Worldcoin’s Sam Altman & Alex Blania on Crypto's Most Ambitious Project

the immediate reaction is like it freaks you out and you really need to understand the engineering behind it to understand that I think none of these concerns are actually grounded welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is David Hoffman here without my co-host Ryan trout Adams but we are here to help you become more bankless today on the show we have two

of the world coin Founders Alex bolania and Sam Altman and we are exploring the world coin Story one of the more ambitious projects in the crypto space and here's what you're going to learn in this episode first what is the idea behind World coin what does it want to do for the world second what is actually inside of an orb is it safe to put your eye into third world coin's answer to how it's providing privacy to those who get their Iris scanned and why some people are still skeptical about it fourth what is World coins identity

platform and what can it do for Sam Altman's other company open Ai and the incoming AI enabled internet that Humanity appears to just be Waltzing into fifth how worldcoin plans to become a permissionless protocol including the manufacture entering and operating of the orbs themselves and sixth lastly we had to ask him what Sam Altman thinks of the AI alignment problem we happened to be recording this podcast on Mother's Day which means Ryan is in his human format and why he is not here for this episode but we are still going to record a debrief episode for the bankless

citizens out there for all the premium subscribers so I will fill him in on all my thoughts about this episode and we'll talk a little bit more about the incoming AI Revolution and the ways that the crypto story is a part of that if you want that extra debrief episode that is exclusively for bankless Citizens for people who subscribe to the premium RSS feed if you would like that debrief episode there is a link in the show notes so you can subscribe to bank list get that premium RSS feed where we post all of our extra bonus content along with all the other perks that you get for being a part of the bankless nation like I said in the beginning worldcoin

is one of the most ambitious projects in this space there's a coin there's a layer two there's an identity protocol there's a mobile app and of course there's this physical piece of Hardware that's because infamously iconic to worldcoin that silver orb it's World coin's philosophy that the best way to produce unique verifiable humanness is human Biometrics that map to our unique DNA this is the most robust way to achieve civil resistance and that's why worldcoin manifests in the physical

world with this orb thing biometric scanners are hardware and that physical nature of the orb that you place your eye into to get scanned has these strong dystopian connotations that have triggered so many people we of course talk about this Dynamic directly with the world coin Founders Alex and Sam how they are dealing with this branding that worldcoin has received and how that's impacted the company along the way but nonetheless the worldcoin project does seem to be growing in momentum and it was a pleasure having Alex and Sam on the podcast today I hope you enjoy this

episode bankless Nation but before we get there a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible especially Kraken our preferred exchange for 2023. if you do not have an account with Kraken perhaps consider clicking the link in the show notes to get started today Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade on Kraken Pro you'll have access to Advanced charting tools real-time Market data and lightning fast trade execution all inside their spiffy new modular interface kraken's new

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languages arbitrim empowers you to explore and build without compromise visit arboretum.io where you can join the community dive into the developer docs Bridger assets and start building your first app on Arboretum Bangles Nation I would like to introduce you to the co-founders of worldcoin Alex blania and Sam Altman Sam Alex welcome to bankless thanks for having us thanks for having us David this is gonna be cool yeah I'm really excited for the for this conversation because uh the world coin story arc uh is an interesting one as it relates to both the crypto world and also especially now with the surgeons of

and relevancy of AI uh in in mainstream society and so I think that the timing of this episode I think is perfect and Sam I think this story uh starts with you um can you talk about just like the Inception of the idea of world coin where it came from uh and what the aha moment about why we need something like World coin in the in the future I I started thinking initially that it would be quite powerful if you could have the biggest Network like the biggest financial and identity Network imaginable if you could have something

truly Global and sort of had no good ideas about how to do that uh the first version we started talking about this was something like well what if we scan the palm of everybody on Earth um or what if we did all these you know like what if a lot of complicated videos about a verify identity but the reason I was excited about it is as the world sort of head toward heads towards powerful AI systems I thought that if we could do something to eventually redistribute wealth through some sort of global Ubi at scale or maybe even access to these systems

which would be the most important component of wealth someday and also be able to verify unique humanness uh with a different lens on how to preserve privacy that would be more important as sort of AI Advanced so I started thinking about this years ago um mostly driven by my work on open AI but also just a belief that Ubi was a cool thing to study anyway and uh egg again ideas were like deeply imperfect but I knew something in the space I I wanted to explore

um met first Max and then Alex and I thought Alex was super awesome and I'll let Alex talk about how the ideas evolved since then because that part is really all credit to Alex um but that was how it started yeah so it sounds like the early motivation for for World coin came from the uh idea that we could tackle two birds with one stone one being Ubi and one being identity correct and that was really like the the Elegance of the solution before there was actually a solution known you kind of saw that you could do the same thing with these two uh solving

these two problems at the same time correct yeah I mean to zoom out even more it was like solve the problem of verified humanness and that and and that was really like that's what you need for a lot of other things like identity like doing the global Ubi um you know if there's if there's a non-fraudulent solution to that that also is privacy preserving that that that's kind of the goal and maybe we could talk about uh where Alex and Sam met uh and and so when did this uh what year was perhaps the idea of world coin accepted and then when

does uh when does Alex come into the story we've really started working in it in January 2020 uh so I was I think seven Max started working on it already six months before but then uh what kind of Max had a full-time job so I'm obviously as well so uh when when I joined we we brought the founding team and then really started working on it right before right before real coin I was in in physics and theoretical physics and kind of how you use deep learning to predict AI systems so um not not too close to crypto and

basically I was I literally got an email from Max uh explaining with a white paper of worldcoin back then come to the super early ideas as Sam just said like a lot of high level important ideas uh where this could go and and why it would matter and I drove to San Francisco had a couple interviews with Max uh then one with Sam uh that we spent more time together and then uh later became co-founder that's kind of the quick story is there anything I'm missing sir that sounds right so Alex

where were you uh in this phase of your of your life and what was your skill set that made this project relevant for you well Max actually reached out to me uh as a software engineer so right before real coin I was I was quite deep into radical physics um and I had a company before in high school that did vertical farming actually did reasonably well but um the five years before Rockland was pretty much just physics and I mean obviously I read about Bitcoin

super early on I was early in that phase of the whole of the whole space but I could not say that it was deep in crypto at all before so it was really just Max reached out I think he reached out to many people at this point um to start building this and then we just we explored the whole Space we took these early ideas that Sam mentioned we went much deeper into them and then later I became a CEO and we just took it from there

was it obvious that world coin was a crypto project from from day one I don't think so yeah I think so yeah and okay and so you had the aspirations we needed verifiable human identity uh you could also attach some some Ubi to that but Sam you talked about the prospects of you can scan a palm but that's not what where World coin has landed it's ended and landed on the iris can you talk about that choice and uh and then we can start to dive into the tech that's actually inside of of the orb yeah let me take that one so

basically when I when I joined there was this like whole paper that that um it was it was not long it was like three pages a lot of high-level ideas and as I mentioned one of the big points of it was you basically need to solve civil resistance to be able to distribute a token to every human being and why do you want to do that in the first place because it would incentive align a really really large Network to grow to all of humanity and kind of really bootstrap this this huge huge financial

Network and then of course at some point you could also distribute Ubi through something like this so you want to do that you want to launch a token to all of humanity collectively um then the first big thing you have to solve is what people in crypto call civil resistance I'm sure you're quite familiar with that and simply speaking what that means is you one one human is able to verify to a network that that human is actually unique to the network and why is that important because if that's not in place

what would happen is that bad actors which is like destroy the whole distribution of this incentive mechanism and this token and everything would break down and that's something as you know David that happens pretty frequently in crypto still today and if you really want to scale it to all of humanity it's even a much bigger topic so it was pretty clear very early on that that's one of the biggest problems we have to tackle first um and then we we went quite deep so

like I mean the whole founding team is pretty much we all met either at Caltech or Max Planck's area all we have all physics backgrounds so we went through the whole space and there's three big things you could do if you zoom out um there's kyc of course so you basically just use governance uh the the Civil resistance of governments that immediately falls through because um less than 50 percent of the world actually have

these documents that you could verify digitally so if you think about inclusivity that just does not scale well it would work super well in Europe and us it just does not work globally so that fell through immediately and the second big kind of topic is what people call Web of trust so you basically try to build up a reputation graph and that's a super elegant idea just never really worked or scaled um but I actually think that's something that will come into work on later so we can talk about that and and the last

part is Biometrics and so we actually build implementations of all three we look quite deep into kyc we look quite deep into verbal trust and then looked into Biometrics itself and before we get into this specific modality which as you mentioned we use average recognition the first big thing you need to understand is all the things you use in your daily life so your iPhone for example what what that does is it re-authenticates you so it

basically realizes that David again tries to log in into the same phone so there's an embedding stored on your phone of how you look like um and then you try to sign in again a new a neural network calculates this pretty much the same embedding again matches it and you can use your phone so it's a one-to-one comparison and that's fairly easy to do other than fraud resistance to solve proof of personhood however you need to compare one user against everyone else so you have a one-to-end comparison and the big problem with that is you

just need much more entropy so information about each user to make that work because otherwise the fraud rate explodes exponentially and you actually hit a wall so that's something that's very important to keep in mind you actually don't have a constant fraud right but you literally hit a wall and so things like face just taking a face image doesn't have enough entropy fingerprints doesn't have enough entropy Palm theoretically actually could have but there was just no life implementation of this and and Iris is the thing anyway

sorry Alex when you say not enough entropy you mean not enough uniqueness like there's just not enough uniqueness in someone's face to be able to prove verify fire viable humanness correct that's correct at least if you if you image it with a with a normal uh phone camera sure okay and so I I'm assuming this the search for you come to the conclusion that government IDs aren't work don't work and it's also just not it wouldn't be very like native to the crypto ethos to just use government ID

as our our identity system uh and then you also talked about the web of trust which there are other web of trust models of of civil resistance out there in the crypto world they're all decently experimental yep um but I think what you're saying is the the biometric solution towards establishing unique human identity is the most robust and the most tried and true model and so that's how you've come to the conclusion of the iris and I'm I'm assuming talking about the entropy of the iris we're going to have you're going to give me a number that's like and the iris is sufficiently entropic correct correct

that's correct yeah yeah okay so that is and that also I think presents the the why World coin is the way that it is why there is an orb if it was just the United it's just like uh United States ID or or um Nation say ID or if it was just uh a web of trust model the world coin project would be in a digital sphere only but since we have to collect actual um like look and map that the DNA of someone we actually have to establish ourselves in the real world that's

that's why the orb exists so can you talk about the technology in the orb and and how it does what his job is so so to just like quickly summarize what you just said because I think it's it's another important piece is the world is about to change in a meaningful way right uh in that case that neither digital content so images or video as well as intelligence are discriminator anymore what it means to be a human so you actually need to bridge to the real world and I think that's the only way to actually solve the problem

and so we started building the orb quite in the beginning we we went quite deep into that engineering we literally had to build our own lens like it's completely from the ground up um custom and so what it does it has a lot of sensors in the front to just make sure whatever we see is an actual human being so not a display uh and not an AI that tries to fool us and all of that compute happens locally so first check

we we look at a human being then second the eye is imaged and a unique Iris code is calculated on the device gets signed by the device and that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device and what's pretty cool and very important is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet through zero knowledge proofs so what that means is that the only thing we or anyone else could prove is that a user has verified before yes or no and so

if you believe what we believe you believe that something like this will have to happen like something like World coin will exist and I think rolecoin is the option to make it privacy preserving open source and decentralized and so I know it sounds count intuitive in the beginning because it uses Biometrics etc etc but you really you kind of you have to look into engineering understand um that I think this aligns really well with the values of the space certainly and scanning an iris is uh from what I understand a known quantity

that's technology that we've had and I was talking with a team member of the the world crying project uh DC Builder and he um just told me about the the technology in the orb most of the technology is actually making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb and so like it can it can scan your iris and that's what it does but most of the technology is making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb in the process of getting their Iris scanned can you talk about the layers of technology that that are comprised in the orb to make this

happen sure um so actually I wouldn't say it's most of it because you have if you think about why the orb in the first place like why did we have to build custom Hardware which is like it was not fun back then we were like four people in a small apartment in San Francisco and coming up with the idea we need to build Hardware devices and ships around the world was really not fun um you you actually solve two major problems as you want like one you just mentioned which is fraud resistance and and that comes down to one showing

something to the device that actually is not a human being and two just physically attacking the device itself so you can just go to the processor and try to insert data streams that are actually not from Imaging so that's one and then two is Imaging resolution um so all the biometric Imaging devices we tested back then they actually also do not have enough to scale to all of humanity they don't have enough resolution so that's why we had to build our own lens and on Imaging system and things like that so this was like also like a lot of work

um so I think it's pretty equally split um but to talk more about your question specifically is the orb has in front it images multi-spectral so what that means is you basically like you imagine multiple wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum so we have infrared we have 3D time of flight and we have multiple wavelengths with an infrared Spectrum just to make sure that whatever we see is an actual human being so you could just know it show a display or even more

complicated Optical setups um so this was quite quite some engineering to get there and then the cool thing is everything happens locally on a device so there's seven neural networks that in real time just like do all of these checks um and that's important because uh privacy yet again is it accurate to say that the the retina scan inside the orb is perhaps the most advanced retina scan technology that exists probably we don't know like whatever military has but yeah probably sure sure okay and so

um just to really just drive this point point home and because I think this is really important the goal of worldcoin is to produce humanness right one human is one human in the world of of worldcoin and this is especially important as the world of AI comes and and those lines start to blur we need to understand who is a true human and crypto has other identity projects other civil resistance projects but I think the the point here that stands is that there's no identity project proof of identity proof of human project that is as civil resistance civil resistant as

uh biology as DNA and so the world coin orb is meant to uh map onto an iris and that is the strongest form of civil resistance that that we have and so um I think just the the uh question I want to ask and I think this kind of gets to where there are always like um concerns about the world coin project is that serializing humans um is a double-edged sword uh we in the crypto industry don't have a source a source of truth of who is a unique human

but the history of serializing humans has not been a good one and this has uh been like the cause of concern around the world coin project is like the concern of privacy so since you can scan someone's Iris and prove that they are human what's the story behind the privacy side of things like how does how does worldcoin address the the Privacy issue well first of all we agree right um so that's that's why we build it the way we we have built it so the first like there's this counterintuitive thing

going on then of course you have Biometrics and that first it the immediate reaction is like it freaks you out and you really need to understand the engineering behind it to understand that I think none of these concerns are actually grounded and so with a real coin it actually comes down to um to three big things uh the first one is that the biometric data is not stored so basically the imagining happens locally on a device the computation happens on the device and the only thing that actually leaves

the device is an iris code that gets signed by the orb and then that's the thing that gets compared against all users then point number two which is by far the most important one is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet with the knowledge proofs which brings me to the third point is it's actually self-custodial setup so when the user signs up uh he just like the user has a non-custodial wallet that generates then later these serial

knowledge proofs to prove inclusion into a set of users and that gives it like quite extreme privacy I don't think there's anything else I'm aware of that could solve the same problem on that scale without any like literally any privacy implications and then the other thing is everything will be open source the majority of the hardware is already open source Defender is getting released slowly because there's still some security concerns but we're getting there

the whole setup will be fully decentralized it's of course a challenge because you have Hardware but but it's going to happen so yeah it's it's I think it's actual rocket science like we spend a lot of time a lot of money to make this to build it the way we've built it um and so yeah understanding the system at a high level it does seem like there's so many moving Parts there's the hardware inside of the orb there's the zero knowledge cryptography there's the mobile app can you uh just walk us through an example of someone uh it goes

and gets their Iris scanned that turns into data and then that goes through a line of steps that turns into somebody being able to be verifiably logged into their worldcoin app or and like can you talk about just like how that data is carried the processing of the data in the iris scanner uh the zero knowledge groups can you just do an n10 story for how this um goes from an iris scan to somebody's phone sure I will um I will keep it relatively high level but we can go as technical as you want so sure um

a user or a person is excited about what kind learns about it downloads an app it's called the world app right now it's right now it's the only client for real coin but many other wallets will support it too as well so I mean all of this is a protocol so many other wallets are connected but right now you download the world con app uh and you click on a map you see where the next orb is you show up in front of this device and then what happens when you verify as you click and verify now you generate a

key pair actually two separate key pairs because you have one an ethereum wallet and the second one is basically your identity wallet so these are two separate key pairs that basically live on your on your phone and then once you verify you show that public identity key to the device and that gets air gapped just via camera to the device then the orb does first the cumulus check then the uniqueness check which means it images the I calculates a unique embedding out of this with a

neural network then signs that and that's the only thing that actually leaves advice goes to a back end that later will be decentralized as well but right now goes to back end uniqueness check happens and then when the user uses World ID the user does a proof of inclusion with your knowledge that the user is actually that that public key is included into that set um and so what that enables you then to

do is you can use that proof across many different ecosystems are not only in ethereum it will also which all other chains but then also in web 2 like you can just use it to log in wherever you want uh without revealing any of your personal information and then another thing that's important to mention is actually World ID is an identity protocol on top of that on top of this idea of proof of personnel that then lets developers and other people attach

verifiable credentials and things like that so it's even more than more than just this but yeah that's that's a flow importantly nowhere in their flow does worldcoin ask for your name or date of birth or address is that is that correct no the only um the only time where this comes up is when you actually use a ramping solution because in the app also in World app there is a you can unramp uh through ramping providers and they ask for your name but it's not us right

so if you want to get money into the app you will give the on-ramp provider your information but World coin the system does not require your name date of birth address or anything like this correct okay cool and so this this provides us a place for Unique humans to be to have a public address right and so that is the net output of this is like there is a new public address from the world coin protocol uh and that is because of the way that that address is derived verifiably human and I think Sam one of

the reasons why you're uh a co-founder of worldcoin and the vision behind this is that you would find it and from the open AI side of things and I think you hypothesize that the world will find it in the world in the age of AI that having a list of addresses of verifiable humans to be supremely useful uh so why would that be useful in the next decade or Century why do we need this in this coming era yeah I I I think there will turn out to be other reasons besides the ones that I'll mention now um but when we think about

these very powerful systems these very powerful AIS that will exist in the world I think the benefits from them access to them governance of them that that belongs to real people and I think it's very important that AI is being built as tools for people now there are a lot of ways that we could think about doing this but there's a lot of there's a lot of advantages we like about the world coin solution and uh as Alex just explained I think although the Privacy vision is different

than what people have maybe traditionally thought about I think it's one that's very compelling um and I think it's also one that is very fair like this is sort of the maximally inclusive system we can we can imagine um I also think that the ability to say I'm a human I created this content or I'm at least endorsing this content uh that's that's gonna turn out to be important too and another advantage to sort of this sort of a structure metamask has something new introducing metamask portfolio metamask portfolio is the best

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