[HN Gopher] Sam Altman's Worldcoin promised them free crypto for...
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Sam Altman's Worldcoin promised them free crypto for an eyeball
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Author : donohoe
Score : 301 points
Date : 2022-04-06 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.buzzfeednews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.buzzfeednews.com)
| rurp wrote:
| "The data consent form says Worldcoin can share user data with
| third parties who can use the data as they see fit."
|
| Doesn't this completely undermine all of their claims about
| privacy and being responsible stewards of people's biometric
| data? You can't make promises about data that is freely given to
| third parties, and I'm sure the people involved here realize
| that. It's hard to see this company as anything other than sleazy
| when their public statements are completely contradicted by the
| legal terms.
| andreyk wrote:
| ""Ensuring a person is human, unique, and alive is an unsolved
| problem," reads an internal Worldcoin deck marked as
| confidential, which was viewed by BuzzFeed News."
|
| I mean, this is true. But I don't get how this solves that - it's
| not like we'll scan our eye every time we need to login to
| something, so there will be a digital bit of data associated with
| the retina we'll need to log in with instead, and boom you have
| the same problem of identity fraud as could happen if someone
| stole you social security number. Except it may be worse, because
| you can't alter this unique identifier.
| grnmamba wrote:
| New day, new crypto scam.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I thought this comment was being glib, but I think you're
| right. It has all the hallmarks of a crypto scam: "Operators"
| being pain in coins instead of money[1], a pyramid/MLM like
| structure where operators hire other operators, and using
| Discord for tech support.
|
| > They are encouraged to hire sub-operators to work under them
| so they can cover more ground.
|
| > Orb operators were normally paid a flat rate of $3 per sign-
| up in tether, a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar. It
| doubled to $6 for every additional sign-up beyond their
| targets. At the time, Worldcoin blamed the payment delays on
| back-end problems as the company updated its technology,
| according to screenshots of a Discord where executives
| communicated with Orb operators.
|
| [1] To be fair it's USDT which is, at least, pegged in value.
| But why make operators go through the hassle of finding and
| using an off-ramp? Reminds me of employees in some industries
| being paid with special cards that have transaction fees to
| take money out.
| imtringued wrote:
| >It has all the hallmarks of a crypto scam
|
| It also took the name of an existing coin from 2013.
| [deleted]
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I trust Sam with my biometrics more than I would trust most other
| people.
| soared wrote:
| I don't see how this could ever be legitimate. Giving out an
| unlaunched shitcoin and a t shirt in exchange for the biometric
| data of people who very clearly don't understand crypto or
| biometric data (read: random person in a mall, regardless of
| country). This is pretty clearly taking advantage of people.
|
| My question is, couldn't you do this fairly without even spending
| that much money? Say you need 5MM scans to build your database
| (that you're going to delete the data from anyway). With
| shitcoins it's close to free, but you had to pay a bunch of
| engineers and marketers. Why not give each person $5 USD
| converted to their local currency? For $25MM you are actually
| having a positive impact, don't get dragged through the mud in
| articles like this, and it didn't even cost that much.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Because it's not about making an impact, it's performance art
| meant to accumulate investment money.
| munificent wrote:
| Akin to "security theatre", this is "tech startup theatre".
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| Stop trying to whitewash this, this is a scam, just because
| he was the former Kingmaker of the SV startup scene doesn't
| mean he isn't a scammer and this isn't a scam.
| [deleted]
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| "Performance art" is exactly right. Likewise, it's not a
| coincidence that the actual field of contemporary performance
| art is increasingly resembling the entrepreneurship/startup
| industry.
| bmitc wrote:
| You are right, but I think it's performance art plus
| narcissism and greed.
| rchaud wrote:
| Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
|
| Give a man a homemade shitcoin and insert yourself as the
| transaction processor middleman, and you feed yourself in
| perpetuity.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Feed yourself in perpetuity and you make billions.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > My question is, couldn't you do this fairly without even
| spending that much money?
|
| It would actually cost tens of millions of dollars (if not
| more) if you want to comply with the securities laws of every
| country.
| hef19898 wrote:
| If you cannot comply with local securities laws you have no
| business in finance in those countries.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| If you cannot comply with local restrictions on press
| freedom you have no business serving content to users from
| those countries.
| space_rock wrote:
| Exactly. It's a circular argument to say a law is good
| because it's a law. And no one has any idea of financial
| laws in each country
|
| Saying that Sam Altman is a scammer
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| This is why the Founders (in America) made it clear that
| the human rights have an ontological basis that
| transcends any law (rights are granted by God, whatever
| that means to you).
|
| Rights that are granted by laws are not rights at all,
| which is why the proper understanding of human rights is
| that they can neither be granted nor taken away by any
| human law, as any law that would do so is just a coercive
| force belonging to whoever happens to be in power at the
| time.
|
| The Anti-Federalists were so concerned to make this clear
| that they even viewed enumerating basic rights in the
| Bill of Rights as dangerous / likely to be interpreted as
| exhaustive vs. transcendent, which is exactly what has
| happened over time, of course.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| This is why, in debate, i prefer not to use the word law
| and instead refer to them are "regulation"
|
| Regulation is generated by those in power and largely
|
| The law comes from the constitution alone.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The problem is that the creator isn't very responsive to
| requests for clarification.
|
| Without writing down what our natural rights are in a way
| that is understandable, you're stuck trying to reconcile
| religious beliefs. How do you deal with an individual who
| believes that people of African descent we designated by
| the creator as less than human?
|
| We deal with this today in other contexts. Ambiguity and
| conviction don't mix well.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| That was basically the debate that occurred, the risk of
| not writing them down was also very large for the reasons
| you mention. It's only a problem if that list is then
| viewed as a) what defines those rights and / or b) is an
| exhaustive list. Unfortunately, that is what tends to
| happen over time, hence the need for constant pushback on
| people who attempt such shenanigans.
|
| As far as your other question, it comes back to coercion
| vs those rights. If some jackass wants to believe that, I
| can't change those beliefs. But I can certainly support
| the right of self-defense or shared defense of the
| intended victim if that ideology is used to attack them.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This is actually my favorite comment of the year.
|
| Pardon the ignorant question, but what did you study to
| learn this? My midwestern education completely failed me
| here. I'd like to read whatever it is you read.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Thank you. :)
|
| Man, I wish I had a simple answer for you, it's basically
| what I've pieced together over the years by trying to
| fill in the gaps in my own midwestern education.
|
| A lot of it, I did pick up by digging into the history
| the Federalist / Anti-Federalist papers themselves, as
| well as various readings on the Founders / framing of the
| Constitution. If I think of anything specific I can point
| to, I'll follow back up here.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you. Honestly, any starting point whatsoever would
| be extremely helpful. That's the thing that's prevented
| me from ever seriously diving in, mostly because life
| makes so little time for it. But I can make the time now.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I find it worthwhile to re-read the Declaration of
| Independence from time to time, even more so than the US
| Constitution (for some of the reasons mentioned above).
|
| The Anti-Federalist Papers aren't necessarily easy to
| breeze through, but definitely worth reading:
| https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Federalist-Papers-Dover-
| Thrift-E...
|
| They can also be found in audio format here, and
| elsewhere: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-
| detail/q3qhq-50128/The-Anti-...
|
| The real mindset change happened, for me, when I saw that
| coercion in society is THE enemy. All actions and
| interactions should be voluntary. It's when those lines
| are crossed that crimes and evil occur. Everything flows
| from that, in my opinion.
| maxbond wrote:
| This comparison would imply that securities laws are
| unjust because financiers are regularly targeted by
| authoritarian regimes.
|
| Which is ludicrous. They aren't the underdogs here. They
| _are_ the powerful parties who need to be kept in check
| for democracy to function. A journalist publishing
| despite censorship is in no way comparable to wealthy
| promoters distributing unregulated securities.
|
| I think what you were going for may have been that
| distributing these securities is in some way freedom of
| speech, which is also just incorrect, or correct in some
| way so limited as to be irrelevant. If it is freedom of
| speech, your freedom to distribute securities stops at
| scamming your neighbor's nose. But the burden of proof
| here is on your security _not_ being a scam, and that is
| because unregulated securities markets readily devolve
| into scam after scam.
| paisawalla wrote:
| The law isn't optional when it restrains things I don't
| like.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If laws forbid what you want to do, you're clearly, by
| definition, not in power.
| maxbond wrote:
| So if I were the President, and I attempted to appoint an
| unqualified judge and was denied by Congress, you would
| argue that I don't hold power?
|
| Power is not a binary quantity, and there isn't just one
| type of power.
| 8note wrote:
| Yes.
|
| A power president would be able to put in unqualified
| judges.
|
| Considering there was recently a president putting in
| unqualified judges, while the prior president couldn't
| put in any judges, that is a difference in their power
| maxbond wrote:
| So, hucksters cannot be regulated because they don't hold
| absolute power? Indeed, we can't even talk about power
| differentials unless there is absolute power?
|
| That would seem to contradict your last statement, so I'm
| just not sure what you are asserting here.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In a democratic society, the power of the executive is
| defined by law. The President is a powerful individual,
| but he is not a King.
|
| By law, appointments of certain positions require
| explicit consent of congress.
|
| The ability of regressive partisan elements to break
| government is a part of the design of the government. I
| personally find it repugnant and stupid. I also think
| that the short sighted nature of wielding this power in
| such a trivial and hamfisted way will ultimately backfire
| and result in constitutional changes down the road.
| paisawalla wrote:
| > _The ability of regressive partisan elements to break
| government is a part of the design of the government. I
| personally find it repugnant and stupid._
|
| It's amazing the way you guys (small-d democrats) are
| always dressing up what is nakedly the statement that
| "everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way
| I'll call democracy (because I say it's good for the
| people), but whatever I dislike is authoritarian (even if
| the people want it.)"
|
| It may surprise you to learn that, historically, this is
| exactly how authoritarianism views itself. Even Saddam
| Hussein conducted polls of his popularity so he could
| pretend his sovereignty arose from the people. The Vichy
| government was legal, popular, and internationally
| recognized. What the law says on paper is a different
| thing than what is practiced, and conveniently appealing
| to what the paper says is a time-honored tactic of
| eliding inconvenient realities.
|
| Democracy, c. 2020s: "The people must be allowed to
| choose, but only if what they choose is good for them, as
| decided by me."
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think you're stretching it to say the only definition
| of democracy is one where the people have selected some
| specific situation. This is problematic on two fronts.
| One is scale. The other is definitional and presupposes
| that democracy's only definition stems from the fact that
| people choose.
|
| Democracy doesn't scale. You need representation. Which
| makes the question of "what do the people want" very
| challenging because you go through layers of
| representation. Definitionally it's a problem which
| surfaces obviously at the extreme - "if the people want
| an authoritarian government and they get it, does that
| mean that that's democracy?". You may think that's absurd
| yet humanity tends to favor authoritarianism in groups,
| particularly in moments of crisis and/or being swayed via
| propaganda (see Julias Ceaser).
|
| I think the nuance that's missing is that you can have
| objective definitions and measures of democracy which you
| have dismissed as ""everything I like and want is good
| and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy" when it's more
| nuanced.
| paisawalla wrote:
| I would like to understand what these objective
| definitions of democracy are. If you look at ratings and
| papers created by the people who (like you) suppose the
| very real science of democracy measuring exists, e.g.
| Freedom House, what am I to make of the fact that various
| societal and legislative attitudes towards LGBT peoples
| (for example) are now a key component of democracy? No
| country can get a full democracy score without legalizing
| maximally permissive attitudes towards this population.
|
| Taking your assertion at face value, that means no full
| and true democracy has ever existed prior to ~2010. Is
| that what you believe? Because even the then-believed-to-
| be freest countries of the 80s were probably quite
| regressive on gay rights.
|
| You would have to believe that, because otherwise
| "democracy" seems to mean "all the things that good
| people support today," which is my point. And if that is
| what you believe, that only in the last 1-2 decades has a
| real democracy existed, then you must also believe that
| it's possible that the science of democracy measuring
| will discover in the future that the True Democracy is
| even more democratic than what we have today. It's not
| clear to me how this is any different from "everything I
| like is democracy," where "what I like" is increasingly
| progressive policies.
|
| Why are gay rights apparently part of the canonical
| definition of democracy and not firearms ownership, which
| directly empowers people to resist tyranny? How can you
| explain this by appealing to universal principles,
| instead of simply reiterating liberal orthodoxy? I don't
| see a way.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| The point of a nation of laws is to restrain the
| powerful, the powerful don't need laws to do what they
| want done, and the law is the only safe redress the
| abused have against them. Which is why unpunished abuses
| of the law by elites in society is so damaging in the
| long run, it erodes the very foundation of what it means
| to be a just society.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| By that definition, it's hard to understand why the
| powerful don't just use their power to stop the
| legislation holding them back.
|
| I think in reality there are many different kinds of
| power, and talking about power as if it's one simple
| fungible thing leads to naive and wrong conclusions.
| maxbond wrote:
| I agree, the thing is, the person who introduced the idea
| into this conversation that power was a boolean quantity
| and that it meant you either could do anything or were
| limited in some way - was you. I don't mean this as a
| personal attack or anything, it's just the facts; we
| weren't talking in those terms until you introduced them.
| You wouldn't need to disagree with this point if you
| hadn't brought it up yourself.
|
| Powerful people lobby against legislation constantly with
| mixed success. They're able to hold a lot of influence,
| but not able to hold total influence. It is difficult to
| understand, it's a complex system composed of many fully
| autonomous human beings. But we do ourselves a disservice
| when we cast it in such stark terms, wouldn't you say?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure.
|
| I responded to an argument I thought was silly with
| something on a similar level, and what I wrote doesn't
| hold up to serious scrutiny.
|
| Such is life on the forums sometimes.
| maxbond wrote:
| > I responded to an argument I thought was silly with
| something on a similar level, and what I wrote doesn't
| hold up to serious scrutiny.
|
| So you're wrong, but it isn't your fault, because you
| didn't even believe what you said, and you only said it
| because you wanted to respond to my argument, which you
| didn't think was worth taking seriously?
|
| I'd encourage you to hold yourself and your public
| statements to a higher standard than that. If my
| arguments aren't worth responding to - don't. If you
| don't believe something - don't say it.
|
| That isn't just "how things go," that's a series of
| decisions you made. Putting that on me shouldn't be
| something you accept from yourself.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| "So what you're saying is..." arguments are typically
| fantasies about the opponents flawed inner thoughts, and
| not worth responding to.
| mc32 wrote:
| What kind of excuse is that?
|
| That's like saying it would cost tens of millions of dollars
| to comply with health regulations in different countries when
| you sell foodstuff. Yes, of course!
|
| Maybe electric automobile mfgs can just ship cars all over
| the world without going through safety standards too!
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The question was literally "couldn't you do this without
| spending a ton of money?". Why isn't saying "no, it'll cost
| a lot of money" a valid answer?
| akhmatova wrote:
| _What kind of excuse is that?_
|
| The standard Silicon Valley Ethos excuse.
|
| Which is what a lot of these "self-made men" have and built
| their careers and fortunes on.
| mc32 wrote:
| The internet and electronic commerce needed some
| breathing room during its nascent period, but now that
| its self-sufficient and does not need these kinds of
| allowances to survive, it's time they get rolled in to
| existing oversight or the .gov rollout a new
| Administration/Commission, etc. to govern these new areas
| of the economy to ensure it's not a free for all.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's not an unlaunched shitcoin. There is already a
| cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. This is actually a plain scam.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I don't see how this could ever be legitimate. Giving out an
| unlaunched shitcoin and a t shirt in exchange for the biometric
| data of people who very clearly don't understand crypto or
| biometric data (read: random person in a mall, regardless of
| country). This is pretty clearly taking advantage of people.
|
| Welcome to the business model of those who want to align their
| old business models of 'web2' with this re-packed new thing
| (but not really) and call it 'web3,' which is totally not a
| scam and not their to sell your data.
|
| Altman is the typical Valley trope tat Silicon Valley
| lambasted, and showed to be a hypocrite of the worst kind:
| those that sell an image of and 'making the world a better
| place' with insert inane startup name (Worldcoin, really?)
| attached to some pernicious data mining business model.
|
| Honestly, YC may still have tons of capital and some cache in
| the Valley, but outside of it, especially if you've actually
| been in the Bitcoin community you will see Altman's work for
| the same type of ICO scam that it is. And like most of these
| guys they're transplants to CA, which is no surprise. I really
| wish they'd stop trying to cling on to our disruptive culture,
| and perverting it with their headlong greed.
|
| Is he still CEO of OpenAI? At this point I'd consider it
| equally as scammy as this project.
|
| Honestly, I'm just wondering if they're going to hire Carlos
| Matos [0] for this shitcoin, too.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5nyQmaq4k4
| nr2x wrote:
| I once heard a disturbing ghost story:
|
| Certain tech company was building a training set of faces.
|
| Hired a contractor in $poor_region.
|
| Contractor asks if eyes need to be open in photos.
|
| Doesn't sound right to $tech_employee.
|
| Asks why exactly the eyes in photos aren't open to start with?
|
| They were taking pictures of corpses.
|
| Contract ended.
| btheshoe wrote:
| Good data is worth it's weight in gold. I've heard stories of
| startups paying journalists 40/hr to write samples for nlp
| datasets. Imo this is not a good place to cut costs
| anyfactor wrote:
| Trying to break into AI training business for a while. I have
| access to tech enabled semi-skilled workers who are willing
| and can be fairly compensated however launching this business
| isn't going to happen anytime soon.
|
| Medium and bigger companies need to work with bigger firms
| and require audits and certification and LLC registration in
| NA or Europe. And smaller companies can or willing to pay
| less than 5 bucks per workhour. At any scale the break even
| is 4 bucks because you can get the job done by semiskilled
| people but you need skilled people to revise and supervise.
|
| Even though the story is highly unlikely when it comes to AI
| training with data you have to balance scale, legitimacy and
| budget. Nobody has figured that out.
| [deleted]
| rosndo wrote:
| This sounds so unlikely, unless they already had a huge set
| of corpse photos for another purpose.
|
| It's easier to find live people that'll let you photograph
| them than corpses.
| nr2x wrote:
| I assure you this is real.
| strangattractor wrote:
| mike_d wrote:
| Lots of places will collect biometric data from the dead.
| If your cousin works at a funeral home taking these photos,
| or in the city government collecting the photos, you can
| basically make money for no work.
| thirdwhrldPzz wrote:
| Mirror neurons and nostalgia for a particular modal.
|
| When a mind latches onto a modal for problem solving, every
| problem is a nail.
|
| Technocrats have to try and illustrate the value of their
| technocratic solutions.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious
| and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x
| machine learning.
|
| Thats not what this is about. It's about identity. How do you
| prove identity of a wallet and ensure that this is my only one?
| Say i want to do an airdrop but only to real people? This
| technology solves the identity problem in a secure way. It's
| just a hash of my retina data, proves this is my wallet and is
| based on unique retina data. Also with ZK Snarks, they don't
| know anything about that bio data.
|
| But crypto is an adversarial network, so i don't see this
| solution working on it's own. I know biometric data is
| intrisically secure but is also intrincicly arbitrary. So, this
| data could be spoofed and will create this constant cat and
| mouse game where the parameters for verification are adjusted,
| creating centralization. But they are on the right path.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| They're "devolving" because that's exactly what the article
| says WorldCoin is doing:
|
| > But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even
| though it has captured and stored almost a half million iris
| scans to train its algorithms.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is
| nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or
| for x machine learning._"
|
| Because "building a database of biometric information in a
| nefarious manner" is exactly what they are doing.
|
| " _How do you prove identity of a wallet and ensure that this
| is my only one? Say i want to do an airdrop but only to real
| people? This technology solves the identity problem in a
| secure way. It 's just a hash of my retina data, proves this
| is my wallet and is based on unique retina data. Also with ZK
| Snarks, they don't know anything about that bio data._"
|
| They are on the right path to build a database of biometric
| data. _All_ the rest of this is handwaving and dreams.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| > Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is
| nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or
| for x machine learning.
|
| Because there's many recent examples of companies building
| databases to sell and a lot of companies are harvesting data
| for machine learning? I'm sorry if I'm coming across as glib
| or rude, but these aren't theoretical exploits. This company
| has apparently collected data on hundreds of thousands of
| people and raised millions of dollars; I don't think they
| deserve a ton of benefit of the doubt.
|
| Edit: changed "long history" to "many recent examples"
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't think you are sounding glib or rude. In fact, the
| person you replied to sounds naive to me. It's great to go
| through life only looking for the positives, but if you
| don't look out for how the thing can be gamed then it is
| pretty much guaranteed to be gamed.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Glad to hear it! My initial reaction was quite harsh and
| I guess I was afraid that would bleed into my comment.
| CPLX wrote:
| > But they are on the right path.
|
| The right path to what, exactly? Is there any remotely
| plausible sequence of events where this evolves into a
| positive contribution to the world rather than a way for a
| couple billionaires to role-play as, well, whatever they are
| role-playing here?
| alfor wrote:
| Imagine a world where everyone on earth start with the same
| amount of coins, not based on how many gpu are mining for
| you or how early you are in the pyramidal game.
|
| Will probably end up with some people holding most of the
| value anyway, but at least you start equally.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > Will probably end up with some people holding most of
| the value anyway
|
| Yes, exactly. It's an entirely pointless exercise because
| it doesn't take place in a vacuum. A "great reset" is
| pointless regardless of your particular aims because the
| world is the way it is for a reason.
| mcguire wrote:
| Imagine a world where everyone on Earth has their iris
| scans recorded by a Silicon Valley company in return for
| a voucher for a small amount of a cryptocoin that doesn't
| actually exist and may never have any value at all, much
| less its stated $20.
| danadannecy wrote:
| I see the appeal of this, but don't understand how
| anything like Worldcoin would be able to achieve that.
| People already have wealth accumulated in the real world,
| and there's no reason giving everyone an equal amount of
| a cryptocurrency would suddenly place everyone in an
| equal starting position.
| achenet wrote:
| Something similar happened around the fall of the Soviet
| Union.
|
| Yelstin gave every Russian citizen a certificate worth
| 10,000 rubbles to buy shares in state owned enterprises
| that were being privatized.
|
| Those with ready cash bought the certificates from those
| without, and this led to the current oligopoly.
| CPLX wrote:
| OK I imagined it. Everyone in the world now has some
| number of digital "coins" tallied in some kind of system
| created by a bunch of Bohemian Grove type billionaires.
|
| Now what?
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| I like playing around in the crypto space. I always have.
| Using ZK-Snarks with biodata allows you to verify, profit
| and protect your data. Instead of handing it to some entity
| to do god knows with. I give it to apple and their database
| isn't just a hash, it's full and open catalouging with all
| my other data taken from the the many sensors in the phone
| and products.
|
| Worldcoin's vision is a positive contribution to my life
| and many people i know who also enjoy playing around in the
| crypto space. People are adults, let them be adults and
| make their own decisions. & stop bashing the crypto-autists
| like me who enjoy playing in the cryptoverse, for the only
| reason that it's wierd and different.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris
| images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for
| its currency. If perfected, the company says the
| technology will distill the image of each set of irises
| into a unique string of letters and numbers, called an
| iris-hash, to be stored in Worldcoin's database. As the
| company's data consent form states, data gathered by the
| Orb will be used for "purposes such as training of our
| neural network for the recognition of human irises."_ "
|
| Eventually. If perfected. "Will."
| imtringued wrote:
| That doesn't change the fact that you will most likely be
| able to take someone's iris-hash and then associate their
| transaction history with that hash.
|
| At least Bitcoin has pseudonymity.
| gaspard234 wrote:
| >I know biometric data is intrisically secure.
|
| I work in security (at a crypto/web3 company!) and the
| opposite line of thought prevails in the field, most
| security experts argue that biometric data is
| fundamentally insecure especially for auth. A quick
| google search shows a lot of research backing that, from
| universities to major tech companies.
|
| >Using ZK-Snarks with biodata allows you to verify,
| profit and protect your data. Instead of handing it to
| some entity to do god knows with.
|
| How is this going to happen exactly? The requesting
| entity, like a doctor, asks for medical history. I use my
| retina to verify, and thanks to ZK-Snarks they have no
| knowledge of my retina data. How are they going to get
| the blood pressure readings? They need the data to
| analyze and understand. And what stops them from saving
| it in their own DB?
|
| Similar with many of these web3 products. Think, uniswap
| or defisaver. Ok you can use ZK to auth, they have no
| idea what wallet address is connected. But as soon as you
| use it they know exactly who and what you transferred and
| traded, all stored in a DB.
| DennisP wrote:
| Having reliable personal identities would enable some
| interesting stuff, like inflation-funded basic income,
| reputations, and loans without collateral. But I don't
| really think having a central actor collect biometrics is a
| good or safe way to achieve it.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > and loans without collateral
|
| Here's my US passport, a drivers license, a picture of my
| home, some tax records, and you can verify all of this
| beyond a reasonable doubt via the various credit
| reporting agencies. Now hand my my $100k please. Oh BTW I
| don't actually have any money in the bank and I have no
| income and etc so you're never going to see me again and
| good luck collecting anything.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Having reliable personal identities would enable some
| interesting stuff, like inflation-funded basic income,
| reputations, and loans without collateral
|
| In a way that, like, say passports, have never done?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| >Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is
| nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or
| for x machine learning. Thats not what this is about. It's
| about identity.
|
| Because _all_ collected data is eventually sold. First you
| try to sell access to the data. If that doesn 't work, then
| you sell the data itself.
|
| No one wants this crypto/nft/web3 world except rent seekers.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| d--b wrote:
| - So how can we do UBI?
|
| - Well we don't have the political capital to do it in real world
| currencies, but we can spawn crypto from nothing, so that could
| work. Obviously we'll need to have a way to make this crypto
| currency actually valuable, and stable, but let's figure that out
| later.
|
| - Ok, ok, so technically, what do we need to make this work?
|
| - Well, the main problem is surely that people are going to want
| to claim their UBI several times, so we need a way to control
| that.
|
| - Ah, ok, we have AI to do that right?
|
| - Well yeah, but we need to send an army of people everywhere on
| the planet, each with a specially created device that scans
| everyone eyeballs.
|
| - Uh? Can't we do this with a webcam?
|
| - No people will cheat.
|
| - But that's going to cost an awful lot of money, how are we
| going to fund that?
|
| - We'll go to VC, they'll give us the money, and well that crypto
| money is going to raise in value, so we'll have that, and
| otherwise we could monetize the planet wide authentication scheme
| that we created.
|
| - And you are sure this is going to solve the world's poverty
| problem?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What a stupid idea. Of course, it's very simple (i.e. cheap) to
| create fake irises.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Someone thought about this before you, and made it true
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/roelven/status/145229070354816614...
| parkaboy wrote:
| I find the fundamentals and implications of Worldcoin to be a
| really neat idea, but moreso for the potential to have true
| online anonymity while simultaneously being a provable Verified
| Unique Real Human Being. The idea of just having a public/private
| key that is associated with your biometrics. If implemented and
| executed properly, you could put a big dent in online
| disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all
| sorts of things.
|
| Obtaining biometrics is a critical component of this, though--and
| doing this in a non-dystopian way is tough. Hashing that data is
| needed (as the article mentions), but even that has a bunch
| trickiness under the hood to unpack.
|
| The Worldcoin/UBI narrative seems like it would be a smart play
| to spur rapid adoption for this, but--again according to the
| article, it sounds like that execution has been...challenging.
| daenz wrote:
| >If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent
| in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and
| streamline all sorts of things.
|
| No it won't. It will only ensure that certain people and groups
| can be the absolute final say in what information people can
| say and hear. Only an extremely generous and unhistorical
| interpretation is that this will "reduce disinformation." It
| will only consolidate who is allowed to have the loudest
| disinformation.
|
| This is disastrous for so many reasons. For example, suppose a
| whistleblower has damning evidence of human rights abuses. The
| powers involved decide to flip a switch and digitally
| quarantine all individuals who could possibly be
| whistleblowers, and everyone N-hops away from those people, so
| the story can't get out. The public never learns of it, and the
| abuses continue. This is not a novel idea, but now we've just
| made it push-button and absolute.
|
| How do you propose whistleblowers exist in the system you are
| advocating for?
| tern wrote:
| This problem is easily solved with cryptography and proper
| decentralized identity design
| parkaboy wrote:
| Just blue-skying here, but you could have a process that
| allows the individual to revoke a previously used key pair
| and generate a new one associated with their biometrics
| whenever they want. The history of their online identity gets
| wiped as needed, but they're still a Verified Real Human
| Being online.
|
| Now of course, again -- the devil's in the details with this
| central entity and how it acquires/processes/stores those
| biometrics. And of course that central entity could be be
| morally/ethically dubious. It would be cool to have a more
| distributed way of acquiring and processing the biometrics
| instead of having a corporation run that part.
|
| Also to be clear: I'm _not_ advocating all online
| communications need to have this identify verification in
| place. I 'm envisioning something like Twitter badges, where
| you have some identifier that you're a guaranteed real-
| person, but people can still communicate without that. Like
| if I'm Reddit, I'm probably not going to care while perusing
| r/music if someone's a Real Human Being, and similarly if I
| get a whistleblower tip over an email. If I'm reading
| r/politics or r/worldnews where disinfo and troll accounts
| run rampant, I then might want to be able to filter the
| discussion or interact with Real Human Beings.
|
| I also readily admit my whole excitement for the concept
| assumes (and it's a big assumption) it's designed and
| implemented in a way such that it can't be abused. And I'm
| also not saying Worldcoin is taking the right approach to
| this overall concept.
| axg11 wrote:
| I had a few interactions with employees at Worldcoin. At a high
| level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of
| personhood for crypto.
|
| HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic
| is an uphill battle. If you're generally sceptical of crypto,
| Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. I tend to believe
| there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world
| alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal"
| and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of
| pain.
|
| There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one
| wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all
| powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value
| to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be
| horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable
| verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass
| surveillance if widely adopted.
|
| Given the interesting potential of the idea, someone was going to
| eventually work on it. Worldcoin should have approached the
| problem slightly differently. First, testing the concept in
| lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to
| it. Since the idea is controversial, they would have gained more
| goodwill by initially launching in the EU/North America under the
| more strict legal frameworks. Second, make the orb look less
| dystopian. Third, launch with a non-economic use case. Worldcoin
| won't solve UBI or inequality in one shot, so why not launch with
| a lower stakes use case such as an online forum or community that
| requires proof of personhood to post?
|
| Sadly I think because of all the missteps, I can't see Worldcoin
| tackling the proof of personhood problem in the longterm. I hope
| another project comes along and makes an attempt more
| "sensitively".
| the_other wrote:
| > At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem:
| proof of personhood for crypto.
|
| Crypto people keep saying blockchain will be great for managing
| digital assets, proving ownership and so on... but they can't
| mint an NFT of my passport and use that?
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Sybil resistance/proof of personhood is a serious problem and
| interesting challenge to work on, not just in the
| cryptocurrency ecosystem but for the internet in general. I'm
| really surprised reading this thread and seeing that so many
| HN users apparently have never even heard or thought of this.
|
| The very website we use can be and probably is gamed by Sybil
| attacks. The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook
| and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down
| thousands of bot accounts.
|
| I am very skeptical of Worldcoin myself but you shouldn't
| simply dismiss the idea.
|
| As for minting an NFT based on your passport: Sure, that's
| absolutely possible. Sounds like a better idea than what
| worldcoin is doing. The hashing would also be a lot simply
| since all you'd have to do is check the validity of the
| passport and base the hash on the passport number which is
| unique. My guess is there are legal reasons to them not
| taking this more sensible approach.
|
| There are many other projects working on solving the problem.
| Check out Idena for a non-creepy idea, but that too comes
| with its own drawbacks imo.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and
| Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down
| thousands of bot accounts.
|
| I don't think I would ever be willing to use or recommend a
| service that could ban people for life in such a manner.
| Even with hashed biometrics, the difference between
| "doesn't currently have any accounts" and "not on our list
| of banned hashes" is minuscule.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this
| as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable,
| logical, and worthwhile goals a company that is bootstrapping
| themselves would take to ultimately solve a very complicated
| problem.
|
| Then, of course, there is the approach to announce some
| ridiculous, overarching, near-impossible goal and then do the
| YOLO "fake it till you make it" dance and hope for the best.
|
| Given the hype around Web3, I'm not entirely sure what their
| best route would've been. However creepy/problematic the shots
| of poor Africans looking at an Orb may seem, I think sadly
| there is a nontrivial amount of VC money that would follow that
| exact sort of approach for "moving fast and breaking things."
| Conversely, the unkind way to describe your approach is one of
| a very unambitious, slow, and "not investable" kind of way of
| running a company.
|
| Your approach is undoubtedly the saner route to try to build a
| successful, ethical, and sustainable business. I'm just not
| sure that, in the near term, for founders chasing after that VC
| money (especially how plentiful it seems to be in the web3
| space now!), that it is the short-run optimal strategy.
| edent wrote:
| Not everyone has eyes. Just like not everyone has fingerprints.
|
| Proof of Personhood is - like lots of ideas - ignorant about
| how people will abuse it. So you need to scan your retina to
| post? That doesn't stop someone stealing your laptop just after
| a scan. Or stop you scanning someone's eye when they're asleep
| / unconscious. Or any of a host of attacks.
|
| The UBI requirement is interesting - but it comes down to how
| much cost is lost to fraud vs the cost of fighting that fraud.
| If you need to spend a billion pounds to stop a million in
| fraud - is that worth it?
| gowld wrote:
| > Not everyone has eyes.
|
| This is silly. The number of people without eyes is tiny, and
| so can be served with an alternate solution.
| the_other wrote:
| As someone who spends a lot of time with a deaf person, in
| a high-quality of life country with a social welfare
| system, I can tell you that these alternative systems to
| support off-mainstream modalities generally suck, if they
| exist at all.
|
| You can't hand-wave these things aside as if some powerful
| faerie will come solve the problem for you. It hasn't
| worked like that for centuries and even in my country,
| where we're comparatively quite good with this stuff, we're
| shit with this stuff.
|
| I've lost track of the number of times I've had to call
| someone to book tickets for something requiring deaf
| support, on their behalf, when _I_ can use a web interface
| for my booking. It's crazy.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Or any of a host of attacks.
|
| I imagine the truly ruthless/desperate gouging out other
| people's eyes to collect their payments :(
|
| This has all happened before: https://usafrikagov.com/how-
| belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-ar...
|
| > In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term
| by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to
| widespread mutilations and dismemberment.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't see how an iris scan can be a "proof" of anything. One
| can simply generate any number of realistic-looking scans.
| There is a website that generates human faces, it should be
| possible to generate iris images as well.
|
| Also, I don't see why cryptocurrency is needed for UBI. Is real
| money unsuitable for this purpose?
| drdeca wrote:
| The idea, as I see it, is that with government issued money,
| you either need to collect the money somehow first, or if the
| UBI is to be done by the govt, the govt has to be convinced
| to issue the money,
|
| whereas, with a cryptocurrency, it can just be issued exactly
| in accordance with the UBI payout, where the designers need
| no permission from the govt, and where recipients aren't
| limited to a particular country. If the issuance produces too
| much devaluation of the token, well, then the experiment
| didn't work, but it didn't interfere with people's existing
| savings or the like.
| imtringued wrote:
| Even if it is not possible to fool the iris scan directly you
| could always take scans of animals. Just imagine farmers
| scanning their pigs or chickens to get a UBI.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Eh, "proof of personhood for crypto" is not part of the design
| by design. The whole idea of crypto was to establish a channel
| that is harder for one government to control. In that sense, it
| kinda succeeded.
|
| But with that success came attention of various interested
| parties, whose goals are anything but the original intent
| including compliance with KYC/AML laws, which crypto mostly
| ignores ( exchanges don't, but it is a separate story ).
|
| In short, "personhood" is not a problem.
| bambax wrote:
| > _proof of personhood for crypto_
|
| But one of the promises of the blockchain is anonymous
| transactions, free from evil incumbent central authorities. If
| this needs a proof of identity then why not use existing
| government systems, such as passports, which incidentally, in
| most countries, already contain biometric information.
|
| > _testing the concept in lower-income countries has a
| "colonial experimentation" look to it_
|
| Yes, that makes this especially disgusting.
|
| > _HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this
| topic is an uphill battle_
|
| Well, it seems every single story about crypto shows it
| reinventing the wheel with worse tools, poor insights, and
| trying to make it square.
| tern wrote:
| Crypto only really makes sense when it's tied to sovereignty.
| Using passports ties it to nation state sovereignty.
|
| It's worth keeping in mind Timothy May's email signature from
| the cypherpunks mailing list, which gave birth to all of
| this: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital
| money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
| knowledge, reputations, information markets, black
| markets, collapse of governments
|
| https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may
|
| That's what's at stake here.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| > I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the
| cryptocurrency world
|
| Name one. Just one.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-
| knowledge...
| hiq wrote:
| These are used in blockchain technologies, but blockchain
| technologies are not necessary to obtain them, or am I
| missing something?
| phh wrote:
| > Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI
| for the world.
|
| Just as a FYI, there is already https://ubic.app/ that does
| that using passports as source of zero-knowledgee
| identification.
| michaelgrosner2 wrote:
| > solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto
|
| This is a problem? Like I have a SSN, a drivers license, and a
| birth certificate. These are tools developed already by my
| local and national government to prove personhood. They are
| used in a legal context, often. I have never once wished my
| identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.
| trotro wrote:
| > I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a
| cryptocurrency for any reason.
|
| Worldcoin tries to solve this exact problem. There's already
| a way to involve your identity in crypto, namely centralized
| exchanges using KYC. I don't have data to back this, but I
| would guess most crypto accounts are in some way doxxed via
| links to KYCd exchanges. Worldcoin provides a way to prove
| you're a human (that doesn't already own an account) without
| having to provide any info about yourself, except a scan of
| your iris.
|
| I share the overall negative sentiments about Worldcoin,
| mainly due to it being a VC-backed for-profit project. But
| you cannot ignore that it solves a real problem in crypto:
| Sybil resistance without access to hardware (mining in PoW)
| or capital (staking in PoS).
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Like another user pointed out they could just use
| government issued ID and give out tokens based on that.
| There is no need to scan people's iris.
| runako wrote:
| > Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI
| for the world.
|
| This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone
| think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for
| verifiable UBI for the world?
| merrywhether wrote:
| Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and
| government money programs, so why would crypto be any
| different? The US' Payroll Protection Program covid response
| paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar
| "proof of legit business-hood" was not easy to determine in a
| timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to
| the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program
| was still mostly effective; I'm not sure where PPP falls on
| the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over
| a 90% success rate for instance.
|
| I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but
| let's not pretend that fraud wasn't a massive pre-existing
| problem for humanity.
| lottin wrote:
| > similar "proof of legit business-hood" was not easy to
| determine in a timely manner
|
| Source? I find it hard to believe.
| morelisp wrote:
| > paid out tons of money to fake businesses
|
| It did not.
|
| > I'm not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum,
|
| You should not use it as an example especially if you don't
| know how efficient it was.
| phphphphp wrote:
| As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and
| free from fraud.
|
| Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have
| been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge
| cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a
| fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in
| need.
|
| We should consider a more traditional social security
| program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for
| those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western
| countries are a few percentage points -- and that fraud is
| traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance... not
| identity fraud.
| runako wrote:
| Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a
| shell business than a personal bank account that does not
| map to a real person, at least in the US.
|
| I can go further: a political environment where people are
| concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed
| is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any
| meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely
| incompatible.
|
| In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for
| fraud prevention.
| colochef wrote:
| It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments
| like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading
| videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is
| ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems
| sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the
| average person to distinguish real from fake computer
| generated images.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of
| governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by
| all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It
| would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable
| standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a
| handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any
| discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc.,
| in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal
| that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like
| that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of
| fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking
| the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the
| possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even
| easier.
| pavlov wrote:
| This is one of the areas where Americans see their own
| decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all
| developed nations struggle with the same basic things.
|
| I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there
| has absolutely no problems verifying who's a person. If
| Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending
| money to resident citizens' bank accounts tomorrow. Paper
| checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics
| are simply not a thing.
|
| Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get
| there, it just takes political will.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > decrepit government infrastructure
|
| This is a common misconception. It's a political battle
| regarding the extent to which the government is permitted
| to tabulate and link the various details of people's
| lives.
|
| > could start sending money to resident citizens' bank
| accounts tomorrow
|
| That ability implies keeping and regularly querying
| detailed information about individuals that many here
| aren't comfortable with.
|
| > Paper checks and other American-style 19th century
| banking relics are simply not a thing.
|
| The system isn't as bad as you seem to be making out.
| Using a credit card without a chip is effectively the
| same thing. It's simply a claim that a numbered account
| has agreed to transfer you funds. Lying about that is
| fraud and your financial institution will have
| identifying details about you.
| runako wrote:
| Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem.
| The tax authorities are in the process right now of
| sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of
| income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about
| those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that
| they are specifically payments to individuals.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > There is no widespread concern about those payments
| being fraudulent
|
| Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc
| have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are
| hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion
| in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6
| billion unrecovered.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I'm not actually sure whether refunds or total revenue is
| the appropriate denominator. The IRS collected about $3
| trillion dollars in revenue, which would bring the rate
| down to 1 percent. On the one hand, refunds are linked to
| the total tax paid. On the other hand, there's other
| kinds of tax evasion, which would raise the fraud rate up
| again.
| morelisp wrote:
| $30bil is not the correct _numerator_ , regardless of if
| you take total tax revenue or refunds. The $6bil is.
|
| That number also includes people who got scammed out of
| their tax refund by third-parties. Worldcoin would not
| prevent that; if anything Worldcoin looks _exactly like
| one of those scams_.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social
| program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage"
| in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally
| accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and
| shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system
| will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will
| want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon.
|
| That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated
| and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that
| you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be
| that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of
| made-up identities.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| 10% is not very much when it comes to barriers to UBI.
|
| If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going
| to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting
| it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was
| going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop
| opposing it?
| runako wrote:
| This is a good point. By widespread concern, I meant
| rather that tax return fraud generally does not rise to
| the level of campaign issue for people aspiring to
| political leadership.
| runako wrote:
| I can name a couple of other blocking issues:
|
| - political will
|
| - perceived lack of funds
|
| Without the political will, this will not move. In America,
| we don't even have the political will to fund a social
| safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I
| would bet my money that no American living today will see
| UBI in America.
| axg11 wrote:
| I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest
| barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at
| recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread
| fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country
| where the government has _some_ information on the majority
| of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at
| the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good
| thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit
| accessible to all and reducing fraud.
|
| Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine
| today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree
| that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard
| of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations
| would be impossible with technology we have today. The
| concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type
| of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one
| global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset.
|
| Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about
| decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing
| centralization.
| drdeca wrote:
| Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are
| centralized.
|
| Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use
| which are issued according to the choices of 12
| authorities, while in the other case, there is one
| currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In
| the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12,
| but there are no central authorities who can continually
| choose how much to issue.
|
| Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run
| by companies which have authorities, who decide what
| rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they
| allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no
| authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment
| processing) transactions.
|
| You might call "Everyone speaking lojban" "centralized"
| because it is of the form "for all x, f(x)=y_0 " , but
| the hypothetical of "everyone speaks lojban" doesn't
| involve a central authority.
| tern wrote:
| Worth noting that the only thing centralized here is
| identity. Once everyone in the world has a trustworthy
| unique identifier, any number of currencies and services
| can make us it.
|
| The rub is: what to do about newly born humans, and about
| death? Worldcoin is far from solving that problem, and
| probably won't even if they succeed, since by then
| numerous actors (including governments) will have gotten
| involved.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Administering a global UBI across all nations would be
| impossible with technology we have today.
|
| The main obstacle is that there is just not enough money
| for everyone. There is absolutely no problem to prevent
| fraud by checking government-issued IDs.
| yabones wrote:
| Can you provide sources on that statement about CERB? I'm
| aware of some people claiming on others behalf (obvious ID
| theft/fraud), and people claiming when ineligible which was
| a risk they were aware of, but not any type of fraud that
| would be resolved by "proof of personhood" as in biometric
| scans of every person in the country.
|
| This argument sort of reminds me of Reagan-esque "welfare
| queen" talking points.
| vageli wrote:
| If the government has a list of all citizen wallets, they
| can ensure efficient and even distribution without risk
| of fraud. There are no checks in the mail to interdict or
| fraudulent details to enter on an application.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > people claiming when ineligible
|
| Proof of personhood doesn't solve that.
|
| > claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud)
|
| Proof of personhood doesn't solve that. A government
| assigned wallet is merely a different target than a bank
| account number.
| theptip wrote:
| I feel compelled to mention the charity Give Directly which
| is actually operating charitable UBI in some countries. I
| think they are very worthy of donations, and their programs
| are directly relevant to this discussion.
|
| You could look at their operational overhead, but I don't
| think it's high enough to justify the assertion that global
| UBI would be impossible. But I also think the concept of a
| global UBI, beautiful though it is, skips out some
| evolutionary steps that are necessary. It's entirely
| possible that a better end state is that each nation
| implements it's own UBI program. And that is definitely
| doable with non-crypto.
| tromp wrote:
| > proof of personhood for crypto
|
| How is any participant in Worldcoin able to verify that all
| funds in circulation are backed by unique persons?
|
| Should they just blindly trust Worldcoin and all their
| operators to be honest and not make up biometric profiles to
| generate extra unbacked funds for themselves? I don't see how
| to solve this problem in a publicly verifiable way...
| gowld wrote:
| Airdrop recipients don't suffer from monetary risk. Only
| people who accept the coin as money are taking a risk.
| tromp wrote:
| People divulging their biometric data do suffer, since in
| exchange they receive a coupon that's supposedly redeemable
| for Worldcoin in the future, which won't be worth its
| advertised value if there's no trust in the system's
| integrity.
| gfodor wrote:
| You could read their website, which explains their concept in
| detail: https://worldcoin.org/
| detaro wrote:
| And notably doesn't answer the GPs question how to verify
| the organization is honest, just how they protect the
| organization against user fraud.
| gfodor wrote:
| Fair - I misread. It does seem that you'd need some kind
| of classic processes and/or auditing to de-risk a
| scenario where a bad actor who has access to the
| necessary keys prints themselves money. Maybe there is a
| way to also analyze the chain state for anomaly
| detection.
| rchaud wrote:
| > If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem
| outright useless to you.
|
| How about those who are simply skeptical that Silicon Valley
| venture capitalists have any interest in solving global
| poverty?
| morelisp wrote:
| > At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem:
| proof of personhood for crypto... There are a whole class of
| ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond
| to one single person.
|
| This is such a bad dumb framing for a bad dumb idea, I can't
| stop laughing. Godspeed you fucked up technofascists.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| IMO tragically naive to blur and equate legal framework
| definitions with market participation with fundemental life on
| earth. Whose legal framework and in what spoken language are
| the rules of personhood written? There is one and only one
| Oracle for personhood, in the possesion of some money-driven
| teams? There are more holes than Swiss Cheese once the
| assumptions are really examined. "Performance art intended to
| attract investment money" is more accurate and to the point
| here, than exposition on human personhood. run away...
| colochef wrote:
| For a much more interesting and community led effort I suggest
| you see https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem:
| proof of personhood for crypto.
|
| > There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one
| wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all
| powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great
| value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could
| be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could
| enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass
| surveillance if widely adopted.
|
| Wait. Why is this a worthy problem if it has such extreme
| downsides? What good is UBI if you live in a panopticon? How
| would the resulting world be different than the former USSR
| where many things were paid for but you lived in fear of your
| neighbour ratting you out for "anti-government sentiment"?
| gfodor wrote:
| This is good feedback. They can definitely still pivot out of
| any issues. It still seems to boil down to if they determine if
| the approach they're taking will actually work from first
| principles. You only need it to work once, because once known
| proof-of-human wallets are on chain then the rest of the
| ecosystem can build downstream from them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the
| cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation.
| Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through,
| perhaps after a long period of pain.
|
| I love how we're almost twenty years into cryptocurrency yet
| people still produce these vague, literally zero content
| statements preceded by accusations of bias against anyone who
| has had enough of this vaporware talk.
|
| In the bitcoin whitepaper it started with a "peer to peer cash
| system replacing banks". Doesn't really seem to work but at
| least sounded straight forward. Nowadays we're at "eye scanning
| orb for proof of personhood" and monkey NFTs. It's not even
| getting better every year, it's getting more stupid
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Two decades? You quasi-doubled the age of cryptocurrency,
| it's been 13 years since Bitcoin's chain started and
| (apparently [0]) 11 since the first alt-coin.
|
| I don't hold any crypto and am ambivalent about it (seems to
| have the equal potential of hardening money/tempering
| inflation as well as providing a backbone to dystopian
| regimes), so I'm not talking my book, but how much of the
| Internet's potential was figured out 13 years into it's
| creation? That barely gets you to TCP/IP going public if you
| start counting at DARPANET, doesn't even get you to the
| Dotcom bubble if you start from the former.
|
| I'd add, if you're gonna quote Satoshi about peer to peer
| cash not materializing (arguably disproved by Lightning) to
| discredit how far it's strayed off it's essence, you could
| paint a fuller picture and pick one of many quotes
| highlighting that hard money/digital gold is just as much of
| a core idea to Bitcoin (from the genesis block message, to
| inflation, gold and gold mining discussions), which has
| arguably manifested.
|
| 0: https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/
| whymauri wrote:
| Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, but the
| concept dates back a while when we consider centralized
| applications. The bit gold architecture dates back to 98'
| and is arguably a direct ancestor to the BTC whitepaper,
| but only existed in theory.
|
| In any case, I'm in the 'decentralized cryptocurrency is
| still relatively early in the grand scheme of things' camp.
| What's really going to matter, in my opinion, is Gen-Z and
| younger generation's adoption and iteration on the concept.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > Doesn't really seem to work
|
| What are you talking about? Multiple large businesses in the
| US accept crypto. You can pay Newegg for a new computer using
| crypto. You can transfer currency between countries using
| crypto as the intermediate method of exchange. What about
| crypto "doesn't really seem to work"?
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > What are you talking about? Multiple large businesses in
| the US accept crypto. You can pay Newegg for a new computer
| using crypto. You can transfer currency between countries
| using crypto as the intermediate method of exchange. What
| about crypto "doesn't really seem to work"?
|
| This is YC, I used to think it was just ignorance when it
| came to Bitcoin, which it still partly is since this space
| moves so fast; but the more time I spent in the Valley and
| met more of these type of typical FAANG footsoldier who
| fancy thesmeslves the next Musk while they toil away in
| helping create the surveillance economy it's more
| pernicious these people were highly rewarded for their
| subservience.
|
| Why would they 'get it' when they only thing they've been
| successful at is only possible in the fiat system?
|
| Seriously, I gave up years ago trying to engage in good
| faith with them, now I just have utter indifference for
| them, either way we already won: they just haven't realized
| it yet and will throw out the typical misinformed rebuttals
| why it _doesn 't work_: energy use, criminal use, hard to
| use (this one is kind of true but only because of OPSEC).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| My basic response to any KYC initiative is, you don't have a
| right to know who I am.
| a4isms wrote:
| > HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this
| topic is an uphill battle
|
| A "word" of advice from someone with decades of experience
| writing and public speaking: Don't. This type of line has two
| problems with respect to making your point.
|
| First, it's not your actual point, so it invites debating the
| nature of HN rather than debating the ideas you spend the next
| three paragraphs discussing. And because it comes _before_ your
| ideas, it is planted in the reader's brain, taking up their
| attention. You gave it priority!
|
| Second, and more seriously, it can appear to be making excuses
| for a bad reception before you find out whether you get a bad
| reception. You may think this will condition people reading
| your post and its replies to discount any negative sentiment
| because of the bias you allege, but what it actually does is
| tell readers that there is social proof for resisting your
| thinking.
|
| You are literally tilting the playing field against your ideas.
| I may not agree with everything you say, but I believe your
| ideas deserve the fairest, most even reception. I recommend
| avoiding this practice in future.
| axg11 wrote:
| Thanks for the advice.
| yuvadam wrote:
| You might think this is a waste of your time, and that this
| idea sounds ludicrous -
|
| Despite the previous comment not exactly following the form,
| going through an accusation audit prior to making your case
| is an extremely useful way of neutralizing the negative and
| getting your counterpart to open up to your ideas.
|
| I highly suggest reading Chris Voss' take on this topic in
| Never Split the Difference.
| a4isms wrote:
| I agree that there are times when challenging the reader's
| bias can be effective. Yes, that's slightly different than
| challenging an entire community's bias, but certainly worth
| calling out.
|
| Thank you.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > going through an accusation audit
|
| "People here dislike this" or "this will probably get
| downvoted" is not an accusation audit. "I realize that the
| following objections to this idea have been raised
| previously" is entirely different.
| hiq wrote:
| More details on how this book would apply here would be
| welcome.
|
| I don't imagine the stance OP took (saying that HN is
| skeptical about crypto and implying that HN is biased and
| thus wrong) actually works here. What would work better
| would be to acknowledge some limitations of this whole
| field so far, so that readers expect a balanced opinion
| with possibly new insights that go beyond these well-known
| limitations.
|
| If you take an extremely unreasonable opinion and a
| reasonable one, meeting in the middle is still not
| acceptable, and it's a bias in itself to lean towards this
| position. If it's not obvious within 10s that you're a
| reasonable and knowledgeable person, it's hard to convince
| myself that I should spend more time and give you the
| benefit of the doubt in the meantime, when so many other
| sources seem more promising.
| unholiness wrote:
| FWIW, in practice this type of disclaimer is shockingly
| effective in a comment forum. The point is to short-circuit
| the reactions of the average comment-reader, who is skimming,
| who has already mostly made up their mind, who is inclined to
| see comments which further reinforce their view as
| insightful, and comments which contradict their view as
| misguided or not worth reading.
|
| Obviously, if everyone read everything, and read it with the
| same temperament, it should be useless. How could something
| you can attach to _any_ argument be persuasive? But people
| skim and skim with bias.
|
| It's really significant effect on places like reddit, where
| "this will get downvoted but _mediocre insight_ " will get
| far more upvotes than " _mediocre insight_ ". It can be used
| and abused.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Agreed. I'm also generally skeptical of unwarranted advice,
| because more often than not it just turns into an exercise
| to brag about one's achievements (or lackthereof) instead
| of saying anything useful.
| kemayo wrote:
| I'll confess to having a flat policy of downvoting any
| comment I see that says "I'll get downvoted for this",
| regardless of whether I agree with the rest of it...
| a4isms wrote:
| Another reason to avoid "I'll get downvoted for this" is
| the possibility that moderators will consider it a
| violation of HN's guidelines. In general, whinging about
| upvotes and downvotes is discouraged:
|
| _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading._
| drewmol wrote:
| I sometimes downvote comments about voting to help
| enforce moderation. What I think is interesting about the
| topic of commenting on voting on comments is that the
| vast majority of my downvotes are fat finger mistakes
| while scrolling.
| a4isms wrote:
| Well, if what you're saying is that a reader who is already
| biassed towards agreeing with the post will be motivated to
| upvote a post that complains about "cancel culture" because
| "culture wars," so use this one weird trick to get more
| upvotes even though it isn't going to persuade anyone who
| has yet to make uup their mind, you may be right.
|
| (hard winkie, you definitely did not say anything about
| cancel culture or culture wars.)
|
| But while you may be right about upvotes, I still feel
| correct about the fact that the tactic undermines the
| quality of the communication with respect to meaningful
| discussion amongst people seeking understanding.
| Furthermore, my fear is that such tactics increase
| polarization and knee-jerk reactions in comments, further
| devaluing good-faith debate.
|
| If I'm roughly correct, the "disclaimer" feels like click-
| bait titles and other tactics that amount to "defecting" in
| game theory: They produce a very narrow advantage
| (worthless upvotes) for the poster, at the expense of the
| value of discussion to the forum overall.
|
| The existence of tactics that undermine the quality of
| social discourse is a very hard problem, as we all know.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > feels like click-bait
|
| That seems like a good way to put it to me. In
| particular, when it's at the top of the comment, it comes
| off as a prompt to the reader that they should buckle up
| for something spicy.
| bko wrote:
| Who said anything about cancel culture or culture wars?
| The original post was just posting out a bias that many
| people have (anti-crypto). Everyone has biases and a lot
| of people are somewhat aware of their bias. By pointing
| out the bias, it helps people keep their bias in mind.
|
| Your original comment said it was not effective and
| serves against you. Now you're saying it produces a
| narrow "shallow" advantage. I think it effective as it
| forces the reader to confront their biases.
|
| I've seen this used in nonsensical anti-FB rants. You
| acknowledge that many people think facebook bad and
| you're not disputing that. And then you can go on to say
| "yes, people in fact still use facebook. in fact billions
| use it every day". It's been very effective in my
| experience.
| a4isms wrote:
| Presuming we agree with the post I was replying to, this
| "shallow advantage" is only relevant if the outcome we
| want is upvotes and shallow engagement. Sometimes, that's
| exactly right, for example if we're promoting a new
| crypto coin, maybe it is beneficial to begin a post with
| "Crypto-Luddites will hate this, but WhyseeCoin..."
|
| However, what I am also saying above is that there's
| another motivation for a post in a forum like HN, which
| is good-faith debate amongst people with open minds. I
| stand by my assertion that such openings detract from the
| post when we're seeking good-faith exploration of ideas.
|
| I believe these two stances can coexist happily.
| trenning wrote:
| Your comment and the response from u/unholiness both make
| really good points. The response comment I boil down to, know
| your audience and when this can be used effectively.
|
| However our default writing style should not do this
| preempting disclaimer because it is a distraction.
|
| This is something I think about almost daily, probably not
| healthy in itself, but I am really glad I read your comment
| which articulated why this writing style can work against the
| author. And the comment from unholiness which demonstrates
| how online discussions are hostile by default and almost
| warrant this writing style by default, although there are
| other steps an author could use to accomplish their
| disclaimer
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I'd guess that line is in there to create debate and make the
| comment more controversial.
| a4isms wrote:
| Alas, controversy and debate do not always go hand-in-hand.
| Highly controversial comments and posts often contain a lot
| of comments, but many of them end up being people yelling
| past each other, rather than engaging with each other.
|
| They have the surface form of a debate, but it's very low-
| quality, consisting of people trying to talk to the
| audience by scoring points off each other, rather than
| organically engaging with each other.
|
| JM2C.
| JofArnold wrote:
| I really appreciate this reply as a reader too. You are
| absolutely right. I've done the same in the past too and
| you've made me aware of this.
| warcher wrote:
| I feel like your advice assumes having a good faith debate on
| the internet about a subjective and highly charged opinion is
| a reasonable possibility if you express your opinion clearly
| and fairly.
|
| I would like to know what part of your decades of experience
| writing and public speaking led you to that assumption.
|
| Have I been using on the wrong internet my whole life?
| phphphphp wrote:
| I'm glad you acknowledge the terrible missteps here, so I won't
| focus on them, but I'd like to hear more about why you think
| this problem can be solved with biometrics. The missteps of
| Worldcoin highlight exactly why an arbitrary "personhood" claim
| is meaningless: anybody can go to a low income country and
| harvest personhoods!
|
| Personhood is arbitrary, I'd appreciate any insight into why
| personhood is a meaningful replacement for identity.
| gfodor wrote:
| It's not, the point of personhood isn't that it's exploit-
| free, but it acts as a fundamental rate limiter. Certainly
| there will still be theft downstream of the verification, but
| (assuming the approach delivers on the goals) you will not be
| able to do anything to generate an arbitrary number of
| recipients.
| phphphphp wrote:
| There's billions upon billions of people, any motivated
| actor could have access to millions of people (Worldcoin
| have access to 500,000 and it only cost them 25 WRLD
| each!).
|
| There's already a black market for this sort of fraud, so
| this isn't theoretical, Uber have a lot of problems with
| it.
| gfodor wrote:
| Sure, but it's zero sum. It's a bounded amount of skew in
| the distribution that's innate in any system that is
| subject to vulnerabilities that have a high return on
| violence. This isn't the same as generating people, which
| is what I said is basically the main thing worldcoin is
| trying to prevent.
| lottin wrote:
| What is a fundamental rate limiter and why do we need one?
| drdeca wrote:
| If you could make arbitrarily large numbers of accounts
| that each receive the token, that would break the system
| munificent wrote:
| Any system that is predicated on "one X per person" needs
| to ensure that a single human can't synthesize multiple
| "persons" in order to get more than one X and cheat the
| system.
|
| Systems like this include:
|
| * Democracy: One vote per person.
|
| * Universal basic income: One income voucher per person.
|
| * Some sales: One coupon per person, or one purchase per
| person.
|
| * Many resource usage licenses: Can only catch one salmon
| on this river per person, etc.
|
| Basically, it's good to have systems that are fair and
| equitable and in many cases, a way to do that is to
| distribute the good uniformly to people. That requires
| you to accurately determine how much each person gets,
| which requires a reliable notion of person.
|
| At the same time, I think Worldcoin is complete nonsense.
| Almost all of the above systems function _much_ better
| when scoped to a smaller regulatory authority that
| already has an existing reliable notion of person:
| passport, driver 's license number, etc.
| nr2x wrote:
| "HN is very anti-crypto"
|
| Minor correction: "HN is full of people who understand the
| actual math and implementation of blockchain technologies,
| business models being tested, and have seen more than a few
| 'revolutionary' technologies come and go. This knowledge puts
| them miles ahead of lay people's understanding."
| dropnerd wrote:
| hn is a privacy/piracy/(decentralization but not on the
| blockchain) enthusiasts. we produce gems such as this highly
| upvoted alternative to Dropbox -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224:
|
| > getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs,
| and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
|
| we are by no means business models experts
| saurik wrote:
| At the end of the day, Worldcoin is just "proof-of-Worldcoin":
| the same people who make that little orb can forge the
| existence of any number of new "personhoods". I work in crypto,
| and I thereby also think this project is stupid: this goes
| against the entire point of a decentralized trustless platform.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| It baffles me that Altman picked up such a creepy, woo-woo tech
| project. It's not like the guy is desperate for cash, he's
| already really rich and has a stellar reputation from running Y
| Combinator (formerly) and OpenAI (currently) as well as investing
| in many other startups...it's just weird
| verisimi wrote:
| Have you seen the creepy interview of Altman and Zuckerberg?
| Upright posture, hands on thighs... the borg talking with
| itself...
|
| https://www.facebook.com/YCombinator/videos/1015399369382910...
|
| its on Facebook, but no need to log in
| strgrd wrote:
| SA: "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go
| to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get
| fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is
| substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows
| through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great
| education now, but you can become expert level on most things
| by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now
| requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the
| number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it
| could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of
| 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to
| fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy
| a really good life."
| davidivadavid wrote:
| So Sam Altman has never heard of the hedonic treadmill, I
| guess.
| gowld wrote:
| > an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x.
|
| How can anyone take this person seriously, spewing
| pseudomathematical woo like this.
| dgellow wrote:
| Do you have a source?
| hiq wrote:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-
| ma...
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Not so far off when Paul Graham also vouched for Coinbase,
| which CFTC ordered it to settle on its False, Misleading, or
| Inaccurate Reporting and Wash Trading.
|
| It's quite unbelievable that this type of grift is defended by
| YC. When the crypto mania ends and the obvious consequences
| from tens of thousands of people who have been destroyed by
| Coinbase are realized, they will be just as quick to distance
| themselves.
|
| I'm really disappointed in YC, especially in its founders. When
| Paul Graham mentioned that he specifically looks for Founders
| who break the rules but not outright illegal, I had no idea he
| meant a break from moral ethics and brushing very close with US
| securities law.
|
| I just don't get how some people can look away at what's truly
| happening in crypto--it is a systematic wealth transfer via
| digitized ponzi. any money you make in crypto comes directly
| from somebody's loss and this is NOT at all like the financial
| markets where pricing mechanism are enforced and regulated for
| price discovery on real world assets that is widely adopted.
|
| Yet this will not stop thousands of applicants who apply to YC
| for their chance at riches. It's a shame how we glorify grift
| and enrichment through the destruction of others.
|
| It is this specific culture that we chose not associate
| ourselves with YC, others are already aware of the grift that
| YC founders have publicly supported, invested, and vouched for.
| What saddens me is that many YC hopefuls and commenters will
| look the other way because of what they seek to gain.
|
| If you drink from water that others had muddied, you too are
| dirty.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I'd stomach the holier than thou attitude more if we didn't
| just experience the SoftBank WeWork era of "real" companies
| being just as fraudulent and pumped by hype as dogecoin.
| zemo wrote:
| dogecoin was invented as an intentionally inflationary
| currency as a joke on financial speculation; it was
| literally designed to stay worthless. THAT was the joke.
| The doge was a reflection of laughing at overly serious
| people. Dogecoin at its outset was a really fun and
| entertaining project and scene, because the entire thesis
| was about removing the get-rich part of crypto to just play
| around and experiment. It has, over time, warped into
| something else entirely.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Two things can be bad at the same time.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| The startup bubble will be the next dotcom. Only the best,
| led by nietzschean Musk clones, will live.
| sealeck wrote:
| Except that there are legitimate and non fraudulent "real"
| companies.
|
| Consider percentages and probabilities rather than
| anecdotes.
| kodah wrote:
| "Moral ethics" are not a thing, they're conflicting concepts
| at their core on an individual level.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| > tens of thousands of people who have been destroyed by
| Coinbase
|
| Could you elaborate on this part? Are you referring to people
| whose crypto was stolen?
| soared wrote:
| Likely referring to normal people who lose money with
| coinbase. Trading stocks has at least some amount of
| protection because stocks have some legal
| requirements/vetting/etc to get on the major exchanges.
| Where as there are a whole lot of shitcoins, rugpulling,
| fraud/etc enabled by coinbase.
| csee wrote:
| Not to mention the exorbitant monopolistic fees they can
| get away with because regulation keeps competitors out of
| the US, compared to the extremely low fees associated
| with trading stocks.
| akyu wrote:
| Doesn't baffle me at all.
| mbesto wrote:
| Quite the contrary. When you're rich, you start doing projects
| that have _impact_ that are not necessarily tied to _money_ ,
| but rather _power_.
|
| Bezo's owning WaPo
|
| Elon taking board position at Twitter
|
| Zuck/Gates giving away net worth to charity
|
| etc. etc.
| solarkraft wrote:
| For sure. But I fail to see the impact here. If the crypto
| currency element is not intended to be a get-rich-quickly
| scam, how else will this thing benefit anyone? The value
| proposition looks ... funky.
| mbesto wrote:
| Impact? They're talking about providing a universal global
| currency. The geopolitical power and capabilities there are
| enumerable.
| imtringued wrote:
| Charity didn't stop Gates from becoming richer. It's weird.
| In my opinion the biggest problem in the world is that people
| don't want to step down and let someone else have fun.
| gowld wrote:
| SA and PG only have a stellar reputation in entrepeneuer-
| religion circles. To the rest of the world they are just
| annoying billionaires rotting society.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Outside of HN, publications like the NYT/Buzzfeed/etc, and
| maybe far-left twitter, crypto isn't hated that much. So what
| seems like woo-woo tech to you, in reality is a fairly valid
| crypto project. I think HN's hatred towards crypto is
| borderline irrational, and will likely be similar to the
| infamous dropbox launch comment over the next decade.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris
| images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its
| currency. If perfected, the company says the technology will
| distill the image of each set of irises into a unique string
| of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be stored in
| Worldcoin's database. As the company's data consent form
| states, data gathered by the Orb will be used for "purposes
| such as training of our neural network for the recognition of
| human irises."_ "
| morelisp wrote:
| > It baffles me that Altman picked up such a creepy, woo-woo
| tech project.
|
| As the kids say today, maybe check your priors.
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| Having a proof-of-human system for crypto which avoids storage
| of biometric data and allows pseudonymous wallets would be a
| massive win that would change literally everything about what's
| being developed right now. It's a pretty big and important
| problem.
| pen2l wrote:
| You don't offer a convincing argument.
|
| We're witnessing the current real estate system destroy
| society before our very eyes, to propose then this idea that
| an inherently deflationary currency system is going to be a
| win is, I say as respectfully as I can, abhorrent.
|
| Let's please learn this and just move on: the ones who got in
| early are rich just like it is with housing, just by virtue
| of having gotten in early; at this point it is only
| defrauding the ignorant.
|
| I couldn't have come up with a better way to fuck humanity as
| efficiently as cryptocurrency manages to if I was paid to.
| awinter-py wrote:
| I like how someone definitely based the UX on vanilla sky (abre
| los ojos) and the scam part on minority report (stealing eyes)
|
| > "Face detected," said the Orb in its robo-staccato voice when
| one of the men pointed it at Kudzanayi. "Open your eyes." The
| machine stared back at him for about 30 seconds before the men
| fiddled with their phones and told him they were done.
|
| > "Its now more than 3 months, what did you do with our eyes?"
| one person wrote in a text to an Orb operator, which was viewed
| by BuzzFeed News. "This was all a lie this worldcoin is the same
| as other scams. Prove me wrong if l am talking lies," said
| another. A third called the operators "thieves" for stealing
| their eyes.
|
| in theory there should be a cryogenics phase next? or switch to
| arnold and do like a free trip to mars
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Worldcoin isn't an effort to accumulate biometric data -- Clear
| (the private company that competes with TSA PreCheck) does this
| at most airports in the US. Instead, Worldcoin uses sophisticated
| cryptography[1] specifically to avoid the collection of biometric
| data.
|
| The value appears to be in the ability to resist the Sybil
| problem[2] with this cryptographic proof of uniqueness[3] as well
| as the wide distribution of tokens (a play on Metcalfe's Law)[4].
|
| Of course, I expect the usual unrelenting crypto skepticism from
| HN, and see that proudly on display today. :)
|
| [1]: https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack [3]:
| https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1451204467815235587 [4]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I believe that a GAN could simply create a million irises [0].
| Making all claims of defeating the Sybil problem difficult to
| trust. Someone also pointed out that the person being scanned
| doesn't need to be alive, which reminds me of some conspiracies
| during 2020 election
|
| [0]: https://www.thisirisdoesnotexist.com/ (i didn't expect
| this to exist!)
| brap wrote:
| Not only fake and dead people, but also real and living
| people who did not consent or fully understand what they're
| consenting to. The whole premise just sounds so absurd.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Except as the article states based on quotes and leaked
| presentations, they are collecting the data. The page you
| linked confirms it. You might be right that their aspiration is
| to not collect biometric data, but they are collecting it and
| that's what this article is about: Worldcoin collecting 500,000
| people's biometric data.
|
| "Images of users' body, face, and eyes, including users' irises
| (visible, near infrared and far infrared spectrum)"
|
| "Three-dimensional mapping of users' body and face"
|
| https://worldcoin.org/privacy-during-field-testing
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| You're making my point -- Worldcoin's business isn't to
| collect biometric data, as alleged by many comments here.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Their business is whatever they're doing, we can't give
| organisations a free pass on bad behaviour because they
| aspire to be well behaved once they've extracted enough
| value from their bad behaviour.
|
| Your comment implies that the article is wrong: it isn't.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| The article plays to the idea that "the company is using
| its cryptocurrency as a way to amass millions of
| biometrics", which is factually incorrect. The company is
| using biometrics made private via advanced cryptography,
| which aren't amassed or stored beyond the testing phase,
| as a means of distributing the token widely and uniquely
| to each person once.
|
| The explanatory arrow for their business is backwards.
| It's totally factually incorrect.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Sure, you're right, it is factually incorrect to say that
| they're using a cryptocurrency to amass millions of
| biometrics, because they're actually using the _promise_
| of a cryptocurrency to amass 500,000 biometrics. Very
| important difference!
|
| You're putting so much weight in "...the testing
| phase..." as if that grants carte blanche to do whatever
| because the goal is (ostensibly) noble. The biometrics
| they're collecting and storing and processing belong to
| real people, whether they're in their "testing phase" or
| not is immaterial. The goal of this whole Orb-on-tour
| program is to collect biometrics, their primary activity
| is biometric collection.
|
| They've pushed back their launch multiple times because
| they've acknowledged that their technology is susceptible
| to fraud and still needs work... so when does "the
| testing phase" end? When they've made their technology
| perfect? What if it takes 1 year, 5 years or even 10
| years? What if they spend the next decade collecting
| millions of people's biometrics, is that okay because
| it's "the testing phase"?
|
| They're going to poverty stricken countries and taking
| advantage of economically disadvantaged people (and then
| not even delivering on their meagre promises) and that's
| okay because it's not their explicit intent, it's just
| what they haaaave to do in the testing phase?
|
| Let's play this out, let's assume (based on their
| inability to do it so far) that they fail to turn this
| experimental biometrics device into something that can
| uniquely identify people using a privacy-secure
| cryptographic process. Now let's take this quote from the
| Worldcoin CEO:
|
| "We didn't want to build hardware devices -- we didn't
| want to build a biometric device, even. It's just the
| only solution we found,"
|
| Doesn't take much to imagine them saying:
|
| "We didn't want to [store privacy-insecure biometric
| data] -- we didn't want to build a biometric device,
| even. It's just the only solution we found," he said.
|
| Then what? Well they didn't want to store biometrics but
| they had to so it's okay?
|
| They literally cannot even pay the people they sought out
| in poverty stricken countries the $25 that they promised,
| a task so trivial it can only be a wilful choice to fail
| to do it, so why on earth would we be charitable in how
| we assess the likelihood that they stick to their (as yet
| unproven) promise?
|
| Worldcoin is a biometrics collection business until they
| do anything else.
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| While I watched or read dystopian sci fi horrified at the twisted
| scenarios presented, these tech nerds on the other hand were
| furiously driven to be the villains in the story. I hope I'm
| wrong, but at least that is how it feels from the outside looking
| in.
|
| And now people (lesser level of the same kind) flock to their
| companies to be edgy. Trust me guys I know it's called
| $nameOfSomeEvilItemHeldBySomeEvilCharacter but don't worry we'll
| be using it for $randomBenignSoundingThingButReallyAScam
| propter_hoc wrote:
| This is horrifyingly dystopian. Glad that the media is starting
| to cover this critically, I bet the fallout will cause the VCs to
| pull away soon.
| manholio wrote:
| They say they scan irises so that each person is unique and
| "nobody gets more than their fair share". Why then not use the
| clasic identifiers: name, date of birth, proven with a state
| issued document, and a facial picture holding some sign. These
| are easy to do remote and are the current standard for financial
| KYC, which any "world currency" needs to take into consideration
| in the post-Bitcoin world.
|
| Sure, some people don't have access to government issued IDs, but
| they are a minority in the world population. The economic
| benefits of having a government capable of issuing IDs are so
| great, that Worldcoin, if successful, could provide technical and
| financial assistance to those states directly to implement such
| systems, instead of pushing dubious "Orbs" onto the world.
|
| The whole "nobody gets more than their fair share" trope is
| dubious. What will the typical person from DR Congo do with $20
| worth of altcoins on his phone? 99% of them will sell it for $20
| minus fees and pocket the money. A very small investor minority
| can afford to hodl, select few will purchase and accumulate
| w-coins, and those will earn the speculative appreciation
| Worldcoin founders are really after. The whole populist act is a
| ruse to get the bubble going.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Yeah the fair share comment felt scummy as hell. I presume the
| coin founder's "fair share" is quite sizeable.
| BayAreaEscapee wrote:
| Regardless of the meritoriousness of Sam Altman's startup, I find
| at admirable that the admins allow these kind of discussions
| about Y Combinator to go on. There is so much outright censorship
| on the internet these days. It would be easy for YC to just have
| a policy of deleting any content or threads critical of YC, and
| it's good to see that's not what's happening.
| alangibson wrote:
| I would love to meet whoever designed the Orb. That thing is
| insanely creepy. I'd be worried it would steal my soul and I'm a
| materialist. I can't imagine it goes over well I places where
| superstition is common.
| manesioz wrote:
| > People may never receive the money they were promised. "We make
| no warranty ... that we will be successful launching the
| Worldcoin network or issuing WLD tokens," says a contract
| distributors must sign before receiving an Orb, which was viewed
| by BuzzFeed News. "We are providing the Orb to you for
| experimental purposes, to advance our objectives, including to
| gather data on the use of the Orb by end users, and for no other
| purpose."
|
| So they're taking advantage of people in poor countries to
| collect their biometric data. Yikes. The people who made this are
| the same people who talk endlessly about the virtue of innovation
| and technology.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What are the odds this will end with Worldcoin being sold off
| for parts - namely the "orb" technology and the biometric
| database? I'm sure a company like Palantir could find a use for
| this stuff.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Ever since I heard of Worldcoin, I've been thinking that's
| the plan...gather enough biometric data and sell it off to a
| larger player (likely a surveillance company), while pumping
| some shitcoins on the side.
|
| Or maybe they'll monetize the database themselves...the whole
| thing is just creepy
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| (I work for Palantir but any opinions are my own)
|
| Palantir is not in the business of collecting data, and as
| such would have no use for this data.
|
| Here's an official blog post explaining this:
| https://blog.palantir.com/palantir-is-not-a-data-company-
| pal...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't like Palantir, but I'm not sure why you're being
| downvoted. You are correct that Palantir probably would not
| want to acquire a bunch of biometric data. My mistake.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Especially since Palantir gets all the biometric data
| they want from their government clients anway.
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| That's not accurate. The article I linked is better at
| explaining this than I am:
|
| > We license this software to organisations, who receive
| secure and unique instances of our platforms in which to
| conduct their own work on their own data.
|
| > We do not and cannot reuse or transfer our clients'
| data for our own purposes. Attempting to profit from
| customer data in this way would be illegal and would
| undermine the trust that is necessary to work in the
| sensitive environments in which we have built our
| business.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Sure, I wouldn't be surprised so if three letter agencies
| and their foreign counter parts were using Palantir as a
| clearing house for information. Plus I am far beyond the
| point of believing company announcements and statements.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| > Palantir is not in the business of collecting data
|
| From all we know about Palantir collecting and
| visualizing data is the whole reason for their existence.
|
| Thus I think that a critical view of this post is
| warranted.
|
| Regardless if this specific data would be of interest.
|
| e: clarification
| fl0wenol wrote:
| Unfortunately, this is a reputation your organization
| cultivated for itself.
|
| For gods' sake, the name is _Palantir_
|
| If anyone truly needed rebranding right now, it's you guys.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I'd argue it's an honest name and their reputation is
| fairly well in line with what they actually accomplish in
| the world. They should change but not the branding.
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| > Unfortunately, this is a reputation your organization
| cultivated for itself.
|
| Yeah, I agree! The article acknowledges this in the first
| few paragraphs.
| nerdo wrote:
| > Orb operators in Africa, Asia, and Europe spoke to BuzzFeed
| News under the condition of anonymity because they feared
| retribution from Worldcoin as well as local authorities.
|
| Show that sentence to someone in 1995 it would blow their minds.
| [deleted]
| Agnosco wrote:
| Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment on this story. Khosla
| Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.
|
| Just not good enough.
| eternalsept wrote:
| Reminds me of the United Nations using eyeball scan payment
| systems instead of cash to let refugees buy stuff from local
| stores.
| brap wrote:
| I have yet to hear of a single crypto idea in the last 5 years
| that was either stupid, malicious, or both.
|
| "How do we print free money for everyone in the world? Oh I know,
| we'll just make it virtual money! Also eyeballs!"
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is a lazy way to ensure one wallet per person. Just look at how
| real world does this. There are layers and layers of checks
| throughout a persons life that verify they exist individually,
| sign off from nurses and docs at birth etc. Taking photos of a
| government id is one of them. Even that, it can still be faked if
| you go enough lengths, let alone a one time iris scanner.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| I believe the correct term for this is _sketchy_ , and that's
| probably being too generous to Sam.
|
| This is some next level dystopia nonsense. There are plenty of
| KYC (Know Your Client) imperatives out there that don't require
| yet another blockchain driven platform and a scan of your fucking
| eyeball.
|
| It's a no from me. This is more than sketchy it's downright
| awful.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I like the concept, a lot, because I've always thought that money
| should be redistributed equitably. But can we maybe think of a
| better way of doing it? Like just giving everybody credit or
| smth?
| 1024core wrote:
| > concerns that the company is using its cryptocurrency as a way
| to amass millions of biometrics and perfect a new kind of
| authentication technology for the blockchain era.
|
| Isn't retinal scanning an "old" technology by now? I know we (the
| US) used it in Afghanistan to identify people years ago.
| verisimi wrote:
| What's with the orb gimmick - a spherical metal camera? Why not
| use a normal camera?
|
| Slurping up biometric data, on the promise of free money - lol
|
| PS Apparently the orb is for:
|
| Our approach relies on a custom biometric device - we call it the
| Orb - that verifies the uniqueness of a person through iris
| recognition, while ensuring their privacy through zero-knowledge
| cryptography.
|
| https://worldcoin.org/how-the-launch-works#field-tests
|
| But I thought people's irises can in fact change colour and
| pattern.. maybe there's some special software that updates that
| too with zero-knowledge... what do I know?
| katmannthree wrote:
| > What's with the orb gimmick - a spherical metal camera?
|
| How are you supposed to start a cult with a normal camera
| though? At least that's the vibe I'm picking up from how they
| revere the Orb in their copy.
| axus wrote:
| Maybe they could include an E-meter?
| helge9210 wrote:
| The Orb itself is actually a remarkable piece of technology
| (considering what is available in a package of this size).
|
| "Normal camera" won't do for the same reason Face ID won't work
| without PrimeSense.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the OP is referring to the form factor. It seems
| impractical and gimmicky. Why not stick the same technology
| into something shaped like a DSLR or video camera - i.e.
| something easier to hold? Making a shiny orb betrays an
| obsession with the technology and not the problem they're
| ostensibly trying to solve.
|
| Edit: The article includes 2 pictures of orb operators using
| the orb. In both cases it seems like a more traditional form
| factor would be better. The first picture shows an orb
| operator balancing the orb in his hand - seems like a handle
| would be useful. The second picture shows the spherical orb
| awkwardly strapped to a flat platform on top of a monopod or
| tripod. I'm guessing that the orb does not have a tripod
| mount, but it _really_ should.
| helge9210 wrote:
| I had an interview with the company and the interviewer was
| kind enough to show me the device.
|
| When I was solving this class of problems in 2016 (image
| acquisition, object detection, identification, measurement
| etc.) with same kind of limitations (everything has to
| happen within the device itself, no uplink to the cloud) I
| managed it with a box of 100 kg and a size of really big
| suitcase.
|
| Seeing this (sensor package and computation) within small
| device impressed me personally.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's literally an "oooh shiny" tactic
| qchris wrote:
| I've heard that there's been pressure to shut down or
| significantly reduce BuzzFeed.News in order to lower the cost[1],
| but I really hope that they manage to keep the organization
| running and effective. I struggle to think of many other
| newsrooms, let alone an upstart like this one, that are able to
| produce articles of this quality through investigative
| journalism, especially on a story involving topics like
| cryptocurrency and privacy ethics.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/buzzfeed-investors-have-
| push...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Reposting a comment I left here [1] after realising it will be
| totally eclipsed by this thread.
|
| This "defence of" post [1] is absolutely cringe-worthy, both in
| the poverty of its arguments and shameless apologetics. The
| arguments basically say, for each terrible, insecure and
| dehumanising act X:
|
| 1) Don't worry about us doing X because soon everyone will be
| doing X.
|
| 2) Everyone can safely do X because some people are already doing
| X.
|
| 3) We'll all definitely get very rich from doing X but don't
| worry, maybe some other people can get rich doing X2, X3, X4 too.
|
| 4) Please just ignore that X provokes visceral horror from
| everyone who encounters it. The association with dystopia is
| likely caused by those silly science fiction authors.
|
| 5) Don't worry about X creating a dystopian hell, because it will
| preserve privacy (hint: privacy is not the only dimension of
| human dignity and is barely relevant in this case anyway)
|
| 6) The track record of the team making X is unquestionable. They
| are already ball-deep in other projects of questionable merit to
| society. The masterminds of X are not interested in extracting
| profits from the project, they will have more than enough raw
| power from controlling them.
|
| They basically admit the whole thing is a scam to get people to
| accept the dystopian bait - proof of person-hood - "The Worldcoin
| coin only needs to retain value as an incentive to get people
| signed up".
|
| I guess the problem, from a simple philosophers point of view is
| that nobody who actually is a person needs or wants to prove that
| they are, because that self-evidently constitutes what a person
| is.
|
| But there are two other matters.
|
| One is that the very definition of "proof of person-hood" implies
| non-person-hood. That's the road that leads to the ovens at
| Belsen.
|
| The other point is that the only excuse you'd ever have for a
| "proof of person-hood" would be in a world where humans were so
| disconnected and disempowered that they'd have to compete within
| systems with AIs designed to be indistinguishable from people.
| And guess who is building those?
|
| Seriously, understand what iatrogenic means, and why a company
| that wants to "change the world for the better" [2] by making the
| poison and the antidote should worry you.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30935213 [2] Anand
| Giridharadas. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the
| World
| IncRnd wrote:
| I am going to give from 231 to 789 HNCoins[1] to anyone who reads
| this post. The number of coins awarded will scale depending on
| factors we will discretely and securely apply using our
| proprietary algorithm that determines how we decide to reward our
| HNCoins during the decision process. [2] If you are a
| cryptographer, SME, blockchain guru, or brain surgeon take a
| gander at our peer reviewed whitepaper! [3]
|
| [1] Past and Future performance do not indicate an ability to
| convert from HNCoins to any alternate currencies.
|
| [2] Not all people will get awarded within the stated range of
| HNCoins.
|
| [3] https://www.usmint.gov/learn/kids/resources/coin-
| activities/...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's worth taking a step back to think just how awful this whole
| enterprise is. The article is mostly about their marketing and
| scanning affiliates feeling scammed in what looks like very
| direct labor exploitation. Also the biometrics they are
| collecting are not being collected with informed consent. There's
| a distinct air of colonialism about the whole enterprise. The
| cryptocurrency they promise will be the payment for those
| biometrics does not exist. And even if it did, it seems quite
| possible the whole thing is just another crypto scam.
|
| And financing all this perfidy is Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla
| Ventures, and Sam Altman.
| mdb333 wrote:
| Basically the same article that ran ~6 months back...
|
| Anyhow, I happened to interview with these folks a year or two
| ago: 20% interesting concept 80% red
| flags
|
| At that time I could barely find anything more than tenuous links
| to Sam Altman. Seems like maybe he's upped his role as they're
| getting into bigger $$$ raises.
| timcavel wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Crypto Startup That Wants to Scan Everyone's Eyeballs Is Having
| Some Trouble_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30699327 -
| March 2022 (30 comments)
|
| _Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman 's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue
| Eyeballs'_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 - Oct
| 2021 (298 comments)
|
| _Sam Altman's Worldcoin wants to scan eyeballs in exchange for
| crypto_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 - Oct
| 2021 (95 comments)
|
| _Worldcoin_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945557 -
| Oct 2021 (101 comments)
|
| _Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for
| Cryptocurrency_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27674598 -
| June 2021 (30 comments)
|
| Others?
| nradov wrote:
| So if you lose your eye in an accident or something do you then
| lose your coins?
| asasidh wrote:
| Scam Altman should not have associated with these kind of scams.
| Lost any credibility he built till date.
| walrus01 wrote:
| The only valuable thing about Worldcoin is the eyeball scans with
| possible additional geolocation metadata for where the person was
| scanned. I can see something like Palantir buying the data when
| the company goes belly up.
|
| The fact that most of these eyeball scans have been collected in
| developing nations with little/no concern to data privacy laws
| (imagine doing this in a GDPR EU location) makes it extra-
| suspicious in my opinion.
| johnqian wrote:
| I think a lot of commenters here would benefit from adjusting
| their scam-radars. The way you scam people is by offering
| something that sounds great and plausible, but actually isn't.
| Consider Theranos, Bernie Madoff, etc. Worldcoin doesn't fit the
| pattern at all. To almost everyone that they need to sell to, it
| sounds ridiculous and dystopian. If Sam wanted to scam the poor
| to make himself richer, why would he make it so difficult for
| himself? There's far easier ways to do it that would escape
| public scrutiny.
|
| I don't know whether the approach will work, but we'd have a much
| more productive conversation if we assumed good intent.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _To almost everyone that they need to sell to, it sounds
| ridiculous and dystopian._
|
| I've heard this kind of apology for scams before.
|
| If a "scam that sounds like a scam" still rips people
| successfully, well, the scammers are still guilty of fraud and
| I still view people who do it with contempt.
|
| And "scams that sound like scams" are marketed to desperate
| people. In many ways, finding a promise people want to believe
| is more important than finding a claim that you easily defend.
| The people who check out frauds in detail are never a fraud's
| target market.
| Stampo00 wrote:
| Okay, but does it have to be _my_ eyeball?
| johnsgresham wrote:
| I wrote a post digging deeper into the Proof-of-Personhood
| problem and Worldcoin's design here
| https://mirror.xyz/johnsgresham.eth/6lL5QT6UqW9VBCdUb6xK2gjh...
|
| Although many of the complaints seem like operators getting their
| hopes up and Worldcoin miscommunication, it's unfortunate to hear
| about the growing pains in the buzzfeed article, and I hope
| Worldcoin can work them out.
| jdrc wrote:
| metaverse is such a scam, but at least it's a way to do random
| wealth redistribution
| jollybean wrote:
| The solution to 99% of problems is conscientiousness and
| competency.
|
| Technology and provide some game changing opportunities - such as
| for example access to information, access to basic banking, maybe
| a couple of vaccines can re-shape a region ...
|
| ... but generally speaking there will never be a substitute to
| social organization at all levels.
|
| If people are corrupt and incompetent, they will have nothing.
|
| If everyone from the barber to the president act diligently and
| thoughtfully, for the most part, most social malaise would
| disappear.
|
| Many poor countries have ample natural resources with which to
| provide a foundation for a base economy, funny that places like
| Japan, Singapore, Germany etc. are able to provide very high
| standard of living without much in the way of 'free money in the
| ground' ...
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Worldcoin talks about UBI which based on what Sam has said in the
| past I would take them at their word on. But beyond UBI what
| WorldCoin is going for is identity.
|
| In the nonblockchain world your identity is your Country ID,
| Passport, etc.
|
| In the blockchain world none of that stuff exists and people get
| uncomfortable when you start asking for it.
|
| This leaves a situation where a person is often just represented
| by a wallet. Well as you may know a person can make dozens or
| hundreds of wallets.
|
| This problem leads to all kinds of weird tricks that crypto
| projects get up to when trying to verify 1 wallet 1 person. For
| example in the idea of 1 person 1 vote on a project or for
| something like an airdrop early in a project where people on a
| discord get free crypto for being early adopters but you don't
| want one person registering with many wallets.
|
| Today that might look verification based on a phone number
| associated with discord or something. Real flimsy stuff.
|
| Worldcoin bases it on retina, which I admit creeps me out as well
| even if it's just a hash. But I can see what they're getting at.
| The need is there, maybe there is a better way.
|
| I used to work at crypto startup and we ran into this exact
| problem.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| I appreciate this insightful comment.
|
| You seem to know more than the average person about this topic.
|
| Would you care to elaborate on the risks associated with this
| retina blockchain tech?
|
| I'd value your thoughts, as would many others here I'm sure.
|
| Thanks either way!
| tern wrote:
| This project faces a few risks:
|
| - Abuse of orb operators by Worldcoin, as outlined in the
| article. This is basically equivalent to abuse of Uber
| drivers by Uber. They are offering a job and they need to be
| good employers.
|
| - Abuse of orb operators by other actors, again, as outlined
| in the article. Since they are "giving away free money," it's
| quite natural for legitimate and illegitimate authorities to
| imagine there's an opportunity to prosecute or profit from
| taking advantage of the system. So far as I can see, there is
| no such opportunity, but it won't stop people who don't
| understand what's happening.
|
| - Abuse of the biometrics themselves to create an unfair
| distribution, as mentioned in the article. If the eye
| scanners actually don't create a unique hash for each
| individual, or if people learn how to create fake irises, or
| otherwise hack the device, people could sign up multiple
| times and receive more free money than other people. If this
| scam works at scale, orb operators could become targets.
|
| - Abuse of Worldcoin "users." Orb operators could sign people
| up, then steal their crypto wallets from them. This could be
| done through coercion or through misinformation.
|
| - Scams: namely, people creating fake orbs that _do_ collect
| and abuse biometric information
|
| - Unlikely, but: collecting more information than needed and
| then getting compromised by bad actors or by some kind of
| corporate takeover. As far as I know, Worldcoin only collects
| hashes of irises (and maybe telemetry). This data is pretty
| much useless for any purpose other than the intended one:
| providing people with a unique wallet. Abuses of such data
| could do one thing: given the original person and the device,
| prove that they signed up for Worldcoin. If Worldcoin
| accidentally collects some other kind of data, which has some
| other abuse potential, this could be a problem. I suspect
| they will be very careful not to do this.
|
| In conclusion, the "retina blockchain tech" has, really, no
| risks associated inherently. Distribution, however, must be
| carefully handled to avoid abuse.
|
| This is especially complicated because most people will not
| understand how the technology works and will attempt to
| exploit it in ways that, in the end, won't work.
| Nevertheless, they may cause harm in the meantime.
|
| The problem is analogous to a bank offering free money to
| anyone who shows up. Provided they can prove identity, there
| is no problem inherently. People show up and get free money,
| then leave. However, how would you maintain order in the line
| that has formed? What to do about someone who shows up with a
| gun? What if the teller is assaulted? What if the tellers are
| not protected or paid appropriately for their service?
|
| Worldcoin, if it succeeds, will merely put everyone in the
| world on more equal economic footing, and make a few people
| rich. It will also launch the first ever decentralized
| identity system with a significant user-base. If they can
| pull this off, I'm more concerned about the geopolitical,
| governance and economic consequences of a cryptocurrency with
| wider distribution than Bitcoin, and of the identity system.
| What happens when anyone in the world can airdrop
| cryptocurrency to more than a billion people?
| mcguire wrote:
| Worldcoin is absolutely collecting more information than
| iris hashes.
|
| " _Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris
| images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its
| currency. If perfected, the company says the technology
| will distill the image of each set of irises into a unique
| string of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be
| stored in Worldcoin's database. As the company's data
| consent form states, data gathered by the Orb will be used
| for "purposes such as training of our neural network for
| the recognition of human irises."_ "
|
| Would you like to invest in my new blockchain technology?
| Send me $100,000 and sign a non-consent and I'll explain it
| to you.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| The risks of retina scanning are the same regardless whether
| in blockchain or any other domain. The company collecting
| your retina signature/hash/data gets breached, your PII is
| stolen, sold on the black market, and criminals use your
| biometric data to create fake, fraudulent identities and
| accounts and steal stuff in your name. This is already
| happening, just without the biometric data.
| tern wrote:
| Is there currently a way to create a fake identity from a
| photograph of an iris?
| na85 wrote:
| Here's what I don't get about this issue: Given that crypto's
| value prop is a decentralized, democratized currency free from
| any regulatory body's oversight, why are crypto people viewing
| this as "a problem"?
|
| It seems to me that they want to have their cake and eat it
| too.
|
| The "identity verification" function is one of the roles that
| governmental agencies are well-suited to perform.
|
| Another is prosecuting fraud.
|
| If crypto doesn't want government "interference" then why is
| the crypto community so invested in replicating that
| "interference", except in an objectively inferior way?
| hiq wrote:
| It's not an all-or-nothing situation, e.g. you might want to
| ensure that every user gets 100 tokens only once in their
| lifetime without further constraints afterwards on what they
| can do with this. Not saying there's any crypto project where
| this would make business sense, but a priori and without
| concrete example, why not.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Proof of Work's raison d'etre is to mitigate Sybil attacks so a
| naive solution to the problem would be to have people "mine"
| their airdrop.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| Bitcoin/crypto solved the "proof of resources" problem in a
| decentralized trustless way, which is cool.
|
| What would be neat now is "proof of unique living individual"
| in the same way.. that would solve a number of problems,
| related to UBI and voting.
|
| In the past, or in dictatorships, resources == votes, but in
| democracies we want individuals == votes.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > What would be neat now is "proof of unique living
| individual" in the same way.. that would solve a number of
| problems, related to UBI and voting.
|
| So, there was a project called Aurora that tried to do
| exactly this during the financial crisis fallout in
| Iceland, it failed, mainly because it was way too early and
| the blockchain itself wasn't protected as well as Bitcoin:
| it was presumed that PoS could serve as a possible solution
| if it has a specific usecase.
|
| Unfortunately, we didn't gain as much info and data as we
| could have other than then from a security standpoint
| deviating from BTC was not tenable.
|
| Jack Dorsey is seeking ways to just this with Block, he did
| a recent talk on how UBI could work via Bitcoin's
| blockchain as a way to facilitate seamless txs, the biggest
| obstacle being that this would need to be a layer 2 or
| possibly layer 3 because of the ID component that ensures
| that this info is not retained: think zero proof knowledge
| protocol.
|
| It can be done on mainchain via a derivative for incredibly
| low cost (100 million sats/BTC), but just like colored
| coins was too early this may prove tricky.
|
| What we learned from the COVID unemployment debacle was
| that the payments system in the US is entirely broken and
| cannot function even at the best of times, much less under
| any strain without being subject to total collapse or
| perpetual grift so this needs to happen either way.
|
| Personally speaking, I'd really wish that we can derive
| more data from all the UBI test runs and then have this be
| a major part of layer 2/3 development: for all this talk
| about 'Web3,' a total boomerism if I ever heard one, and
| the money pouring into this space I wish some of it would
| be spent in this space.
|
| I'd offer to help get involved if it were the case as a
| former co-founder, dev and consultant in this space, if
| that were to happen.
| imtringued wrote:
| >What would be neat now is "proof of unique living
| individual" in the same way.. that would solve a number of
| problems, related to UBI and voting.
|
| The Bitcoin way is asking the person to kill his or
| herself. That way it is guaranteed that the person only
| exists once.
| root_axis wrote:
| Why would I prefer to offer up my immutable biometric data if
| I'm uncomfortable offering up my government issue id, this
| reasoning makes no sense.
| drewmol wrote:
| Because in our current environment, a data breach of your
| government issued ID can have more negative real world
| consequences through various forms of identity theft than a
| data breach of your retina can.
| hiq wrote:
| Devil's advocate: I think the point is not to solve a problem
| the users have, but rather a problem the company dabbling in
| crypto has, e.g. that no user benefits twice from one-time
| offers, this kind of things.
| thebean11 wrote:
| You don't offer up the biometric data itself, you offer up
| something anonymized and derived from it (think a hash of
| your biometric data).
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris
| images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its
| currency. If perfected, the company says the technology
| will distill the image of each set of irises into a unique
| string of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be
| stored in Worldcoin's database. As the company's data
| consent form states, data gathered by the Orb will be used
| for "purposes such as training of our neural network for
| the recognition of human irises."_ "
| rdiddly wrote:
| Well this is a pretty good social critique, but I would like to
| tackle the technical side a bit more.
|
| 1) As the WorldCoin people know, there is no way a raw iris scan
| is going to be consistent enough to produce the same hash every
| time. Every scan of the same person's iris is going to have
| slight differences compared to previous scans. And a hash, as HN
| well knows, is designed to amplify slight differences, so it is,
| if you will, a "different-maker." (It makes two things more
| different from each other.) So to address this, they're saying
| "Wait, wait, we'll spread some ML in between like so much peanut
| butter," with the goal of transforming multiple slightly-
| different scans of the same iris into something "the same" enough
| to generate the same hash. So this part is a "same-maker," that
| makes different things more similar. Aside from how half-assed
| this sounds (a same-maker and a different-maker fighting each
| other[0]), now throw in what you already know from every "Turns
| Out Some Problems Came Up with This Particular Widely-Hyped ML
| Application" article in HN for the past 5 years. No ML model is
| perfect and they all have false positives/negatives and the like.
| Remember this is supposedly for identifying people. What if,
| before you apply your different-maker, your same-maker makes two
| different people's irises the same, such that they have the same
| hash and the different-maker can't tell the difference? Then your
| shit is fucked there, happy camper. I'm saying, not in this
| decade, will this work right.
|
| 2) If you're ever wondering whether a particular tool or piece of
| technology is something designed to serve humans and adapt and
| accommodate itself to humans, vs. something humans are supposed
| to serve and to which we're supposed to adapt and accommodate
| ourselves, just look for the handle. Obviously I'm being a little
| facetious but you get the idea. Someone brought this up elsewhere
| on the thread and I thought it was spot-on.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30932568
|
| [0] ...although it does sound like fertile ground for something
| GAN-like
| daenz wrote:
| This whole thing gives the impression that these tech gurus view
| the rest of us (particularly less developed countries) as cattle,
| to be identified, categorized, and allocated a pre-defined amount
| of resources.
| mcguire wrote:
| Ok, so here's a general notice to the techbros of the world:
| _Most people, when you say "X is true" believe that you are
| saying that X is true._ Not that you are saying X will be true in
| the future, not that X might be true at some point in time, and
| certainly not that you are asserting that X is physically
| possible.
|
| Anyone remember the argument that rather than waiting to recharge
| an electric car's battery, you can just drop the battery, bolt a
| new one in place, and be on your way? Yes, that is physically
| possible. Yes, it might be a way to do things sometime in the
| future. But no, it is not possible now, no one is building out
| the infrastructure required, and as far as I know no vehicle
| manufacturer is designing their vehicles such that the battery
| can be easily and quickly replaced. _The possibility that
| something may be done in the future is not a solution to a
| current problem._
|
| This may be news to you, but most people who might exchange a
| iris scan for $20 in currency that you cannot access now, and may
| never be able to access, would consider that to be _fraud._ _You
| have lied to them._
|
| But that's just the start of the craziness here.
|
| " _The documents indicate that the true value of Worldcoin's
| continent-spanning field test lies in its distinctive Orbs.
| Rather than just facilitating the company's utopian promises, the
| Orb appears to be at the core of Worldcoin's ambitions to
| dominate the emerging business of anonymous digital
| authentication: in other words, proving that an online avatar is
| a real person without revealing who they are. [...] Worldcoin
| says that once its systems are perfected, it will anonymize and
| delete users' biometric data, thereby guaranteeing their privacy.
| But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even
| though it has captured and stored almost a half million iris
| scans to train its algorithms._ "
|
| Yes, they're simply lying about the reason they are collecting
| data.
|
| " _Blania strongly pushed back on the suggestion that Worldcoin's
| purpose was to harvest the world's eyeballs in return for a
| cryptocurrency that may turn out to be worthless. That notion "is
| just very wrong. I don't even know where to start, like this is
| just very wrong," he said._ "
|
| Yeah, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and spends its
| time quacking, it's probably a duck. Theranos!
| negamax wrote:
| Sama join the long list of shitcoin paddlers. Sad day
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