about the fabric of the way humans organize and interact. in open AI, right? And so he is sort of this, and now we're at a phase, I think, in the world where, like, tech bros from Silicon Valley are, like, all kind of grouped into this parasitic extractor type of motif.

And some people might think that's fair. Some people might think that's unfair. I think the majority of society, though, just doesn't trust that sort of individual at this point in time. And so I guess a question to you is like, or maybe just a question to mull over is like, is this guy legit? Or is this guy going to be like somewhat evil or somewhat influenced by mowlock traps and all of the things that we've seen tech billionaires get influenced by leading to you like bad outcomes for society? I guess the question is, can you really trust Sam Altman is what it comes to. down to. So yeah, the archetype of like the web two extractor, the Zuck Zuck web two idea.

Like I'm reminded of the, um, this quote from Sam Harris where he was talking about how everyone is like, they are fewer people and like there's a modern movement to ignore expertise. Just like, oh, experts are wrong. They're all, they're all wrong. Like experts like told you to wear mass and they're wrong. And so he was throwing a flag at that whole like movement that's going on in the modern day culture. Anti-intellectualism. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, the way that society progresses is like there are experts and then they

say things and then we prove those experts wrong. That's how society moves forward. But who actually proves experts wrong? Other experts. Yeah. Like more experts, not the masses. And so like, to carry over this analogy, Zuckerberg is the old expert. Sam Altman, who knows if he's a better, newer expert who proves the old archetype wrong,

but I add me as a true. trusting individual, I would like to leave that door open that the way through that bad branding for VC tech bro founder, innovator type is actually we find one that like does good for the world, like who fixes the problems. Like it's not going to be like the average Joe that solves proof of humanity, proof of humanhood in the AI world. It's going to be a VC tech pro. That's why he's a VC tech bro. That's how you solve these problems. What was your impression of him during the conversation? I'm slowly liking him more and more and more. Why?

What do you like about him? He seems authentic. He seems nice. He seems he's not running away from the alignment problem. I mean, I think some... If he is good in the front and then bad in the back, he is a world-class sociopath, I'm saying. What does the AI safety community think about this?

guy. I mean, I know El Eukowski. I don't know. L.E. Z. Yukowski is like burned down all the GPUs. Yeah, but he's an extremist. Okay, but I'm surprised that AI safety, hmm, I haven't really seen

AI safety and alignment groups come out in like torch open AI or Sam Altman very publicly. Well, anyone, right? They don't haven't touched to torch anyone. Is that, is that sort of happening or do is there the general impression in AI alignment

communities that, hey, well, open AI is not perfect. They've done a fairly good job so far, and they're not completely ignoring safety. They're still trying to remain competitive, and they're trying to do everything. Open AI has an alignment division inside of them and apparently contribute to this world. Well, there's another factor of why people are scared, and that's just because these tech billionaires are so powerful these days. It's like how powerful is Mark Zuckerberg at this point? How powerful is the individual who is masterminding open AI, right? And now you're doing decentralized identity as well.

You're doing World Coin as well. I think that unnerves people. One thing I'd say, though, because this has been somewhat, you know, me throw it lobbing grenades and criticisms, what is the alternative to decentralized identity? That is the threshold to cross. It's like basically what we're going to be left with is some sort of nation state digital identity, right?

And that's all we have. I mean, India has already has that deployed now and that's completely centralized. Now, you might argue, well, that's, you know, this is the probably the Roman Gray argument. Well, yeah, of course. decentralized identity. It's great. It's a democratic nation state sort of proposing this and putting this forward. And so that's a great thing. But that is definitely centralized technology. And I do think

that is the only viable alternative that we've seen. For all of the decentralized identity experiments in crypto, so far, none of them have really taken off. So as long as this thing is better than that or different enough than that, it feels like a worthwhile experiment to keep running. What's the downside, I guess, would be my question. That's where I go back to, like, the claim that biometric scanning is the best form of simple resistance. If that, I don't know, there's probably some measure of truth or falsity to that. But still, it's biometric. There's a reason why we do biometric scanning.

So turning biometric scanning into proof of humanhood, I think, is a noble endeavor. And so that is why I am categorizing myself as a World Coin Apologist. Wait, you'd say a WorldCoin apologist? Yeah. So that, like, an apologist means, like, you're fighting for WorldCoyne. Like, you are evangelizing for WorldCoyne. You are sort of making the argument. I'm just saying that, like, the existence of WorldCoyne is not the thing to be upset about.

I guess my take is, and this might be a more moderate take, I'm just open-minded. I think that sometimes the crypto-white blood cells attack too hard. and destroyed things without, like, without good reason. And so I am pretty open-minded about this one and excited to see how it plays out. When are you going to get orb, David? Oh, I'm not getting orbed. If you're an apologist, though, you have to get orbed at some point. I will get orbed when I need to do something that requires me getting orbed.

What's the benefit of getting orbed anyway? Is it just you get actual world coins? Yeah, you get world coins. sooner you get a distribution of world coins. And the idea is that world coins like any crypto token appreciate and value over time. So, yes, Sam Olin actually talks about that on the podcast. I think explicitly like, yeah, yeah, well, I number go up. So, like, the interesting thing you think about Worldcoin is that like not only is it's a currency that might be used,

but it might also be like a graph for like things like air drops or distributions. So if Worldcoin as a distribution mechanism becomes, legitimately decentralized and distributed to humans equally all over the planet, then it becomes a very good graph to distribute other things to. Remember, you read Bill Bauder's book, Red Notice? Yeah. Yeah, so, like, there was a big problem when the Soviet Russia went from communist to capitalists, like how did they distribute the equity of the companies to the people of Russia?

And so they gave out like these vouchers things and to people, like, if there was WorldCoin, they would have just been air dropped. Here's the equity of the company to the citizens of Russia, right? It's just like a legitimate mapping of equity and capital as far as it's like the most legitimately distributed asset at all the time is the thesis

that they're going after. Why Worldcoin? Why are they calling this thing World Coin? I don't know. I don't. I don't know. All right. Well, open-minded. And then when's this thing launching? Did you find that out? They do not have a public date yet

Okay Well I do know that It's like rolls out It's not like one thing that launches It rolls out over time Do you know our editor Luke of Bankless Newsletter He got orbed

Actually on Thursday New York City Luma? Yeah Luma got orbed Yeah He went to the offices And got orbed as a test No shit

Yeah So I haven't debriefed with him Is it gonna be like the What was that Dr. Seuss book? Starbelly Sneaches or whatever. Orbs? If you're or if you're not?

Yeah, if you've been orbed or not. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. I just, I feel like they could have done something different in the marketing, but maybe there's no other way. World coin orbs. That's what I was thinking about.

Like, okay, so once you commit to the biometric scanning thesis, like, then you conclude, this is like outside of just crypto stuff. Then you conclude that irises are the most legitimate, like, biometric scanning technology. So you are scanning irises. If you believe in biometric scanning, you believe in scanning irises. So you're saying there's no way to make that... How do you make a thing that is mass-producible

so that we can capture 8 billion irises? Like, what shape do you put that in? Do you want it to be a box? Because the box isn't much better. Like, do you want to dress it up like a teddy bear? Because that's kind of worse. How do you do it? How do you do it in a way that doesn't make people squirm?

It's not possible. Maybe could you? you do, yeah, it's probably not possible if you have to have an independent hardware device. You can't, like, create an app for it or something like this. Right. Yeah. Well, you know what? Once you make its own device, you have to, it has to be custom.

It can't look like anything else. Like, what, how do you do it? I still think that. A Chrome orb is like as good as idea as any. I still think that even though this is very well funded, given the names and given kind of the ambition as well, it kind of should be. I still think that the most likely scenario of a product like this is it doesn't reach a product market fit, right? And I just say that because that's generally what happens with startups. This is the startup phase.

And so maybe I think a few things to watch is like, how's traction going? Is it able to resist civil attacks or not? That's a huge one. Big question. Um, what's, you know, I guess how many new IDs are they getting over time? Um, it's stuff like that. I think that will really make a break this. Because like Sam Wulman is doing this because the world of AI is coming.

And so I think without the world of AI, wait, why? What's the tie? Because you need to prove who the humans are. Oh, yeah. On the internet. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so like, World Coin without AI, I don't think is, has much legs. I think Sam Waltman is going to simultaneously produce the need for WorldCoin using OpenAI. And that has actually been his plan all along. He's like, first I'm going to make OpenAI.

And then there's going to be AIs everywhere. Ooh, then we're going to need to figure out who the humans are. So I'm also going to make this WorldCoin thing. So I create the problem and also the solution. I mean, you can see how this gets very. The good business model. Yeah. Anyway, to be determined, we'll see.

I would definitely be great to have Sam on the podcast again and talk about AI stuff as well. But I'm sure we'll get into that some future stage. He's going to owe the world a handful of conversations. Well, Bankless Nation, let us know what you think of World Coin and this conversation. As always, we appreciate you being Bankless Citizen. Thanks a lot.