Sam Altman is, by all accounts, a smart individual with a lot of startup and startup evaluation experience, and presumably the resources to pursue whatever idea he wants. Though Worldcoin initially strikes me as being poorly thought out, given Altman's reputation, I've been trying to see the point of Worldcoin. I find myself very confused.<p>Setting aside the fact that the Orb idea will strike many people as creepy...<p>> The internet is powerful because of large networks. Email, social apps, and marketplaces are examples of such networks. The more participants they have, the more powerful they become. For the first time, cryptocurrencies make it possible to distribute ownership and control of those networks to their users, rather than a single entity.<p>>If a cryptocurrency were adopted at scale, it would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make applications possible that are now unimaginable.<p>Any sort of specifics would be great. The website says little about <i>why</i> it is important to get a new cryptocurrency in the hands of every person on earth. It sort of sounds like they want it to be used for UBI disbursement? Even if inflation, cost of living, etc. is radically different and changing at different rates in every sub-municipal area?<p>I tried digging a little deeper... There are more technological and not ontological/existential details provided here: <a href="https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works</a>. Given that the founders do not make explicit their motivation, they seem to expect that people will go through the Orb procedure based on vague crypto promises?<p>Solving the "proof of personhood" problem for digital crypto wallets is important because... it will allow literally everyone to vote on how to run an email service? Own a fractionalized share of an NFT? And if everyone has a Worldcoin, then by definition, it isn't scarce.<p>I'm left to conclude that either the founders all know something that is opaque to the rest of us in terms of what problem they are actually intending to solve (with the eyeball thing being just one part of the solution)... Or they are in for being on the receiving end of a surprising number of wicked coordination problems which aren't technological in nature.