The post Thursday Mailbag: Is it cypherpunk to contribute crypto to bitcoin treasury companies? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Blockworks Daily newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. “It looks a little bit like crypto keeps playing a prank on the stock market, and the stock market keeps falling for it.” — Matt Levine on bitcoin treasury companies Q: Will you let Worldcoin scan your eyeballs? Now that it’s finally available in the US, I will — enthusiastically.  That might put me in the minority because Worldcoin has gotten a chilly reception in crypto circles, mostly because its eyeball-scanning orb looks like surveillance tech straight out of Minority Report. But how else are you going to prove you’re human? In the coming age of AI-generated fake news, deepfake videos, financial scams and fake job applicants, someone will need to store a proof that you’re human. You will only have three options to choose from: a government, a corporation or a decentralized crypto protocol.  Seems like an easy choice. Vitalik has explained that “proof of personhood is valuable because it solves a lot of anti-spam and anti-concentration-of-power problems that many people have, in a way that avoids dependence on centralized authorities and reveals the minimal information possible.” But even non-crypto people will likely agree that identity on the internet should be decentralized, sybil-resistant, provable and open source. Last night, Sam Altman reassured us that Worldcoin’s technology was “a way to make sure humans remained central and special in a world where the internet had a lot of AI-driven content.” Altman is admittedly proposing to solve a problem that he himself has created, but he’s right that proving unique humanness is about to become mission critical — and CAPTCHAs are not going to do it. So far, Worldcoin is the only plausible solution for proof-of-personhood I’ve seen (or can even imagine, really) — and it proves that…

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Filed under: News - @ May 1, 2025 10:23 pm