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Alexander Blania wants to verify people with Worldcoin
By Wolfram Weimer
08/01/2023 09:41 am
German Max Planck student Alex Blania is developing revolutionary technology for a new world currency with ChatGPT founder Sam Altman. Millions of eye scans are to become the ultimate identity card. Some are excited, others horrified.
Not Palo Alto or Houston, not San Francisco or New York or at least Frankfurt. The new world currency “Worldcoin” comes from Erlangen an der Regnitz. There is a lot of excitement in the AI and fintech scene, as Worldcoin is currently considered the “hottest innovation of the year”. When artificial intelligence, masses of data and crypto money combine, many people prick up their ears. And this time, a 29-year-old student from Franconia is behind the supposed tech revolution.
Alexander Blania has teamed up with AI superstar and chat GPT creator Sam Altman to create something bizarre that looks like it was straight out of a movie. It looks like Hollywood alliens lost a steel ball with an eye on Earth. The thing is called “Orb” and is said to be able to scan people’s eyes like no other device before. The orbs – the first examples are now available in 30 major cities (a shopping center in Berlin and a pedestrian zone in Munich have been selected in Germany) – collect biometric data from volunteers, in particular the iris scan, and use them to create digital identities. Everyone scanned gets a personal identification code, which is said to be forgery-proof on a decentralized blockchain.
Orbs are currently considered a new cult object in the tech scene. Videos of long queues of people in front of orbs-scanning stations are circulating on the Internet. In the near future, Blania wants to produce 50,000 of these devices per year, which could bring the number of users into the billions. Investors have now given the founders a three-digit million sum to flood the world with orbs.
In the concept of the developers from Erlangen, the orbs enable two important things. On the one hand, they create a unique digital identity for potentially millions of people. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have already had their eyes scanned and a digital passport issued. Worldcoin could thus become a huge identification platform for all kinds of digital businesses. If you have an orbs scan, you may no longer need identification checks or passwords for transactions on the Internet. In the age of autonomous AI software, it will also be possible to distinguish between who is really a human and who is just a bot. Blania and Altman want to create a so-called “World ID”, the ultimate proof of identity – like an unforgeable passport in the digital age.
Cryptocurrency as world happiness
Blania and Altman not only designed and developed the second step, it is already a reality: Worldcoin as a cryptocurrency. Worldcoins are currently created by the fact that everyone who is scanned receives 25 Worldcoins as a welcome gift, which can now be traded freely. In the end, everyone should even get something for free. As Blania puts it, “We initially wanted to create a digital currency and give everyone a piece of it. But to do that, we needed a way to prevent criminals from abusing the system. Our solution is the Orb, which collects biometric data.”
The whole setup, from the eye ball that suddenly encourages millions of people to scan their irises everywhere in supermarkets, to the issuing of a digital “human” passport (the identity is actually called “Proof of Humanity”) to the digital cryptocurrency as a world blessing, works straight out of a dark science fiction movie. But Worldcoin is not only well financed, it also finds its audience surprisingly quickly.
Data protectionists are appalled that millions of intimate data from retina scans are collected for a few crypto dollars without knowing exactly what is happening with it, who really has data sovereignty and how to protect it from hackers. Will Worldcoin possibly resell the data? Worldcoin assures that it is not a data company and that the Iris code is not linked to personal data.
But the high pitched tone of the founders, that they want to secure democracy in the digital age, that they want to create freedom from artificial identities for humanity, and even grant them a basic digital income, raises doubts. The company’s name “Tools for Humanity” reflects the high moral tone of the founders. They want to “guarantee the existence of humanity” in a world of artificial intelligence. “The goal is simple: a global finance and identity network based on proof of personality,” Altman wrote on Twitter. This is particularly important in the age of AI.
“Verified Human”
But even in the early stages of the company, critical reports accumulated that tens of thousands of retina scans had been collected under dubious circumstances in poor countries in Africa and Asia and that people had been promised hope for a basic digital income. A corresponding report by the MIT Technology Review on exploitative practices and an emerging black market in identities is causing a stir in the crypto industry. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin warns in a blog post: “The Orb is a hardware device and we have no way of verifying that it is designed correctly and has no backdoors. Even if the software layer is perfect and fully decentralized, the WorldCoin Foundation still has the ability to build a backdoor into the system that would allow it to create as many fake human identities as it wants.”
Blania and Altman argue that in the AI age, where machines will soon influence or even create all communicative reality, there is a need for people to identify themselves as real people. If you have your iris scanned on one of the Worldcoin orbs, you will actually already get an advertising sticker with the inscription “verified person”. The crypto trade medium Cointelegraph comments on this strange process as follows: “The perfidious thing about it is that Worldcoin was founded to eliminate those externalities that the successful sister company OpenAI – the operator of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT – created in the first place. So one hand creates a new problem in the first place so that the other can solve it.” Blania’s Worldcoin would then be something like the pest control robot from Altman’s ChatGPT. The Bavarian has a lot of experience with something like that. Years ago he won second prize at the youth forscht competition Bavaria with an unusual device: a bark beetle surveillance robot.