The Wolf Of All Streets - Worldcoin (Beginning Or End Of Privacy?) | Crypto Town Hall With Peter McCormack, Vinny Lingham, Matthew Gould, William Mougayar & Others

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Yo. Is this thing on? Can you hear me? It is, it is. I've got all the invites out. What's up, David? Yeah, man, we can hear you. Why is Twitter... ...space is so glitchy? Look, look. We have to get out of fact. We run a big... exactly.

Twitter's not glitchy. X is also not glitchy, but it's called X. So how do you pronounce X-E-E-T? That's your problem, man. I just post. If it was in China, do you shit? It's like if he's President Xi and it's X-I, then are we cheating? Are we cheating?

Are you still trolling people when it comes to the X? No, I'm not trolling anyone. I just want to understand. You want to understand how to say cheat. My favorite joke, though, was that I said, was the idea that if I send you a private message, I'm sending a DMX. He's my favorite rapper. One of my favorite rappers.

But, yeah, I don't know if we're zeding or we're sheeting or we're exceeding. We're not hosting a space either. We're what? I don't know. Ex-a-ting? Ex-a-cing? What is it? Ex- We're what? I don't know Ex-a-cing? What is it? Ex-a-ce? I don't know man

I think spaces make more sense now You know since Elon is the rocker guy Oh I see what you did there I didn't Oh shit okay yeah yeah Dude way ahead of us Matt Jesus Christ Five steps ahead of us, Matt. Jesus Christ, yo.

Five steps ahead of us. It's the best way. I think it's your first time on stage, Matt, and you embarrass me. This is how it is. Your first time on stage at the Crypto Town Hall. But it's good to meet you as well. Yeah, great to meet you. It's impossible to be embarrassed on Twitter.

I mean, I think that's the whole point of Twitter. Guys, anyone that says Twitter on stage, exactly, remove, it's called X and it's X and what we're doing now is we, are we X-ing or what are we doing now? I don't know the way we have it. We've made

that joke. I'm cheating. I'm taking a cheat. Well, do you want to cheat the market update as a starting point, Scott? Because I'm sure there's a lot of exciting updates today in the markets. It's very volatile with a lot of volume, yeah? Well, I'd be out to hit sarcasm. Well, I'll tell you that the stock market continues to rip. I think that we just had a record 11 up days in a row or something,

which by the way, I don't see when I look at the S&P, but it was a huge headline in Bloomberg. But basically, the market continues to rip only a few hundred points off the highs. I mean, absolutely absurd when you consider how far we dropped, taking a lot of wind out of bear sales. But we have seen before, obviously, in previous cycles, if we're talking about stocks where you have these massive bull traps that some would call them, and then that's kind of what happens in 1929, for example, before the Great Depression had a huge bounce and then dropped. But for now, things are pretty much intact, economy looking strong. But Bitcoin, obviously, being as not correlated as it is at the moment, dropped and kind of lost the range that it was in trading between 29.5 and 31.5 or so, depending on how you obviously draw it on the chart.

So I think a lot of people holding their breath here waiting to see what's going to happen with Bitcoin next. But to me and to most people, it seems like this is looking like an opportunity wherever it lands to buy a dip. And most people, I don't think, looking to short right now. And altcoins kind of trending slowly down, but they're holding at least their parity with Bitcoin at the moment, which is encouraging. A lot of times when you see Bitcoin drop, you'll see Bitcoin dominance go up and altcoins disproportionately losing. But they're holding their value versus Bitcoin at the moment and just kind of dropping proportionately against dollars. But honestly, even with all of this, kind of points out yesterday,

if you look at Bollinger Bands as a sign of volatility, right now the Bollinger Bands are literally on the weekly the tightest they've ever been. Volatility is exceptionally low. There's just not much happening here. So it's hard not to just overanalyze the basically nothing that's going on. I mean, that's really what's going on in the market. A question if you have to.

Go ahead, Rev. I mean, we did a show with options traders last night and options, for those of you who don't know how options are priced, they're priced using volatility. And the guys are saying that this is the lowest volatility since 2019. If you look at crypto and Bitcoin as a whole, we haven't had this kind of low volatility since 2019. So there's really, really, really no volatility. But if you look at this, Rian, if you look at the four-year cycle, though, interestingly, this is exactly where we would be kind of relative to that. And you would expect this to be a period of low volatility kind of coming into the halving next year, right? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.

I do think, though, that we are going to get volatility tomorrow because i think we've got the fomc tomorrow the market is priced in one more interest rate hike which is due to happen tomorrow and i think that what's going to happen is we're going to get a i spoke about on the show today we're going to get an increase in interest rates tomorrow but i think that pal's going to allude that there are more rates, more rate increases likely. I think that's what... Why do you expect volatility from that?

Because that's pretty expected, no? No, it's not. No, if you look at what the market's expecting, it's expecting one more rate hike tomorrow and then no further rate hikes. And if you look at what Powell is... if you look at what I think Powell's going to do is I think he's going to say we're grazing and a lot of the members say that they see more rate hikes in the future. And then we're going to have the dot plot and the dot plot I'm

sure is going to show higher rates at the end of the year than we have tomorrow. And I think that's going to throw the market off. Why do I say that? So I had Gareth on my show today and he highlighted something very interesting. He said, if you look at the price of oil, if you look at the price of gas, both the price of oil and the price of gas have gone up in last month, 15%. And the energy sector was the sector

that brought down inflation in the last cycle. So what it's saying is that because the gas price and the oil price and the energy prices are increasing, we can probably expect inflation to start increasing again. And so the market probably celebrated the 3% inflation too quickly. And I don't think that Powell's going to take the risk of getting egg on his face again. And that's why I think the market's going to be shocked tomorrow. So I think that tomorrow we have a down day in the stock market. I think that results in a down day for Bitcoin as well. But I want to look at it more holistically and David, and for the rest of the panel, but William, David as well, feel free to jump in on

this one. If you look at it historically, has crypto always lagged behind equities the way it is now? No, absolutely not. I mean, right now it's completely untethered. And is there examples we can look back over the last few years that will be comparable? It's actually been far more rare over the history of Bitcoin for it to show that close correlation that it did for parts of the last few years when there's a massive sort of bearish move at once, all correlations rise to one, everything becomes correlated. And then as the dust settles, they generally become uncorrelated again. But Bitcoin, I mean, in my opinion, has been effectively untethered. And you can see that in the data that it's been decreasing massively in

the correlation for a year now. I mean, it really started last summer when Bitcoin kind of chopped sideways throughout the summer. We certainly saw Bitcoin decorrelate even further to the downside after FTX, right? Because stocks were continuing to trade sideways and slightly up, and we had this massive drop on a black swan event. And since then, it's just been largely untethered. I mean, stocks have been ripping up, Bitcoin's been sideways, Bitcoin down. So I mean, we could probably talk about a relationship more to the dollar, but at the So, I mean, we could probably talk about a relationship more to the dollar, but at the moment, I think Bitcoin is really trading in its own world. Yeah, so I would agree with that, definitely, especially recently,

given all of the headwinds from the regulators right now, how crypto is really dependent on its own good news or bad news. At least for the short term. But that's a good thing. We don't want to see that correlation. We do want to see crypto become its own relatively uncorrelated asset class. No, it's like regulation, Mario. We don't want regulation until we do want regulation. We don't want correlation.

Until now, we all want correlation because the Nasdaq is on a tear and Bitcoin is just like a lame donkey. Yeah, I tend to correlate on the way down, unfortunately, which is kind of what I was alluding to. If you're cheering for correlation, it only usually happens when things go bad in the stock market. Yeah, exactly. I was just saying this yesterday, Rand, is that we sit there complaining when crypto is not correlating to equities, if equities are ripping. But we're happy when there's no correlation, when equities are not doing that well or stagnant and crypto is pumping.

So, yeah. I think it's one thing after another. Like one thing will lead to another. Right now, in my opinion, we're still in the penalty box. We're still paying for the sins of the last year. And when we have more credibility by virtue of our own good news, then others will pay attention more, and then we can then go and follow the NASDAQ tech trends more confidently. So yeah, right now it's up to us

to come back with the good news to gain the credibility back. Cool. I'm sorry. I'll disagree with that. I want no correlation over it. This is David Towle. This asset class has to stand on its own. The only way it becomes an asset class that wealth managers, institutional investors need to go ahead and pay attention to exclusively from tech stocks and other, I'd say, risk on assets is if there is less and less correlation, both to the upside and downside. And I think that that's better. I think right now, the lack of correlation is really just reflective of the lack of volume and lack of depth of market, period. I agree.

And I think we just need to gain that back. I agree. But I think that when you refer to it as an asset class, I think that may not be the right referral. I think if you say Bitcoin, I agree that Bitcoin should not be correlated to the NASDAQ, because if it is, then what's the point of having a fully correlated asset? But I think when you talk about Ethereum and Solana and you've got to equate those to venture investments, because those are venture tech investments, literally whichever way you want. Those kind of investments are venture tech and to me seem like an extension of the NASDAQ.

And so I think when you say Bitcoin, I agree. That's a store of value that should maybe be a little bit more correlated to gold than it is to tech. But I think when you talk about blockchains and blockchain applications, that's actually just an extension of the NASDAQ. Guys, if you don't mind, I do want to move, because I know we discussed this at length yesterday. We're going to do it tomorrow as well. So instead, I want to pivot to the concept of proof of personhood. Obviously, we're going to talk a lot about WorldCoin, which is dominating the headlines.

But Vinny, I know we discussed this yesterday. So I want to give you the mic to kind of give us an intro. And just for the new panelists, and I see Matt there and I see Dr. Nick. Guys, feel free to jump in anytime or put your hand up. Bob as well. So just it's pretty casual. But yeah, Vinny, I want to give you the mic. Give us a bit of an update, not an update, an overview of what proof of personhood means

and what the utility is and what your thoughts are. Because I know we had a debate a couple of days ago on whether we have true use cases in crypto. And I would label this one as a really interesting use case. Very smart. Yeah, yeah. So I think the best sort of example or the best sort of description of it came from Vitalik Buterin's post. I think he posted it yesterday. And he basically outlined there's three ways to do proof of personal.

If someone wants to put up a tweet, then that'll be great. But, you know, there's three sort of areas. One is social graph-based. The other one is general hardware biometric. And the third one is specialized hardware biometric. And what he said was there's at least these three paradigms of approaches that all have unique strengths and weaknesses. And so, you know, basically what he's saying is

there is no one way you can do proof of personhood. I mean, you know, whichever way you do it, there's issues, right? So how do you work with them? How do you do them at scale, et cetera? He delves into that in his article. A very interesting take. And I think what we're seeing with WorldCoin is

they're using specialized hardware, biometric, and it is lacking in things like accessibility. It is not decentralized for the reasons you outlined. Just take it one more step back, Vinny. When you say proof of personhood, what does that mean exactly? The way I look at it, the way I understand it

when I start digging into this today is that you link a human to a wallet. Is that a simple way of explaining it? Well, yes, to theory. What we try to do is distinguish bots from humans. But one of the things I call in my head around is, and I spent years building identities, if a human gives its

ID to a bot and then the bot pretends to be the human, are you dealing with a human or a bot? Especially when there's no physicality. I think humans... Sorry, Vinny, can you say that sentence again? The human bot one?

In the digital realm, if a human verifies the identity and then hands over the keys to a script or a thought. Something automated, yeah. Automated. Is it human doing the transaction or is it a bot doing the transaction? Because the human's authorizing the bot. Now, that's the electronic world, right? That's the electronic world where you have bits and bytes flying around um your atoms aren't being

moved uh with identity in the you know atomic world humans have to physically be present you know you can sort of judge from the skin and everything else and that's a human and you know your identity is is more sort of cemented in that world today. Okay. It may not be the case in 20 or 30 years where, you know, even in 10 years when, when, when,

when your AI and robotics merge and now robots can move atoms. It's not just electrons. And it's not always, they can't really do it today. I mean, Tesla's factories are all robots, but let's say you get to a point where you can put skin and bone and make it look really human.

Like, you know, Battlestar Galactica style in, you know, in 50 years or 30 years. And then what is the identity? You know, can I actually have an avatar out there that looks perfectly like me, to pretend to be me,

if it has the keys to be me? These are the sort of questions that we have to think about if we take a long-term view on identity. And WorldCoin is an interesting take. Well, Vinny, I must say, I've been shown some AI deepfakes of myself

with my own voice. And, I mean, it's actually really, really scary. And I think AI is very much in its infancy. When we look at AI as it is today and think that it's going to improve itself exponentially, you start realizing just how important this problem of proving humanness actually is. Like it's a real problem.

I know that today my bank verifies me using voice verification technology, but I also know that I can dub my videos in Spanish and the AI uses my voice. So I think that goes pretty much out the window today. Yeah, exactly. Voice verification is pretty much out the window today. Yeah, exactly. Voice certification is pretty much done. 100% right. It still boils down to what are we trying to achieve here? What are we trying to solve for?

What's the problem? Let's just look at WorldCoin and what the objective is. So WorldCoin are saying openly that they're solving two problems one of them is proof of humanness and then what they're saying after that is that they i just want to make sure that i that i quote correctly so if you just give me one second i'm trying to make sure i don't uh butcher the quote they're saying world coin aims to establish

universal access to the global economy, regardless of country or background. It is designed to become the world's largest human identity and financial network. So it feels like what they're doing is they're trying to create human identity as a platform or a basis for global financial network, which currently doesn't exist. I think you and I know the problem quite well because we both come from South Africa. We know what happens in the rural areas. We know that a lot of the people can't get banked because they just don't even have an identity, let alone a bank account. You can't get a bank account unless you have an identity. And I think that WorldCoin is aiming to solve that problem by giving everyone identities

and by giving everyone identities, allowing them to start being financially active in a financial network, right? Yeah. And the size of this opportunity is huge. And I don't think most people get how big the opportunity is. But if you think about it, financial fraud, which is what an identity network would help fight, has to cost at least 2% of global GDP.

And I know that because that's the fee that Visa charges. And that's in great countries like US or EU where there is already low fraud. And then if you look at PayPal, the fee can be up to 10% for making simple transfers. So what you're saying is like 10% in some places of GDP is being consumed by financial transactions because of high fraud. Or in the US and EU, maybe it's closer to 2% or 3%. If you think about it, it's not even fraud. Or in the US and EU, maybe it's closer to 2% or 3%. If you think about it, it's true. It's not even fraud. I mean, fraud is one aspect of it. I think the bigger loss is that the fact that these people don't exist in the financial system. I mean, again, I think it's

very difficult for anyone in the US to imagine this. But I think Vinny and I come from South Africa. And there is a sector of South Africa, which is like i guess it's maybe even over 50 percent of south africans that cannot enter the banking system at all and the reason and the reason they can't is because there's not a good way to identify them to prevent fraud so that's why i'm saying like there you can see it it's it's the other side of the coin like the reason they can't get access is because there's not a way for them to get uh there so i see it as the same side but it's on the map yeah you're saying but but what you guys are saying is there's no centralized way of verifying those people there's no will to verify them because i don't i don't

know what's hard about verifying the identity of people you get their fingerprint i know the old school way of getting their fingerprint giving them an id and you're done and then they go and open it back expensive it's expensive i really think it just comes down to it. It's super expensive. If you look at Twitter, they spend millions. That's really not what WorldCoin's trying to do, though. I think it's worth winding back a second and looking what proofing personhood is for. It's largely to solve the Sybil problem.

So for those who aren't aware, Sybil resistance is this problem of people setting up multiple accounts and pretending to be many people when they're one. Which creates fraud. Well, it creates a kind of i mean if you think about where where we're at here in the crypto system right anyone with a private key can set up many public keys so you can just keep printing identities it's the pseudonymous systems and the problem with that is which we've seen a lot in the airdrops that we do here, is that you can break a system by just pretending to be many people. And largely, this is what WorldCoin is trying to solve. It doesn't really solve financial fraud.

It just locks in a single identity. It doesn't stop that person from money laundering. So, Nick, that's almost correct. The one issue with that is what we've seen, and Civic runs, we do a lot of civil resistance for companies, gaming companies, etc. We have the Civic Pass, etc. What we've seen is people buy identities. So someone will go and get someone to get their retina scanned

and pay them $50 to use it. And these people have no idea. Basically, we're dealing with the lower tiers and the economic scales of the world. These people get paid 20 bucks or 50 bucks. They don't care. 20 bucks or 50 bucks.

Money for food or whatever. Which is happening with the WorldCoin as well. People are selling them. Whenever there's an incentive to trade an ID or sell an ID, people will do it. And now we've got eyeball farms where people are being paid.

So WorldCoin is trying to solve this problem, but it doesn't do it perfectly. I call it the civil war. You can't win. Is there a better way to do it? because there is, I call it the civil war. You can't win. Is there a better way to do this, Blake? As you say, is there a way to... If I can, please. Let's go back to the

beginning of, like, you need to prove you're human and you're unique, right? You're not a bot, right? And you need to be able to do it pseudonymously or anonymously to know what you're connecting to. And then after that, to get into what Ron was saying, you need to be able to add credentials to your identity at some level to say, I'm not a fraudster and I have some legal basis to actually get into the banking system. And to cut to the chase, WorldCoin, again, by the way, they came to me when they were doing their white paper three years ago, because we figured out how to do that.

And they made some design choices that simply put them into a corner, like you said, where people are using their identities on the black market. You can just eyeball farm them. And it fundamentally doesn't actually work to solve civil resistance or actually get people into the banking system. It's just their design choices failed. I think predominantly what we're trying to create here, though, isn't the banking system. We're trying to create a parallel economic system, alternative economics. We're trying to create DeFi. DeFi is decentralized. It means you don't need your post personhood to be able to engage with it. There's a billion people in the world without IDs. So all these systems, which just attest your ID and then you're a person

don't work because we're trying to build systems which are decentralized and don't just inherit all the identity issues from the mainstream system. So the solution they have, and whoever's jumping in, let's jump in right after I ask this question. The solution they have is, is it focused more on Web 2 or Web 3? Like we do have an identity system in Web 2

and it works pretty well. Like correct me if I'm wrong and I might be naive, but it's not that easy to buy an identity. You know, you got to show your passport there's a photo there's your physical atoms there that you cannot fake but in the digital world in web 3 that becomes a lot more difficult and that's where I think

world coin makes more sense what do you mean web in web 2 you could be online and using a fake ID you don't have to but the verification processes there is in Web 2 are pretty difficult to skip. It's so easy to buy fake credentials

on the dark web. Let's say it's super easy, like 20 bucks for a passport or something. It's really easy and cheap. Yeah, but the passport, if they have a proper verification process, they've got to turn on your camera and they see the passport. There's systems in place

to avoid you cheating or avoid you faking your identity. The systems have flaws and people have done tests and posted these online and showing how they're able to bypass these systems. Very few of them are really, really good.

But the majority of it... And remember, this goes back to the comment I made yesterday. most of, so again, we got to keep this in mind, like in the crypto world, and I'll use Bitcoin as an example, after six confirmations, the exchange has no financial risk on the transaction. They now have that Bitcoin and they can allow you to do whatever they want on the account. In the financial world, the dollar and fiat world, banks have chargeback risk on credit cards. They have even on wires and checks as well, check your balance, and they have financial risk. So banks have very high fidelity systems for

getting people on board. And even they mess up a lot. And crypto exchanges, they don't really care. They don't want the best ID verification system. They want the worst one that's legally approved. So what you find is in a lot of countries, the vendors that these guys use are the worst possible vendors. But as long as they're kind of certified, they scrape through.

I mean, as a crypto exchange, why would you want a system that declines 95% of people, 90% of people coming in and creates a high amount of friction versus a system that basically only declines like 20%? You have no financial risk when people are depositing crypto into your exchange. And so these exchanges have played that game for the past decade or five or six years at least. We're talking a lot about the ID itself. But that's not the issue. That is not the challenge.

The challenge is what to do with it. Where are the apps? It's very easy to give somebody an ID, whether you do it via an iris scan or whatever. That's not the issue. The issue is what do I do with it? It's like having a passport without airports. If you had a

passport and there were no airports and no airplanes, it would sit in your drawer doing nothing. So that was my beef with WorldCoin. They released this token and tell me one thing that those 2 million users have received the token. Tell me, give me one thing they

can do with it. Nothing. You can't do anything with it. Actually, by the way, I'll quote him and I'll give him credit. Tali over at Solana, he basically said, look, there's two killer apps for identity on crypto right now.

One is anti-civil, right? You got to prove you're not a bot. And two is what Vinny's alluding to. Basically, some form of identity verification so you can actually do financial transactions. What about... Right, then everything's getting radiated now. You don't need to. I mean, the point of this is to not have identity. The point is the pseudo anonymity.

Pseudo anonymity is fine in some cases, but somebody eventually, when you're starting to do financial transactions, it's a legal thing, right? Yeah, but it can be reputation-based. I mean, it can be. In many cases... No, they're not. This wasn't a thing

20 years ago in the same way that it is now. Reputation doesn't work for governments and regulators. You can't say, oh, this guy with this.each wallet has got a great reputation. Sorry, I'm saying more for applying for credit or doing things online that were requiring your ID where they don't necessarily need it.

The system could be changed to be less reliant on ID, is all I'm saying. I'm always convinced that anyone trying to build a system without real-world identity tied to credit is going to get hosed. Absolutely. I mean, I might be the only one who's actually a licensed VASP here. I can tell you

hands down, and probably we're grandfathered into Mika, and the Europeans are ahead of everybody. They're okay with DeFi, but anonymity is not acceptable. Pseudonymity is, but somebody somewhere is one of these 8 billion people who are actually going to be known to make sure that they're actually not behaving poorly.

So is that solved by ZK zero-knowledge proofs to some degree? I mean, where basically the zero-knowledge proof is telling you that the person is in the ER, but not sharing that information fully. That's obviously sort of the promise or pitch for zero knowledge proof. You're applying for a credit card. It sends them that, yes, you do have the credit and your ID and information is there.

They just don't receive all of your information. Nope, that doesn't work because the regulators want you to keep records of the stuff in case that's right. So the way it can work, Vinny, because I agree with you, like, make no mistake, like, Uniswap and SushiSwap are basically dead man walking. Like, they're not going to be able to accept zero-knowledge proofs.

That's not true. That's not even close to true. Why are they dead man walking? Well, because Micah has come in. That's why you think... Micah and GFR, but let's get... It's a permissionless system. It's going to be there forever. You'll be able to use Uniswap B2 to the end of time. It's not death.

To Vinny's point, I'll get to that one in a sec. Regulators are not accepting zero-knowledge proofs. Somebody has to be the custodian that says, this is Bob, one of the 8 billion people, and in case he's a terrorist or laundering money, we can go find him. So somebody, either some VASP or a licensed entity,

will actually collect that information. Now, can they share that information to a Uniswap via ZK proof? No, they can't, which means they can't comply to MICA, and neither should they. I mean, MICA is a regulatory regime for the EU. The world's a big place, right? There needs to be global financial systems that everyone can use. You're talking specifically about compliance to a regulatory regime, the EU.

Basically, I'll give you a heads up. The Americans, the Japanese, the Singaporeans, they're all more or less coming to the same conclusion you're going to have some level of identity verification when you're doing financial transactions that's a that's a reality that's not really no anyone can deploy a smart contract and use it pseudonymously like that's never going to change now there's one problem which doesnudonymity though. Your audio artist, can you fix it

in any way? Maybe mic closer or something? Okay, can you hear me now? A bit better, yeah. Not sure if you can improve it further, but it's a bit better. Sorry, I think that's good. So basically there is a small problem with pseudonymity though and I'm pretty sure that's an error in the room that needs to be addressed.

So we can get a hash from the word coin, but what if the government actually has the same machine and generates exactly the same hash? So if they do coerce us to do this, for example, in an airport or someplace like that, then the pseudonymity pretty much goes out of the window. What do you think about this? It does. So one of the things Vitalik was talking about yesterday,

that you might be able to use the same machine and collect the same iris data as anyone else and generate the same hash and dot to people. But I think going back to your question, Mario, a while ago, is it a Web 3 or a web 2 thing it's it's world coins very much phrased as a web 2 system it's goal is to

allow you to interact with web 3 without revealing your personhood you don't need a passport you don't need any of these other documents and the point of it is Sybil resistance and being able to like operate in these systems without having any of these documents. So it's very much a Web3 thing.

And so we're trying to compare it to real-world ID. But Nick, what about the issue of selling your identity? Because it seems to be a lot easier with something like WorldCoin when compared to traditional ways of doing it. It's actually harder. So it's harder it's actually harder so it's it's harder to sell your id when you you can kyc a binance exchange account for example and then just sell your password to someone and that's why that's why you have to re-kyc every two years but how how would it work for world coin i don't understand how you could sell it if there's a

you know you what you give your private key to someone uh you can't even export your private key it's it's so you can easily trade it if you can export your private key so they've stopped that people are selling like whole android images so you like that you can take a box of android phones to where there's an orb operator dish them out and get people to sign up and then collect the phones back that's one way to do it and so people are just like farming these IDs by just paying people more than WorldCoin are giving them. So that's how most of it. As well.

That's fascinating. Like, imagine the world we live in and I love it. Like just FYI for everyone that I, anything futuristic I love. This one's just a bit tough for me to understand enough to have a real opinion, but just imagine you've got these.

So go ahead. They're only doing biometrics on registration and they're not actually doing it with verification, right? And that's because they went with the orb. If you actually do biometric verification when you log in, then you can actually track this. But again, they designed themselves into a corner. So I'm looking at the orb. Anyone listening, if you go on Google, and by the way, Ryan, if you're with us, you get to talk about Bybit, man. But before giving the mic to Ryan, if you look at the orb, it's just like a sphere, a silver sphere. And apparently, if you have 10,000 orbs in the world, that's enough to have everyone in the world use WorldCoin. If I got my number, you know that?

That's different from the trade, by the way. Yeah. It's restricted. to have everyone in the world use world coin if i got my money so yeah and yeah well no americans can touch the asset and so they're not even doing the united states but let's let's the united states eu etc people can't do it so it's not gonna be everyone in the world but you guys i think you guys are missing the point i think you guys are missing the point here. I think you guys are missing the point here. And again, bring it back to practicality. So in South Africa, we had a problem.

We had 50 million people in South Africa. We had 50 million mobile phone lines that no one knew who the owner of the mobile phone line was. And the government introduced a law that said retroactively the cell phone networks have to prove who owns every single number. And our company was the company that was tasked to do this. One of the companies that were tasked to do this. And we had to go out into all the rural areas. We had to go and find people and ask them to register their mobile phone. And in return, they'd get some kind of incentive for registering their mobile phone number. So imagine going into rural areas where people don't have any infrastructure, setting up a station,

and then scanning people's identity if they had an identity. We immediately realized that most of these people don't have identities and they don't have what we call a proof of address. So most of these, you're asking for proof of address, the guy says,

I live in a mud shack in the middle of here. I don't have a proof of address. So I think what, like when you talk about can 10, of these orbs actually work yeah we we had scanning machines and we used to send these these people out to churches and they used to meet at the churches with these scanning machines and they just used to scan and scan and scan people um as much as they can so you don't need a lot of these orbs to capture the whole world once. It's not such a big task. We did 50 million people and we did it in less than six months. And we were

a very, very, very small organizational team. So it's not like, this is not a huge task. And especially when you're not shocked on time and not sure on time. The second thing I want to say is everyone's applying this use case to the applications that we have today. And I think what you're missing is this use case is not built for the applications that we have today. For the applications that we have today,

pretty much we have enough identity verifying systems. Then that may not be perfect, but they're close enough. They're good enough, as Mario says, to work. This is built for a world where there are a lot of applications we haven't yet realized and we haven't yet discussed. And I think what they've realized is that you need some kind of digitally verifiable identity, which doesn't involve something that a deepfake can do on a person's behalf.

And I think that that's the point I'm missing here. Everybody's talking about, is this Web 2 or Web 3? It's about the future of both Web 2 and Web 3, regardless of what it is. We need some kind of form of global digital identity. Another problem that you guys aren't seeing is in countries that are corrupt, like a lot of the African countries,

it is very, very, very simple to buy fake identity documents. It's so easy in South Africa to get a fake identity document. It's one of the easiest things in the world. And it's real and it's on the government database. And if you want me to be Mario Norfolk with a couple of hundred dollars, I can be Mario Norfolk tomorrow. A couple of hundred dollars is a lot of money here. And so I think that this solves that. By getting a retina scan or an iris scan or whatever they're scanning, I think it creates a globally verifiable standard.

Now, it may not be perfect, but it's as close as we're going to get to a globally verifiable standard that everybody is on. Right now, this is a good point. So what are these apps? These ones that are yet to be seen? What if I knew

I'd be building them, right? I am building them. Go ahead, Nick, go ahead. So there's a few things here. It's like the ID necessity is removed with DeFi. So those people who don't have bank accounts,

who haven't been issued an identity by their government, can use Aave. Anyone can. And so it's what's better is credibly neutral systems. How do they get the crypto to use Aave? Well, OTC. I mean, like, there's still plenty of, like, on the ground. There's still plenty of on the ground, like, cash for crypto places,

especially in the global south. Admittedly, very hard at the moment. I mean, the on-ramps is where these kind of solutions live. But to the question of what these apps might look like, there's one of the big ones that is a use case is voting. It's actually in the WorldCoin white paper. They're talking about quadratic voting. So quadratic voting is a system where you get, let's say, a token,

and that allows you to vote on a system, and you vote quadratically, which means that the square of your votes... So let's say you vote five times on something. It costs you $25 or 25 credits, and you can break that if you can Sybil it. So this is a really interesting voting system. It's one that injects nuance into conversations

and allows a single identity to express multiple preferences. It's really exciting, and it's one of the things that I think Sam Altman knows is how you can align AIs. So he's very interested in it. But it breaks if you can Sybil it. So if you can set up 10 accounts, you can get 10 votes by voting for one each. But the single account, it'll cross you 100 so this is one of the key systems that does break and i i build these things so i build quadratic

voting systems and i'm trying to build systems that make it work in pseudonymous pseudonymous like context so it still works even if you don't take anyone's ID. And it's possible. Bitcoin essentially does proof of works for Sybil resistance. We burn 1% of the world's energy to create Sybil resistance on Bitcoin to solve the double spend problem. So it's very difficult to do pseudonymously. You need something like proof of work or proof of stake in Ethereum. And you can achieve it without taking people's identities through crypto economics by making it costly to Sybil. For example, if Elon here

just made it cost a penny to send a message, it would solve the bot problem because people spamming hundreds of millions of messages, it would cost them fortune. So you can do it with cost. And it's a trade-off

space and fortunately the one that world coin has taken is to to introduce like surveillance and that's what these systems are their surveillance tools um so yeah my sort of argument is we can achieve this civil resistance we can get to a civil resistance state it's not perfect we're not getting we're not going to get to one one person one vote but we can get to a civil resistance state. It's not perfect. We're not going to get to one person one vote, but we can get to a point where it still works and it's not a problem and you don't need to scan everyone's eyeballs.

Or do we... Sorry. I just want to leave you guys with one thing to maybe discuss while I'm gone. The DID, the standard's been developed over the past five, six years, and it's actually ready for primetime, and we're using it, and

many other companies are trying to use it, and I think it would be good just to discuss the implications of DIDs and how it can be used. I can launder money with DIDs. I can tell you that. I can create more. I can. I've actually done it, Vinny.

You look perfect for money laundering. I can. I've actually done it, Vinny. I did not expect the money laundering. Sorry, but I did. I did not expect that. Look, it goes back to a little bit what Nick was saying. You still have to get down to it's one user, one identity. Now, you can have multiple

wallets associated with that. You can have credentials associated with different wallets. But fundamentally, you're a one of eight billion. Now, you can have multiple wallets associated with that. You can have credentials associated with different wallets. Right? But fundamentally, you're a one of eight billion. Now, after that, you can get into credential sharing. I can prove I'm not a bot on Twitter. Or in the case of DIDs, I can actually share credentials. If you just use DIDs and don't have one of eight billion uniqueness, you can launder money.

Right? Here's my passport and my... There's no system that exists that you can't launder money with. There's always a way to break the system. I'm just pointing out the flaws in DID. DID without having the basic human identity underneath

fails. That's the point. I mean, so WorldCoin could plug into DIDs and say we've scattered it and we will write to this DID that this person is who they said they are. And there you go, right? So there's some privacy issues and stuff we should deal with, but this can be done.

Yeah, so just to put the DID down with Biddy on this one, they're super interesting and it allows you to create a little cryptographic signature that allows you to attest some part of your identity. So you can say, like, I've got a degree in physics, right? So I can attest my degree in physics, this DID, and then reveal it when I want to in the context that I want to. So it's on a blockchain, for example. We're doing credential sharing, too. in the context that I want to. So it's on a blockchain, for example. And I can find a message.

We're doing credential sharing too. We've looked at DIDs a lot. My point is, by itself, without having the unique human being underneath, it can be anybody. So going back to WorldCoin, I can go buy one of those wallets, right? Or five of those wallets,

and then start sharing credentials from that wallet, which isn't really an identity. Yeah, but you can build up identity over time. So if you're trying to build a pseudonymous identity, so I can exist as a PFP in a DAO, for example, and I can work in that DAO and submit work to that DAO and contribute to that DAO over a number of years and the identity that i've got has built up a social consensus of what it is right but who i am people know me as dr nick in the dao mine i may not be nick it might become someone completely different and i can still be trusted in that environment to the point where i can be given highly elevated votes treasury

rights and and all these other things. And actually, I don't need to dox myself completely in order to achieve that. 100%. I mean, what you'll see from us, by the way, like we're saying here's an anonymous, actually pseudonymous, proof that I'm not a bot on Twitter.

And you can add credentials to different things and you can do it very privately and almost anonymously. Again, where I think you and I disconnected, eventually you do something that is a regulated financial transaction and you actually have to show the regulators the bare minimum that's legally required. I think there's two things here, right? There's DeFi, which exists out in its own illegal space in the middle of nowhere.

And then there's VASPs, which are regulated entities that are agreeing to dox their users if required. FI is regulated. If you're not aware of that, I'm happy to tell you. No, no, no.

I work with regulators and lawyers every day. I know exactly what's happening. I'm saying that DeFi is unregulatable. You can deploy a smart contract into a money market that there's no way to stop. That innovation is not going to stop. It's unstoppable. It's a very interesting experience. I had the same conversation

with European regulators last summer. And I was like, guys, you can't enforce it, right? It's impossible. It's unethical. And they literally, in under a second, they went, we know exactly where, for example, all the Sushi people live. We know what their wallet

is that collects profits. And we'll literally turn it into kryptonite. And then three months later, look tornado cash where they literally the whole world i'm sorry the regulators looked at it and said like we don't care if there's applicable law right we're going to turn that thing into we can't stop it because it's autonomous set of contracts we don't care we're literally going to make it so that anybody who touches that is basically let me quickly jump in ran um before we forget and we've got your friends that are sponsoring the show today okay amazing so we do have a new sponsor of the show the sponsor is perpetuals exchange or it's a spot and perpetuals exchange and they have a competition called the

world series of trading campaign competition where they're giving away up to eight million dollars in prizes for a competition that starts on the 7th of august and ends on the 20th or the 6th of august and ends on the 27th of august now we have established a squad the squad is called the banter well room squad it's open to banter subscribers and anyone that signs up using the links here for Crypto Town Hall. We're going to establish what we think is going to be

the biggest team and hopefully the team wins. And when we do, obviously we will get you shared in the spoils. So it's a great competition. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to open a Discord and we're going to have live trading shows for people who want to participate in the competition. There is a link in the pinned tweet

if you want to join the competition. Again, if you want to join our team, you've got to sign up with that link specifically or with any Banter link for any Banter listeners that are listening. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It starts pretty soon.

We've got 12 days to go to sign up and get KYC'd. You don't have to scan your eyeballs to get KYC'd apparently. It's just the normal KYC. And, yeah, I think it's going to be super, super exciting. So guys, sign up. Let's build the biggest squad. So hold on. How does it work?

So I can see the links at the top, the Bybit links. So what you sign up there, you do KYC and you have a competition with $8 million in prizes. So what happens is it's teams, right? So we have the Banter Wellroom team. We've already got 450 people in our team. The Crypto Town Hall will obviously join the Banter team just so we can get the strengths and numbers. And what it does is it takes the P&L, I think, of your top 10 traders in the team. And then that's how we determine if a team wins. So the more people we have, the more chance we have that we have good traders in our team.

Get Scott to go into our team, man. You want to miss out on the prize? Get Scott to go in and trade. I'm in the wrong country. He's American. But Scott, I do have a very cool idea. I do have a very cool idea. If you tell me when to buy and when to sell, I can set up a pseudo

Scott account. Oh, we'll just use WorldCoin. I'll scan my orb. I'll send you my hash. You'll sign up for an exchange and we'll kill it. Does that work? that works that works but no on a serious note that is a very serious

competition I think that we've got a great community here at Crypto Town Hall we've been giving you crypto love and crypto wisdom so I really think that we've got some great traders here maybe this is a good competition for us to try and dominate. So there is a link in the tweet.

Go check it out. Sign up. Bybit are the new sponsor of Crypto Town Hall or one of the new sponsors of Crypto Town Hall. So I think that they're going to be with us for a long way and we're going to do a lot of competitions. And there are also sign-up bonuses. You can get a sign-up bonus of up to $30,000.

I mean, depending on what you do, you can get a sign-up bonus of up to $30,000. I mean, depending on what you do, you can get a sign-up bonus of up to $30,000, which is, I think, a relatively big sign-up bonus. So sign up, join the competition, let's have some fun, and let's win. Let's show them the power in numbers. Cool. Scott, do you want to go back to discussing your orb?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just that it's easy to get lost in the nuance of world coins specifically, but I think I really enjoyed what Rand said and it made me think about the greater implications of what this could be used for. I would just love for anyone to present some of those very specific use cases.

But Matt, you and I spoke, obviously, I think it was in October in Vegas, in person about this very thing, right? You guys were sort of pivoting a bit at Unstoppable into digital identification because you believe that was the killer sort of use case for crypto and blockchain moving forward. Yeah, well, I also just want to say that William makes a good point. Like, where are the apps today? And I think it's worth saying that there's not any right now. And one of the biggest reasons why they're not apps today

is because DeFi is continuing to be unregulated. You would think that maybe the number one place you'd see adoption of civil resistant type things or KYC, AML would be in finance on chain.

But the incumbent industry in crypto and DeFi doesn't have an incentive to implement those protocols because it's not really their customers or their business. But if we look out to the future, and William, like I'm projecting what I think people might use these for, I think that the interesting areas are around lending

and credit extension. Because if you have a reputation, a bunch of credentials, and one of those credentials happens to be that you are a real person, that can help people to lend and extend credit to each other. And we have not seen

less than fully collateralized credit on the blockchain. If you want to borrow money, most of the time you put up one Bitcoin, you can borrow up to half a Bitcoin's worth of lending. You can see that in Baker and these other protocols. But there's no place for you to go and say, put 20 bucks down and then borrow 100. Kind of like on a house, you put 20% down and you get 100. We don't really have that lending yet because there's not a lot of ways to ensure that the person's not somehow cheating the system or that they are a real person

and there's just not enough credentials but i think lending is a big area of opportunity for credentials on the blockchain and you know identity is a thing that you have a whole collection of credentials that will open your identity so lending is pretty big another area that i think is actually potentially could happen first is around marketing. There's a lot of companies who want to do marketing and they really hate Sybil attacks on marketing. And these Sybil attacks can make it so they can't run a marketing promotion. You see this in crypto directly with token airdrops

where they have people trying to farm L2s right now, you know, like Arbitrum or whatever. And this causes a problem because you get a bad token distribution. But marketing, even native crypto marketing, suffers from these types of issues. So I think that you could see if we can get more silver-resistant credentials,

and it's not just WorldCoin, like Vitalik was pointing out, it could also be social graph-type generated identities, or even government. I think one of the guys up here speaking is talking about how they actually do some sort of government verification on chain. So I think those are all places where we could see use cases, William. So William, I'd love

to hear you push back on those. You don't think any of those are going to work or why, but that's where I'm spending a lot of my thinking. We're seeing fair drops too. Sorry, go ahead. It's all kind of in the future. When I read their white paper, they say the first use is governance. Again, it's kind of

voting. That's not a very... I mean, it's one of them. Second one is internal currency, but for what? For actions, they say. And thirdly, for H2O payments. All of these are fine, but they are in the future.

So, Martin, I was wondering, are we going to talk about their token launch? Well, William, you're speaking specifically to the use cases of the token of WorldCoin, correct? Which I do agree when you read their terms and conditions, which you just so aptly decided to share. It says even in their own terms and conditions that they don't know what the use case of WorldCoin is yet. So effectively, you're getting this coin that allows you potentially governance to decide what the coin could do. And those are the use cases. So I get that that part is a little bit shaky at best.

Yeah. So why allow the token to be traded so early? With only 1% of supply. Because people, yes, I'll let you take it. They need a mechanism to be able to reward people for registering on the app. But hold on. But they could have given you the token and keeping it locked without credibility. How about the issue of FACI? Yeah.

It's an African in Africa that has very limited education. How do you explain to them that they're owning this token, but they can't really trade this token until they trade it? No, they want to know that they can take a token, exchange a token for money and use the money to buy bread. I've had that in our old shows when we first started this space. We used to give out $10,000 per space. And at one stage, we had a sponsor with locked tokens.

So then we sent mini SAFs or something to people that won the tokens. And then we started getting called scammers because they're like, hey, where are our tokens? They didn't understand the concept of a SAF. And I saw the same thing happening with WorldCoin, that people that call and get a scam because they're getting those tokens, but they can't sell them. There's no liquidity. So I think that it's a necessity to have that liquidity. And you just got to trust in the team and the vision that they're going to build. I mean, it depends on what side of the scam you want to be at. I mean, the price of the token is going to get bumped. Only 1% of the float or less is out there and 65% of it was given to market makers. I mean, this is crazy. How can they get away by doing that?

Those market makers were priced at $2. They're going to keep it up over $2 for three months. Otherwise, they're going to lose their $100 million. It's a scheme. It's a scheme right now. They should have waited. I mean, is the promise that the token is going to appreciate? Or is the promise that you're going to be able to do something useful?

They are promising UBI. Okay, so where is the UBI going to come from? William's asking the hard questions. I have some insight on this. So, yeah, you're right. Basically, they got people to literally queue up to this Orwellian orb in African villages for months and months and months. And they give them some tokens that don't have any value. And it just stopped working the the

orb operators which are these mlm style scheme that they've set up to distribute this token were getting death threats and they were being they promised these people that they were going to get some tokens it's the new bitcoin it's going to go up 10x it's going to go up 100x everyone's going to get rich and then the there was real implications for these orb operators that were promising people free money and that never got it and it so they pivoted to giving them usdt so they were giving them dollars and they got they they just iterated around the price they found out that they could get signups for three bucks so for months and months and months

they've been like getting people to orb themselves for three dollars but that's a huge burn like the this is a huge burn on the company and is slowing down their growth that's why they've launched the token they just literally can't afford to keep growing the signup base without that token having value so that they've gone for it without... Yeah, and to your point, William, about the float, the token economics of WorldCoin are the worst I've ever seen. It's unbelievable. You're right to say

how can they get away with it? They've copied SBF's token economics, 1% float, it's got 30 billion, it's valued at more than, there was a point yesterday when it was valued more than OpenAI. It sounds to me

it sounds like FDB yesterday was at 28 billion at one point, and it's funny you brought up SBF, he invested at 1 billion FDB. Yeah, and he invented that token economics scam. I mean, that's a label of 2016 and 2017.

But back to the first point you raised, I think it's the wrong expectation to say that this token is going to appreciate for users so early. It's not the right way to sell it. It should be the use case.

If they want to make this the coin for the world, the one that equalizes all the rights for everybody, but what am I going to do with it? Again, if it's a password that's digital, what am I going to do with it? I mean, if you look at what they want to do, they even want to integrate account abstraction, which is something I'm worried about as well

because basically what account abstraction does is that you give up your private keys to somebody like WorldCoints or, and they do like automated payments on your behalf, but also account recovery. And that's the opposite of why we're in crypto is to give away our keys. We want to have our keys. We want to be your own bank. And, you know, I guess I could point a question at Rand because he was talking yesterday on his show about universal basic income, which is a point that William brought up as a use case for WorldCoin. I mean, why are we in crypto if we're edging towards that direction

with WorldCoin of universal basic income and account abstraction? I mean, it sounds like pretty much the opposite of why we're here. It's not UBI either. UBI is a consistent basic payment for cost of living. This is a one-time airdrop. They're using UBI in the context where it shouldn't be. It's an airdrop. It was an incentive. This is a sign-up incentive.

Exactly. It's an airdrop. They're going to take your identity, basically, and give you possible universal basic income. Is that something you're a fan of, Brad? Because I know that's something you were talking about on your show yesterday. Look, I am a fan of it. I've become much more of a fan of it in an AI-enabled world

where the discussion as to whether AI is going to be a net creator or a net destroyer of jobs is not as black and white as people think. I know that yesterday I asked the question, and Mario and Scott both said it will be a net creator or a net destroyer of jobs is not as black and white as people think. I know that yesterday I asked the question and Mario and Scott both said it will be a net creator. But when someone like Elon, who I think has a lot of foresight when it comes to AI, and someone like Bill Gates, who also has it, and both of them are of the opinion that they're not sure yet whether it's a net destroyer or net creator of jobs. I know naturally we all want to say that this revolution is going to be like every other revolution and new jobs are going to be created, but the smartest people in the world at the forefront of these technologies are both saying that they're not sure if it's

going to be a net creator or a net destroyer of jobs. Now, when you get to that section and you get bots generating the income, and then as a result, you get a whole lot of a whole lot more unemployed people then you have to be a fan of of ubi you have to then say if bots are starting to generate the income and humans need a basic income to survive maybe the solution is that you need to have ubi so you know in today's world i'm a fan but i'm, but I'm not like a screaming crazy fan about it. Like, yeah, I think UBI is a great idea in today's world. But I think when you introduce the dynamic of AI, and if we do get to the flip side of it,

where all of a sudden a lot more humans become redundant, we then have to have some kind of UBI. You have to. There's just no other way to keep to keep humans uh uh surviving or alive or financially alive and so in that case i'm very much a big fan of ubi the only way that happens though is if it gets given to a government so governments are the only people who've got the money printer so they're the ones who can really do ubi like even not at all even if you print not at all yeah i think you can do either outside of the

of the governance sure on context sure sure let me let me let me make it very simple what if what if um what if we determine that there is a new bot that replaces an or a new set of of ai that replaces an entire industry. And I'm just giving you a crazy example, but that industry decides that they are going to allocate 10% of the revenue generated by the AI category to UBI, and that is paid directly to WorldCoin holders in the form of buying WorldCoin on the open market

and airdropping it to people in the form of a UBI. I'm just giving you a crazy example. You don't need government intervention in that at all. Let me give you another example. Assuming that the tobacco industry decided that... No, let's actually take it one step closer to home. The aspartame industry, because now they've...

Aspartame. Aspartame, whatever you call it. Aspartame, yeah. Aspartame, I don't know what industry. Aspartame Aspartame I don't know what industry yeah Aspartame decided that what they're going to do is they're going to take 10 cents in every

dollar that they make and they're going to airdrop it to UBI because of the damage that they're doing to the world then you don't need government intervention for that. You can just, the industry, the bot, the AI narrative, the vertical, can airdrop

money to people based on certain criteria. There's zero need for government intervention. Why would they do that? What is the incentive? Yeah, what's the... Why would they do it? Maybe a simpler way yeah what's it yeah why would they do it i would maybe a simpler way to think about it is more like a dividend um and so you can imagine something

like a reputation network i'm not saying world coin's going to do this but you know a reputation network like world coin um assuming they figure out a way to monetize they could just they could pay a dividend out to people maybe that's a better way to think about it. Because if you think about it, if you had a public network that everyone was a member of and it made money and then it paid dividends out to everyone who was a shareholder, essentially, then that's kind of like UBI. So that's how I've heard non-governmental UBI discussed.

It's theoretical. If a private company does it, they're doing it for a reason. If they're paying loads of people to live, why are they doing it? It'll be for their own agenda. It'll be for their own gain. I think, guys, I think we're in a narrative. We're in a mind space and a narrative of private companies.

We're in a mindset and narrative of borders. And I think that that maybe changes when AI becomes, you know, AI doesn't see borders and doesn't see these government lines that that we draw it lives in ai lives effectively in a metaverse you know and i use the word it's it's created by someone though isn't it so like sam albin who's creating gpt he's doing it for a reason to make money until it's until it starts to be created by itself until until it starts to, until a bot creates another bot. Yeah.

Like, when we get to AGI, I think that, like, we can easily say, like, there's an AGI that has a DAO that basically goes off earning money all over the world, puts it into the DAO, gives it to world coin holders. That's basically sci-fi at this point. Well, I don't think it's

sci-fi, and also I don't think that anyone here on this panel actually has enough foresight, enough knowledge as to where this AI is going, because I don't think any of us are AI experts. And I think we've reached out to Sam Altman to potentially join us later this week so that he can give us his version of why it's needed.

And, you know, again, like, when I, you know, when you hear their their vision when they and they're as plugged into to to what's going on then it changes your perspective and i've heard bits and pieces of it and that's why i'm saying i think we're all thinking in today's paradigm it's banking systems it's defy it is government governments it is um uh it's dividends it doesn't work like i think we're moving to a world where all of that becomes invalidated

and we move we move to a completely different paradigm and I gave you one example one example is if if a lot of people lose their jobs

and bots start to or AI bots start to generate revenue there's going to have to be some kind of UBI and it's going to have to be paid out by the bots

it's a form of dividend I kind of agree with that yeah so UBI's the end I'm not sure about that to be paid out by the budget. It's a four-hour dividend. I kind of agree with that. Yeah, so UBS. I'm not sure about that, to be honest. I listened to Sam and Alex, I think his name, on another podcast from Bankless, and they tried to have them explain this.

It wasn't very clear where they were going with the application. Now, some of it could be that they are waiting for developers to go and take this and develop apps on top of WorldCoin, which is a possibility. But I don't know. I mean, don't expect too much. When they invented the internet, when they invented the internet,

they had no idea that we would be using books, that we would be able to catalog, order anything we wanted, and it'd get delivered to us within 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour. You know, we are at the invention of the internet, and you're asking, why does this thing have no use cases? Let's give it time to develop. We're at the first step. Is this the first step? Okay, but have they opened it up? Can anybody

develop? It's relatively closed source. It has a few open source elements, but it's not like a hardware wallet that you can deconstruct and build. It's still relatively closed. It depends on them. No one's going to manufacture the orbs but them.

So they can open both them. You have to wait for them to participate. And there could be backdoors to the orbs. And already account abstraction is a huge red flag. Like, why are we in crypto if you want to give away your private keys? It just doesn't make sense. Exactly right. And that's the ethical issue. Let's look at the ethical issue

that we're incentivizing people with tokens, of the word coin tokens, and while we all in crypto know that the tokens are volatile, it can lose money or it can lose value or increase in value,

people are basically incentivized by the dollar value of it because they're not really looking to invest just yet i'm speaking about the third world country citizens basically so this is also kind of unethical if you ask why is it unethical i don't get it you're incentivizing people to to use the service it for me just sounds like a very smart strategy to get adoption i don't see if it doesn't if the price if the price doesn't make

sense then then they wouldn't be not be able to acquire customers and they've got a problem so i think it's not unethical i think it could end up being flawed because it's too dependent on the price which is something about coins they should skip bitcoin and stable coins but they can't print those they have two words like that the people that receive these tokens aren't really aware how it works. Typically, they don't deal with such a technology. And I'm just worried that maybe they're not... So you think they listed the token too soon? I think they're in a tricky position.

Because on one side, if they're not listing the token, they're being called a scam and that could cause issues for adoption. The other side, if they list the token too soon then you've got a new problem to worry about which is the token price and Is it list the token in the scammiest way possible? It's the wrong mindset

It's the wrong mindset to think that the token needs time before it can be traded That's got to be the future. I can tell you that, especially in this universe. That's so way. You know, this is a token. It has to be objectified before it can be traded.

I've got to push back here, because the way you used to build a business is you would build it and they would come, so you would make something, and this is what William's saying, like build the product first and then they'll come. That's how you used to do it. That's one way of doing it.

But what we're seeing with token economies is sometimes you get everybody together and then they'll come. That's how you used to do it. That's one way of doing it. But what we're seeing with token economies is sometimes you get everybody together and then they build it. And I'm not saying it's going to work, but I'm saying that's the strategy WorldCoin is trying to do. You hit the nail on the head. You hit the nail on the head. You said when we build a business, we build it and it will come.

But we're not building a business. We're building an infrastructure so businesses could be built on. It's like when they built the internet. They said, let's build the internet and then people will come. They didn't say, let's build the businesses on the internet and therefore we need an internet. We are building a platform here.

We are building rails here. We're not building a business. We're building rails that other businesses can use to solve problems that we can't solve with existing infrastructure. Yeah, but you don't need the token to be traded publicly to prove that point. Otherwise, but... What's the issue with the token being traded publicly?

Let me give you a very simple example. Let me give you a very simple example of how this works. Right now, I believe in WorldCoin. I believe that a fair cost of acquisition to WorldCoin is $50. Let's just say for argument's sake and i'm willing to fund 50 for every customer that they get because i believe so they give people x amount worth of tokens and there is a market maker or a buyer that is willing to buy these tokens for 50 actual usd and pay it to the customers for signing up and it's a great sign

up bonus and they're using their own token they're doing it fairly and ethically and they're allowing actual USD and pay it to the customers for signing up. And it's a great signup bonus. And they're using their own token to do it. They're doing it fairly and ethically. And they're allowing people who believe in the venture to fund this. And if you don't, if you don't believe in the venture, don't buy the token. And if you don't buy the token,

you're not going to find, you're not going to find their acquisition strategy. And if you do, you are going to find the acquisition strategy. It's not a Ponzi. It's completely, everything is completely transparent. And the only people that can buy world tokens right now for US dollars are what I call sophisticated investors.

When I say sophisticated investor, I don't mean an accredited investor like in the United States. I mean, not people that are in rural areas, which is the people that are actually signing up. It's people like you and I, who are a little bit smarter. I'm confused. I'm confused. I want to wrap up the show, but I'll give Gary the mic first,

and then I'll tell you, Ryan, why I'm confused based on what you just said. Gary, I know you've been waiting for a while, but see you again, man. The mic is yours. Yeah, much pleasure. Thank you guys and gals and everyone very much. This is a great conversation and a much needed one.

Everyone's bringing up a lot of good points from the Web 2 AML KYC to what we're doing in a quote unquote Web 3, including new technologies like account abstraction, which all new technology

has potential benefits and potential, you know, unintended consequences. And it's important that we have these discussions and look at all of it. I think what it comes down to and potential unintended consequences. And it's important that we have these discussions and look at all of it. I think what it comes down to for both Web 2 and Web 3 is about the transparency.

It's about with the Web 2 or with WorldCoin or with this project or that project, Web 2 or Web 3, how much transparency is there? How much information is being shared with everybody? And not just how much information is being shared, but also people need to be paying attention. If it's open source and transparent, but no one's paying attention, then this might as well be closed source. And so, you know, we have to be looking at all of these technologies, how the rails are. And because DID was mentioned a couple of times, digital identity, or in the case of Web3, decentralized digital

identity, we need to be looking at these open source protocols, these open source technologies that are transparent that anybody can integrate, such as the Ethereum name service, ENS.ETH, which is cross-blockchain compatible, blockchain agnostic, and can be integrated without asking permission, where people can have access to their identity, which cannot be taken away, where people can receive crypto, they can receive NFTs without asking permission, they can have their websites without asking for permission. And protocols like ENS have the network effect. They don't do paid

sponsorships and anybody can just... Gary, I've never had you on stage without you mentioning ENS. I don't know. You've got to be the number one man. I don't know how many domains they gave you, but they owe you. I remember since the first day you joined me last year till now.'re you're as loyal as they get respect um it's good to see

you man protocol and anybody can participate it's not it's not restricted or gated by you know a centralized company and so that's what's beautiful about web3 hope everybody does secure you know learns about crypto learns about nfts hope everyone does secure their Web3 name, so you can't be shut off and your name can't be taken away from you and you can continue participating like we all want to in this room. I appreciate it, man. And Ranj, let me tell you why I'm confused.

Okay. Tell me, Mario. Before I do so, stop for an ad break, everyone. If you want to come on the show as a sponsor, as we heard by a bit earlier, or if you want to join our upcoming Shark Tank show, where Ran will not have a hot mic, I promise you the Shark Tank show,

he'll never have a hot mic. It's only in spaces that he does. If you want to join, just hit us up. The pinned tweet, I removed them for the sponsor. Just DM me and Ran, because Scott doesn't have DMs. DM me and Ran. Usually we have a pinned tweet with an email, but I removed him, so we promote Bybit. So that's that. And the second thing is that ugly

logo, the red one on stage, that's the Crypto Town Hall. We're going to start hosting from that account soon. So make sure you follow that account so you get notified that the account's sending you the love hearts. So the red circle. Rand, you kind of started making a weird argument two days ago. It's like crypto does not have any real use cases. But then here you are making an argument on how WorldCoin is a great use case. I'll add to it. So, it's already got 1,400,000 users. Can you still make that argument that crypto does not really yet have any real use cases?

So Mario, I'm going to take you back to our discussion two days ago when we spoke about this. I said, up until now, crypto has very limited use cases. The first use case is a store of value. The second use case is the transfer of money from one place to another very, very quickly. And the third use case is speculation because of the nature of the fact that they're transferring money. And I said to you, the reason why I was so excited is because I think that WorldCoin actually brings in potentially a new use case for crypto. And that's one of the things that actually excites me is that we may actually see a real mass market use case for crypto emerge out of this WorldCoin thing. Now, I think it is grossly, grossly, grossly overvalued. And my frame of reference for overvaluing,

I broke it down on my show today, was I said, look, Elon paid $44 billion for Twitter. Twitter has a massive, massive... Elon and Sam Altman have very similar objectives. Elon wants to create X. He wants to use Twitter as the distribution mechanism for X. And he wants to build what he was quoted as saying something like half of the world's financial system or something. Sam Altman wants to do exactly the same thing. He's starting off

with identity, but then he wants to build a global inclusive network of financial inclusion or whatever he wanted. And if you read between the lines here, they're both going after the same pipe. Elon bought Twitter for $44 billion. We know how many users it has. We know how much traction it has. I don't think we need to go into that. And WorldCoin is trading at a fully diluted valuation of $21 billion, which is half that of Twitter.

Now, you ask me, that is absolutely ridiculous. That's crazy. It is a manipulated price because there is only 1% of the tokens in circulation and there's very, very, very strong market makers who are... We know the word market maker

in crypto actually means price manipulator. So you can say, yeah, market maker, what you are is you're a price manipulator on behalf of the token. No.

I was short world token. The reason why was short World Token. The reason why I covered my short is because I'm just too scared of the market makers with only 1% of the tokens in circulation. Such an illiquid supply, you can't compete with market makers that have 90% of the supply in their armor,

in their arsenal, which is why I decided to close my short. But net, net, I think that the token itself is grossly, grossly, grossly overvalued. Number one, it is the fourth most valuable token by market cap. It's Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin, and then WorldCoin.

Now, I don't think that a project at this early stage, no matter how much promise it shows, can be valued at what those projects are valued at. Also, as I said, the token is valued at half of what Elon bought Twitter for. And we know that Elon slightly overpaid for Twitter. I don't think it's a big secret that Elon slightly overpaid for Twitter. So let's say Twitter was worth $35 billion, not $44 billion when Elon bought it or whatever the number is. You're talking about WorldCoin already having 60% or 75% of the valuation of Twitter. And that for me is a bullshit valuation.

So I think it's grossly overvalued. I think it's grossly overvalued. I do think it's going to have amazing, amazing use cases. I think it's an amazing experiment. I think it solves an amazing, amazing real world problem in a very practical way. But that said, I'm not willing to pay $23.5 billion fully diluted valuation for it. That's absolutely ridiculous. Quickly, Rand, just to add to that, it's actually what I wrote a newsletter about this morning, but it's not just X and WorldCoin.

I mean, this is effectively Apple's future mandate as well. And they're the biggest player here with Apple Pay. They've also said that they want to build an inclusive financial system for the entire world. So this kind of is the battle for the future. That's A. And then B is, once again, Mario, to answer your casino question, the token itself is a part of the casino.

The platform or the technology or whatever is being built, that could be a future use case for blockchain. But in my opinion, yes, it needs a token to incentivize people, but it does not need a token that's valued at 28 billion FDV to operate. So once again, you're back to why does this necessarily need a token? It was so they could print a bunch of money and incentivize people. And if that's what we're accepting, that's fine. But this is not saying there's a use case for the cryptocurrency. It's saying another use case potentially for blockchain technology.

Cool. All right, guys. I think it's a good place to wrap it. From my end, I'm not going to talk about the market cap or the price of the coin. I think the use case is really exciting for me. It makes a lot of sense. But I'll leave the valuations or the price of the coin. I think the use case is really exciting for me. It makes a lot of sense. But I'll leave the valuations for the analysts.

Guys, we'll see you again tomorrow morning. Appreciate you all. And yep, have a good day. Bye.