Why Crypto Really Might Need the Worldcoin Eye-Scanning Orb

I’m not sure how well known it is, but one of the key antecedents to Bitcoin was a technology to fight email spam.

In the original Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi references something called Hashcash in order to explain the concept behind “proof of work.” The basic idea of Hashcash was to reduce spam by forcing a sender to engage in some arbitrary expenditure of computational energy for every email sent. For a person sending a random email, the cost of energy would be insignificant. And for a corporation sending out something important, the cost would be worthwhile. But for business models that depend on ...