No, You Shouldn’t Trade Your Eyeballs For Crypto

<p><em>This piece first appeared on my newsletter,&nbsp;</em><a href="https://trendmill.substack.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>Trend Mill</em></a><em>. You can&nbsp;</em><a href="https://trendmill.substack.com/subscribe" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>subscribe for free</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p>The crypto industry is rife with scandal, scams, rug pulls, shady characters and money-grabbing celebrities. The technology became the fundamental building block for world-changing concepts like NFTs and Web3 and other less-savory practices like helping organized crime move money and pay for illegal activities. Even the cases where it did something &ldquo;well&rdquo; have proven tainted &mdash; just look at golden boy Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, or Binance, which is now&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/22be8c3d-8bae-4edf-ac3f-915794662f2c" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">under investigation</a>&nbsp;for alleged illegal practices, including fraud.</p> <p>Everything remotely crypto-connected should be met with skepticism. Every new character who enters the picture claiming to &ldquo;change the world&rdquo; should be met with distrust until proven otherwise. None more so than the newest project on the scene, one that wants to scan your eyeballs to prove your &ldquo;humanness&rdquo; in return for crypto.</p> <p><em>What could go wrong?</em></p> <p>Worldcoin is a project co-founded by Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The ambitions are lofty &mdash; how else will you suck up that sweet VC money, of which Worldcoin has already&nbsp;<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/sam-altmans-crypto-project-worldcoin-got-more-coin-in-latest-115m-raise/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">raised</a>&nbsp;$115 million &mdash; with the moonshot being to &ldquo;enable global democratic processes&rdquo; and eventually fund a universal basic income. The pitch includes the whole Buzzword Bingo card. The first line of the Whitepaper&nbsp;<a href="https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">reads</a>, &ldquo;Worldcoin was founded with the mission of creating a globally-inclusive identity and financial network, owned by the majority of humanity.&rdquo; Across the homepage, all the others are present; community, ownership and blockchain protocol.&nbsp;<em>Check, check, check.</em></p> <p><a href="https://stephenmoore.medium.com/trading-eyeballs-for-crypto-da3ef88de89a"><strong>Visit Now</strong></a></p>