This project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.
Thanks, that must be what the op was referencing; and also thanks for affirming the sibling comment. The tools for humanity and the worldcoin foundation sites don't have much info on them from what I can tell. I wonder at how they go about preventing volatility and how they eventually plan on doing that in US. Sounds dodgy if they are avoiding our jurisdiction.
It doesn't create or track identities. It creates a unique hash of your iris and can only use it to determine if your iris has been scanned before. Nothing else.
Biometrics as private keys are an absolutely horrible idea as it is.
Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane.
The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.
> Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me.
You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
They are very clearly playing the game of positioning themselves as the AGI good guys, and at the same time Sam Altman has been encouraging the view that AGI is dangerous.
the current 'normie' understanding of ChatGPT and other current LLMs like Bard is not that they are stochastic parrots that can complete sentences by probabilities, it's that they are 'stupid AGI.' And if we give them more funding and more training, eventually they will become 'smart AGI.'
OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot) or do any number of things that lean in hard on the 'stupid AGI' angle, never clarifying that their actual product is a spicy autocomplete. You'll never hear OpenAI say 'ChatGPT is a stupid AGI' out loud, but they'll never correct any mainstream misunderstandings that it is.
a lot of the dismissive takedown of LLM's intelligence uses their spurious knowledge of the world, but it is quite easy to have them 1. search the internet 2. search research articles 3. read books and have them work to iteratively improve something.
Right now they cannot do much reliably but calling them a parrot is miopic how little we understand how humans are intelligent and to how LLMs today are more intelligent than a non negligible chunk of the population.
When you ask ChatGPT to write a piece of code that does a thing, it is not reasoning about what the code should do, modeling the problem in its head, figuring out how to translate that into code, then writing it. The neural weights are spitting up a piece of code it determines would probably come after your prompt, based on similarity to a kajillion StackOverflow answers, GitHub repos, textbooks, etc etc. It is not coming up with a solution, just giving you the average answer to the million most similar questions.
ChatGPT can “write code” in the most literal sense that it will give you code when given a prompt, but (unlike how OpenAI markets-by-omission) it does not reason about code like an AGI could.
I'm not particularly interested in AGIs (I'm kind of hoping they don't happen) - but for my purposes the illusion of LLMs being able to code is now good enough that I'm using them to write good, working code for me on a daily basis.
gpt is clearly capable of constructing and interacting with a model of the world -- there was a famous example in the microsoft bing paper where they described a complex maze and had it reason its way out. 'predicting what it thinks is most similar to stackoverflow' etc does not explain any of its behavior in a meaningful way, unless you are willing to apply this description to human intellectual labor. gpt4 is clearly not sentient, but what is shocking about it is that it demonstrates that honest-to-god cognition can be decoupled from sentience.
btw, i think i have tended to see these pessimistic takes by people who have only used 3.5, which is impressive but not reliable -- i strongly recommend using 4 in the course of your job to see how useful it is. every day in the course of interacting with it, it produces novel lines of thought which shock me.
One of them is easy to include in thrilling action movies that allows the idea and risk to enter public consciousness, and the other is something that economics wonks and people interested in how business works at high levels look at.
Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?"
Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!"
Protagonist 1: "Shit, of course! What will we do?"
Audience: Laughs at this shit being played so straight it comes off as a farce.
The problem with regulatory capture is it makes everybody look bad.
The usual morality play is either the evil business hurting people who has to be stopped by the benevolent government regulators, or the evil government regulators hurting innocent businesses who are just trying to make a living and keep prices down and keep jobs from moving offshore.
To which the traditional solutions are either more regulations that businesses don't like or fewer regulations that businesses don't like.
Regulatory capture is when the villains of both sides are working together, and the solution to it is fewer regulations that big businesses do like. But nobody wants to see their hero as a villain so anything that accurately portrays this is unpopular.
> The problem with regulatory capture is it makes everybody look bad
The other problem is this isn't how regulatory capture happens. OpenAI was flexing its badass credentials in the halls of Congress while it wrapped up a multibillion-dollar fundraise. There was no path from Altman's testimony to any sort of regulatory apparatus that wouldn't immediately constrain him.
Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder? They get billions in funding which they can use to absorb regulatory overhead, then the regulations come which price out early stage competitors and make it harder for anyone else to raise the kind of funding they've already secured.
> Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder?
Actual capture involves industry coöpting existing regulators through revolving doors and burdensome rules that reduce the threat of new entrants. It happens quietly. The only times industry proposes new frameworks in public is when they're cornered.
The "regulatory capture" playbook OpenAI purported to follow has zero actual precedent. It is only rhetorically precedented in crypto, where the same nonsense about creating a new regulator that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages was pitched to the naïve.
Isn't the lack of recent precedent because most industries already have existing regulators? A new industry coming into existence isn't that common, and when it does happen, I don't think this is actually unprecedented. AT&T was one of the big proponents of new regulation back when telephone companies were a recent development.
> that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages
But that's classic regulatory capture. The industry gets the government to impose regulations that are wasteful and bureaucratic but can be navigated by a large organization with economies of scale, which allows regulators to appear as if they're doing something, but the rules don't prevent the incumbents from making a mint by consolidating the industry and charging monopoly rents or avoiding taxes paid by the middle class and smaller competitors etc.
> AT&T was one of the big proponents of new regulation back when telephone companies were a recent development
AT&T wanted a regulator so it could scale like the railroads. The regulator wasn't to regulate AT&T, if I remember correctly, it was to regulate the states. (It backfired in the long run.)
Broadly speaking, if you’re weak enough to need a regulator to guard your moat, you’re weak enough to be overpowered by the regulator. Regulatory capture, successful examples, at least, begin from a position of strength. Altman pitched doom and gloom and then, when the EU began reacting, seemed surprised that they weren’t permissive.
> The regulator wasn't to regulate AT&T, if I remember correctly, it was to regulate the states.
It was to consolidate the regulation so they could focus on capturing the one federal regulator instead of 50 different state ones, sure. But you do that so that when the public starts clamoring for something to be done, you get to control what gets done, and do something that benefits the incumbents and not new entrants.
> (It backfired in the long run.)
It seems to me that it's still pretty hard to start a competing telephone company.
I might be able to get some open source VoIP software running on a VM in one day. Now I want to offer WiFi calling plans. There is some domain name in the public DNS where phone numbers are subdomains that resolve to the IP address of its associated phone company so I know where to route calls, and I just go to some free government website to have some numbers routed to me so I can assign them to customers, right? No?
> Broadly speaking, if you’re weak enough to need a regulator to guard your moat, you’re weak enough to be overpowered by the regulator.
But the strength comes from the moat protected by regulations. The law inhibits competition, so you extract lots of rents from customers, so you have lots of money to influence regulators with. The regulators are the source of your power, but you and the rents you extract are the source of campaign funding, and they don't want to cut that off. Or worse, have it directed to the other party, if they can't actually bankrupt you before the next election cycle.
Regulatory capture becomes much easier to understand when you exaggerate it and say they’re trying to hijack and take over the government to make money. It isn’t that, but it’s close enough
The regulatory capture conspiracy is myopic, ignorant, and "cope" as the kids say these days. People act as if Altman had never said spoken about AI dangers until ChatGPT took off, when in reality Altman has written about the dangers of AI before OpenAI even existed. The US government already added GPU dual-use export control restrictions a year ago due to their potential for weaponization, so he is not alone in recognizing the inherent dangers.
The purpose is to build a financial system although data is involved. It's a bit like saying banking is a scheme to get your financial data. I mean banks have your data but it's not the purpose.
Pretty sad. They don't care about regulation that would potentially have a profound impact for everybody, but they care about people voluntarily doing something for a silly crypto token?
He was always sketchy, and the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI (the exact opposite of OpenAI's initial mission).
And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta.
History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.
the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI
To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI.
The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments.
It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
I disagree, it's functionally a gradient because the label encompasses different assumptions when different people say it. (It's even more vague than the US' "freedom of speech", since it lacks a bunch of case-law precedent.)
You're saying clear-cut objective lines exist--where exactly do you believe they are placed?
Not saying this is the "objective truth", but the OSD does a good job of helping you find a clear-cut line when something is "Open Source" (in common parlor) or not: https://opensource.org/osd/
Again, not everyone agrees with those of course, and I guess that's fine. But I think most software developers who are in the FOSS ecosystem could agree that Llama is not "Open Source" as most people understand the term.
You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian)
[1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
I took a look at RSA and 1) it's not technically UBI but a conditional welfare program (UBI is allocated to all adults, even wealthy ones) and 2) it's exceptionally low - just $514 a month. That's 30% minimum wage and a bit less than half the poverty threshold.
I don't think UBI will really work if it doesn't even have support at the poverty line. Part of the point of UBI is a segment of the population which can't find work due to obsolete skills can at least spend the energy to retrain, or perhaps pursue some endeavor that is difficult to monetize but provides some benefit to society. That's difficult to do when one is destitute. As well, it needs to be effective for large swaths of the population if we are indeed heading into a post-work society over the next 10-20 years.
Is that the kind of UBI we want though? If it has a single issuer, like the government, then it has a single point of control which can be used to coerce people (i.e. by threatening to take it away).
The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI. It ought to be a safety net that makes otherwise impractical growth possible.
As a crypto, CirclesUBI is a bit of a disaster (e.g. the hosted UI, and sensitivity to certain kinds of attack), but I think they got the tokenomics right: it encourages Sybil resistant behavior among the users without trying to bind an address to your body and without relying on an issuer's good behavior.
Since USA still controls it's currency issuance (unlike EU members), why isn't this in place today? Rename food stamps and WIC into newUBI and start rolling it out.
Given that we'd have to all conspire to respect the UBI token while we replaced the government, I'd classify it as cryptocommunism, but I take your point.
I just have a hard time imagining a government that both:
- keeps the U in UBI
- is not under some kind if existential threat from its people
You need the latter to have the former. But if you're coordinated to achieve the latter then you don't really need the government to achieve the former anyway.
> The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI
If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.
there's a civil war ongoing but your income is still at its pre-war level (without any devaluation, meaning you keep your pre-war purchasing power) thanks to the magic of the blockchain.
> without any devaluation, meaning you keep your pre-war purchasing power
That's not how economics works.
The purchasing power of any currency, for example USD, isn't the same everywhere even at a fixed point in time, because we don't have negligible-cost transportation in war zones (amongst other places).
It would come down to devaluation by whom right? If everybody wants the war to end and both sides see you as somebody that is working towards a reasonable plan of ending it, then I expect your tokens would go pretty far.
And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat and your evaluation of their tokens as well. Reciprocal exchange and utility, not market value.
This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. (Ceteris paribus.) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.
Sure, but that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.
I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.
> that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.
It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.
> you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed
How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Keep in mind, you are in a war zone, which means no guarantee of safe imports or exports. (Also, whose tokens?)
Managing an economy on a war footing is old business. There is nothing Worldcoin does to even remotely approach giving a semblance of an indication that anyone on their team has actually thought about this, like, once.
> that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal
This is, in a nutshell, the problem with anything that purports to maintain its value over long durations of time. Value keeping takes work. We can't meaningfully convert ancient currencies to modern ones because it makes no sense to ask how many days' labour a Roman peasant would trade for an iPhone. These problems are fundamental to the notions of value. They don't have a technical solution. Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
> The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.
Followed by
> Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?
If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere, nor does it matter what the "value" of our coins is in terms of some number, so long as they are issued to each of us at the same rate.
You only have to bother with establishing a correspondence with some allegedly valuable thing in the real world (gold, factories, whatever) if you want a globally consistent notion of value. A notion which, as you've explained, is a fiction, and which I'd argue, is a harmful one.
> Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?
Yes. (It’s paradoxical because it is, though an unremarkably old paradox at that.)
> If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere
It does if that war just blockaded the barley!
> Better to just value the coins in a nonspecific way
With each area that tends to trade together having a common coin or set of coins for reference purposes, and large interchanges between them?
The way I'd do it, each user gets their own type of coin and then they form webs of trust such that tokens flow along paths of transitive trust. In a highly connected part of the web, everybody is treating everybody else's tokens as interchangeable.
Things would differ from traditional currency in cases where users are not well connected. Imagine a newcomer, flush with tokens from a disconnected or distantly connected part of the network. They may not be able to find any locals that will accept their tokens. (This sort of hygiene discourages Sybil accounts and makes difficult the kind of bank-driven shenanigans that were typical of US foreign policy in the 70's). If you want to do remote business you should have to gain the trust of the locals first, and you should have to fear that they'll revoke that trust in response to bad behavior on your part.
The value of a loaf of bread, as expressed in a conventional currency would then be a function of whether the baker had needs that weren't met by the local economy. Communities that are highly dependent on the global economy would have a great need of conventional currency. Self sufficient communities, less so (this is to prevent the formation of the overly complex, and therefore fragile, supply chains that we see today).
So yes, I expect that the structure that you describe would emerge, with densely connected hubs etc. The UBI token would only make sense for use within a hub though. You'd probably use a strictly-scarcity-based currency like USD or whatever for inter-hub commerce.
This is because if the goods are coming or going a great distance then you don't really need all the trust stuff since you're unlikely to be in a position to care about the externalities of their manufacture/use anyway. By contrast, if the goods are coming from your neighbor's back yard then you probably want to be using something besides conventional currency, something that lets you threaten to revoke trust if their operations are poisoning the drinking water or whatever.
Mostly this design is inspired by how CirclesUBI does it, but there's a few tweaks I'd make of I were going to try to build such a thing.
> Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.
Yes, it would; neither form of the “U” in UBI includes free of borders in the sense used in the term, and reinterpreting that way and pretending its what the term means is just lazy equivocation.
> If you're denying people access to the system based on where they happen to be, it's not universal.
“Universal” seems to be a later construction, it was originally “unconditional”, and in both cases the writings on it for many years under either name made it clear that the reference was principally freedom from means- and behavior-testing, contrary to status-quo welfare programs, but that it would target a population based on (exact scope differs in particular proposals) residency, citizenship, and/or age. Not surprised that the “no borders” crowd has seen it differently, and their version certainly is a valid instance of the general idea, but they don’t get to rewrite history and narrow the scope of the broader concept to their new version.
And you don't need a magic orb to do it. You can do it in the US through the mysterious buildings referred to as "unemployment offices" by changing the signs and opening twice as many. It would also be amazing to use these buildings to match employers and the unemployed, but that's obviously asking far too much of government.
> And you don't need a magic orb to do it. You can do it in the US through the mysterious buildings referred to as "unemployment offices" by changing the signs and opening twice as many.
You could do it through the agency known as the IRS by adding a standard refundable credit, you might need a few more employees, but nothing like twice as many.
> The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it
Not really, or rather it depends who you ask: on the left's perspective on UBI, you're right, but on the right side (Milton Friedman being the most prominent on that side having talked about UBI) then it should be barely enough to replace all other form of state wellfare without necessarily be enough to live from it.
As soon as the money becomes conditional, it's not UBI. If you have to irrevokably sign up to an organ donor list, it's not UBI. UBI is inherently redistributive. Which I happen to think is immoral.
Almost every interaction between more than one human that involves resources is either abusive or positively redistributive to some degree. If intentional redistribution with the goal of increasing equality is immoral, that leaves abuse as the only moral choice in your worldview.
LOL so theft and coercion are in the redistributive category and barter and contracts are in the abuse category? If what you say is true, then I would choose abuse over theft.
Yes. We're borrowing money from China to fund salaries in the Ukrainian government. Let Europe do that. I don't mind sending old munitions that are set to be destroyed anyway, especially if we get some good data out of it.
I used to defend crypto a lot (now just a little). Especially the UBI attempts. But no.
World coin has always looked like a thinly veiled attempt to generate a biometric dataset which would later be used against its users.
I just don't know who its audience was supposed to be. If you're suspicious enough of fiat to want this kind of escape hatch, how can you simultaneously be trusting enough to embrace a system that relies on biometrics and allegedly trustworthy hardware?
Because 90% of the people who got into crypto did not give a fuck about "trust" or any of the nonsense blockchains claim they do and only wanted to hit the lottery on the next coin going to the moon.
Oh it's totally in the 95% grift part of crypto. I'm just saying that it stands out from the rest because it targets a virtually non-existent demographic. Most scams try to cast a wide net.
It's pie in the sky. UBI could be worked towards today in many different ways without involving crypto. The idea of US tech people offering UBI to people in one of the most heavily exploited parts of the world as a way to get them to turn over biometric data is gross.
It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle? I don't get it. (I think he or his supporters would say Worldcoin is something necessary for the future-AI world, but I don't buy it).
So, making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle. Boy, I'm really proud to be working in Tech in 2023...
Can an AI physically go to the DMV and get a REAL-ID? If we reach the point where this seriously is a concern, then we will have other, much larger problems to deal with. WorldCoin feel like a scam. The crypto aspect and then paying people in Africa to gaze into metal orbs and get their irises scanned (with funding from A-Z and Vinod Khosla), ... it's not exactly a confidence builder.
I actually think his actual concern here is humans stealing identities and running bots in order to farm any sort of UBI mechanism that gets set up.
It's not about humans asserting their humanness over some evil AGI/ASI machine, it's about sybil resistance. Malicious humans pretending to be thousands or millions of other humans.
People will soon be able to use their iriscodes to reclaim credentials that they sold, and once people start doing that, the market for re-sold credentials will drop to approximately zero.
> People will soon be able to use their iriscodes to reclaim credentials that they sold, and once people start doing that, the market for re-sold credentials will drop to approximately zero.
Is the obvious related problem this solution brings forth supposed to go unsaid? (Criminals don't buy something they can steal.)
Imagine we live in a future where Worldcoin is ubiquitous, all the hardware/software is open source. Several orb operators exist in every city in the world, and operators have a non-trivial amount of WLD tokens staked to ensure good behavior. Misbehaving orbs have their keys and subkeys revoked at the first sign of illicit usage.
Maybe a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steals an orb, and uses those 10 iriscodes to register 10 new credentials on the network. How much profit would you expect to come to the criminal before their credentials are revoked?
> a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steals an orb, and uses those 10 iriscodes to register 10 new credentials on the network
This is a lot of work. Just steal the iriscodes. If they're used for re-issuance, they're being stored and transferred. If they are not directly used, there is a hash-like reduction that can be exploited.
For sake of argument, though, let's assume perfect security. Infallible security. All the way through. Congratulations, you've turned every pair of eyeballs into an oil spigot. When the Taliban or ISIS carves through a town, instead of beheading the leaders and taking their treasures, they take everyones' irises. Every authoritarian state would require scans of its citizens so payment could be routed through (read: stolen by) it, a requirement they would back up with violence.
So if we start with your premise, the attack I can see being a concern is being able to deny people access to Worldcoin and burning their accounts/tokens by maliciously attacking an orb. If keys can be revoked because of illicit usage, someone could generate a key at the orb they wish to attack and act maliciously. Sybil attack, or attempt fraudulent transactions, or whatever behavior triggers burning all the keys tied to an orb. Do this before an election (if worldcoin is used for voting) or before the UBI is dispersed for the month and you could disrupt a lot.
How does Worldcoin provably know that an attacker is not using a dead person’s keys?
That sounds like a automation problem. If you have an office dealing with UBI and unemployment in your neighborhood, the government can literally know their customer. The more people unemployed, the easier it will be to staff them.
These people are pretending they're fighting fraud, when instead they're trying to reinvent government responsibilities/campaigns as passive income sources for 3rd party rent-seekers. Uber for welfare.
That sounds neat. I like the ultra-local approach.
The important thing that I think your argument is missing is that everything here is additive. I'm sure the whole Worldcoin team would love it if governance organizations of all sizes, from tiny villages to billion+ population nation states would run UBI programs to take care of their people. The thing is, today, that's not really happening, so there are a number of people working to make it happen from different angles. Maybe all of them fail, maybe one succeeds, maybe a bunch succeed and any given citizen of the world might be entitled to payments from a handful of UBI sources.
Do you think there are better global scale UBI projects and ideas out there, or do you think we should just stop trying to solve this problem?
Sybil resistance is important in any sort of UBI system that preserves privacy, which may or may not be important. I like the idea of a privacy preserving UBI, and feel like it's definitely a lot more equitable than having it based on existing passports, or bank account numbers, or something like that.
This is valid. But even if we reduce scope to a privacy-preserving UBI, nothing Worldcoin solves the core hurdles thereto. It's solving a side problem tangentially related to those involved with a privacy-preserving UBI, but entirely germane to an a16z-style crypto pump-and-dump.
Adjunct: how is Worldcoin privacy preserving? At least with Bitcoin you can plausibly deny ownership of a wallet. In a world on Worldcoin, every traffic stop lets the cops inspect your bank account.
> It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle?
Promotional statements by corporate executives aren’t necessary reflective of their beliefs, but rather what they believe it is useful for other people to believe they believe, and Worldcoin isn’t a side hustle.
Its just a game to a lot of executives/investors. What they say publicly is curated and often reflects their best intentions or hopes, regardless of how far they are from reality or true intentions.
Considering I've had a lot of laser treatments (micro-veins) and am getting eye (retina) surgery before long, it makes me wonder how reliable such a system is, and how well it will tollerate change/variance of one's eye-prints. I mean, theoretically, if you lose your eye in an accident, does that mean you lose your life savings in such a scheme?
It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.
iirc you go to a place that can verify your identity through other means, and they'll update your iris scan or give you a yubikey you can use instead or something.
Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.
Governments already exist. To try and upend them by replacing their system of personhood and currency is in effect the tech-bro version of a mutiny. It may seem ridiculous but that's precisely what crypto is. An attempt to replace central banks and governments. Tech companies have grown very powerful, and they see an opportunity to create a world-wide "private government" and they're going for it. This won't be the last attempt. Governments will eventually wake up. Or if not. That's it for them.
Neat, so are all world governments going to band together and implement UBI? Do you really think that waiting for all world governments to come together and figure this out is the right move here?
I admire the optimism (I think of myself as a pretty optimistic person too), but you've got to realize that there are reasonable people on this planet who think that waiting for governments to fix this is probably not going to turn out well. Some of those people are actually doing something about it, which is what we see here. Maybe Worldcoin works out, maybe it doesn't, but in my personal opinion, it's definitely an experiment worth running.
There won't be UBI. There's work and death. And if AI truly replaces us, it's the latter. I'm not trying to be cynical I'm simply being blunt about how systems work.
You and your environment have to "click together" so you live. In the wild, this means mostly surviving cold, hot, stay dry, find things to eat, and not be eaten.
In society, however, it means being useful to the system somehow, so you get access to other useful things the system makes, like air conditioners, housing, and food, ways to get around etc. If you're not useful to the system, the system may pretend it cares for you, but it doesn't really care for you. This is not up to the morality of the people in charge. It's up to the system. The system elects the people and tells them what to care about. The system is quite resilient. It can withstand certain amounts of welfare, corruption, crime, and so on. But only certain amounts. If you cross those certain amounts, what happened in 2020 with COVID handouts, and the subsequent doubling of prices of food, and so on, happens infinitely and suddenly money is worthless paper. Like Zimbabwe. So if you have somewhere else to run where they're not as stupid as Zimbabwe, you can be useful in that new place and live. If you have nowhere to run, as with a global UBI, you die.
Of course, people won't just lay down and die, they'll just have a revolution like the Bolsheviks did, and speak about how everything will belong to everyone, and of course resources will concentrate to those on top again, instead. With AI however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful. So revolution after revolution, new people will sit on top and promise it'll be different this time, in a smaller and smaller population.
> With [_____] however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful.
{mechanical looms,mechanized farming,factory mass production,computerized tabulation,AI}
This has been the progression of economies since steam power after ~1720.
Automation replaces a category of work, everyone decrees the loss of jobs, workers reallocate into new jobs, everyone is the richer for the increased output, repeat.
The only version of this that is substantially different would be 'AI eliminates all jobs below an education threshold, while not creating sufficient surpluses via efficiency gains that they can be supported by welfare'.
Ultimately, I predict UBI is going to look a lot like more general food stamps: standardized basic goods are free, and sufficient for {food, shelter, entertainment}.
We have the industrial capability now, if we so chose.
Survivorship bias is an interesting thing "I keep living another day, therefore I'll always live another day, I'm immortal." The grave is full of these immortal people.
And we're not richer today. It used to be one person (usually the man) provided for the family and the other (typically the woman) took care of the home and children. One job per family was enough. You may consider it outdated, but think of why it is. It's suddenly not fashionable to take care of your home and children. It fashionable to have two jobs, and for your spouse to also need two jobs. And you're miserable.
No one "chose" this. If they were offered a choice, no one would pick it. The system picked it for us. And we're too myopic to understand what we're walking into. The current employment figures are a sham. The homeless and the unemployed are on the streets, crime is rampant, and this is still paradise compared to what it'll be in 5 years.
So the last refuge is our intelligence, like during the industrial revolution and computing yes? The good old times. "Machines will do the work, so we have more time to think." But this time, AI is coming for our intelligence. Thinking machines. Education won't save you because your education is outdated before they even give you the diploma. And AI doesn't really need you that much lately. You're just clicking a button. And then your boss notices that. And lays you off. Welcome to the singularity.
Look at the track record of the people involved, at the track record of crypto, do you think they are really going to give anyone money because of ethics?
LOL. "Sam Altman" is not trying to upend governments. It's the opposite. Him and his ilk are trying to interface with governments in such a way that they can use the legal violence of a government to streamline the integration of their systems (schemes) into the public's life. Sam Altman wants to use the same play book that pharmaceutical and defense industry's use (regulatory crony capitalist capture). This is not "tech bro" mutiny this is -- probably -- the first of many crony capitlist (BlackRock\Ratheon\Etc\Etc) attempts at duplicitous digital currency.
Governments exist, and the current standard of identity verification is a laminated piece of paper with a picture on it. If you're giving away free money you might want to have a standard slightly higher than that.
Sure, but maybe that payment power is going to have a lot of side effects that are worse than limiting/filtering gifts through potentially corrupt governments that can also prevent other situations.
For example, the resource curse implies there will be great reasons for companies to risk gifts of small amounts of money to lots of people in a country about to vote on whether to protect collective assets from corporate theft..
All the weird action committees of US corruption haven't even had the logistics to directly bribe voters of a low population state to piss in the pot. Should they get iris wallet addresses for everyone correlated to scan locations? Is anything the US would do about this beyond the capabilities of Kenya?
The laminated "paper" has microchip in it in most places and codes which can be checked against a central database. It's a good enough standard. In fact better than crypto-chaos.
Um, "personhood" and currency aren't anything like the main functions of a government. If you had everything Worldcoin wants to do, it still wouldn't replace any governments.
Try and think what else the government has. Police, military? All those are second order effects. Think how the government controls those institutions. Money & the ability to spend it as a person or an organization. If you control people's legal existence in your own monetary system without alternatives, means all the government has will become yours.
This is how the USD works by the way (in systems like the petro-dollar), and why so many are trying to replace it. It's not easy. But they'll keep trying. And when they succeed, the American hegemony is over.
In Mexico there's technically a government. But really there are the vast networks of drug cartels. They have their own military, they control politicians, they choose who is and who isn't. It all started by them making a ton of money. The rest followed. If you control the money and who can spend it, you control the economy. If you control the economy, you control everything.
It stems from human tax base (after we mostly eliminated direct government capital ownership when we did away with monarchies).
And human tax base ultimately stems from... the ability to count. Which is the identity question.
People. Assets. Productivity. Profit.
A government which lacks the ability to count cannot have a stable tax base, which increases stability risk and therefore decreases the value of their money.
Crypto schemes allow a lot of experimentation with the structure of money that no sane government would ever try for fear of crashing their economy in one way or another.
Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten the biosphere...
Bitcoin was designed to act like gold, but this was a series of design choices. (as someone, maybe foldingideas, put it: the crypto bros looked at the concentration of wealth in society and decided that the problem was that /they/ weren't the ones with all the wealth.)
You can just as easily design a crypto scheme to generate tokens and distribute them to everyone with an ID regularly: this is UBI, so long as the tokens have recognized value. The problem is that you need to prevent people from registering a million accounts to get a million UBI credits, deflating the value of tokens held by honest folks. Thus the unique identifier problem.
Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.
KYC is a thing and apparently crypto exchanges can implement it when asked nicely.
But I think grand parent poster is right on the money, it’s a attempts to take governments roles.
After all nation states are not that old of a concept. Basically Napoleonic wars.
Some type of distopian corporate nationality might come to fruition to replace them.
But again, as GP noted, isn't that a problem governments have already solved? If you want UBI it's going to be through the government, as that's the entity collecting the funds through taxes that would be distributed, and they already have a unique identifier for people. In the U.S. it's your SSN, which is conveniently also how they track you for income taxes (again, where a large portion of the funds for distribution are gathered)
If the government wants to link a retinal scan to a SSN, that might make sense with regard to UBI, but how does it make any sense for some random blockchain? Are we expected to think that even if a government wanted to use a blockchain they would use some third party blockchain and not roll their own? I find that highly unlikely.
It's 'solved' in the sense that there's a lot of machinery to deal with and remediate fraud and abuse. It's definitely not solved in a technical sense.
It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
You're talking about the market in general, and I'm talking about with respect to UBI. My thought process is:
* Any UBI is going to be government based, as there needs to be a way to collect (tax) and redistribute (UBI) money between all people, whether or not the amount collected and distributed is the same relatively for each or not.
* Governments already have (in most cases, if not all. I can't speak for every country definitively) ways to uniquely identify their populace. They don't need some external service to do such.
* Given that UBI will be government based, and the government already has a way to uniquely identify people they govern, what purpose does a third party blockchain to uniquely identify people service with respect to UBI?
> It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud.
There are plenty of benefits to that. That has nothing to do with UBI. I'm not making a case that there's no benefit to identity verification, just that I'm not sure how some third party is supposed to help with UBI by providing it.
> If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
In some small ways (at least for the U.S.) they do. For example, with Tax services to look up people. Additionally, while not provided as a service to companies, SSNs are routinely used to uniquely identify U.S. citizens for financial reasons.
The Government could offer more services to companies for this, but there might be perverse incentives involved. Again, none of this has anything to do with UBI from what I can see. Once someone gets money, who cares how it's spent? Let it be deposited in the financial institution or asset of their choice. Again, no third party arbiter needs to be present for this, we do this today with tax returns and while different services often help with this, they are both not requires and there's multiple to choose from, not one external trusted entity that must be used.
I wasn't starting from the assumption that UBI /has/ to be government-based, and was discussing a core problem (identifiability) that arises when a non-government entity tries to implement UBI. You've just got a different set of assumptions.
Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it.
Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in which case I'm honestly curious as to any explanations from anyone of how that works.
Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~.
So, here you go:
Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account.
This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.
The distribution portion of UBI is the least interesting from a theoretical and technical standpoint. Giving money to people is easy, and a solved problem, which is basically what I've been saying. Funding that money is the hard part, and the portion that basically requires a government because it's likely to be taxation that does it.
Some crypto company trying to help enable UBI by solving the identifiability and distribution problem is like some artist trying to help build a car by offering to find the right shape for the wheels, and then using the fact they offered in promoting themselves. Thanks, but really, you aren't offering much, pretty sure we're already going with "round".
That, in a nutshell, is what I've been trying to express. I think they just attached themselves to UBI as a buzzword to sound better, when really their change of usefully being involved in a real UBI implementation is likely close to zero because it makes no sense for them to be involved in any feasible plan that could move forward.
It's no different than if they said they were going to help enable people to pay taxes (except in negative connotation instead of a positive one). The portion of the problem they'd be helping with is a mostly solved problem, so what are they really offering that's likely to be of use? If it's extremely unlikely they'll be used for whatever reason in the problem space they're advertising themselves in, what's their reason for doing so, to actually advertise their intent or to associate themselves with something?
> This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.
That's a prime difficulty of a cryptocoin, not of a government entity dealing with its citizens. Again, I'll note, in UBI the actual distribution of funds is so simple and solved as to be inconsequential. Who to give money to and how much are the main things to work out on the distribution side, and are entirely policy based, and thus no blockchain product is going to help.
OTOH, the impossibility of getting UBI on the government side is actually motivating adoption: sure, you've got a central identity repository, etc, but it will never happen in our lifetime (in the US) if you need 60 senators to vote for it... This is, IMO, basically insurmountable - we've seen governments toying with UBI but I seriously doubt we'll see any government pull the trigger in any reasonable timeframe.
I don't disagree that it's extremely unlikely that certain governments will adopt it, at least not without lots of other governments to point to as success cases at least.
I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less[1], but I don't recall the outcome).
Maybe, possibly, a religious organization such as one of the various Morman churches that strongly encourage tithing could do so, but it would probably be cast more as charity than UBI. That's also ignoring all the other problematic aspects of something like that.
The other innovation of cryptocurrencies is bootstrapping 'value' for scarce digital tokens; in this sense, UBI based on a cryptocurrency can be self-funding.
That only works because of investment and speculation. You would specifically not want that for UBI IMO, because speculation could crash your currency leaving people that rely on it unable to purchase anything with it. I'm pretty sure you would need to tie it to a stable real world currency for it to function for its intended purpose as a basic income.
To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?
The problem it's solving or attempting to solve is "how do I create demand for a token that isn't redeemable for anything (generated by a private organization which intends to profit from exchanging tokens it generates for money)", and the only people that want those are cryptobros. Throw in the eyeball trackers as a "Proof of Personhood" twist on the "restricted supply" story, to go with the usual "future world currency, unlimited demand" spiel
You realize that the IRS deals with rampant fraud right? And with emerging technology, the capabilities of criminals to steal identities is only increasing. People file taxes for dead people or people whose identities have been stolen all the time. Recently, to deal with this, the IRS has outsourced their identity verification to a third party company, id.me, who gathers way WAY more information than Worldcoin does, and it's barely making a dent in the fraud.
It's very obvious that the vast majority of people hating on Worldcoin have never taken a moment to consider the actual problems being solved here, and especially the critical importance of solving them now.
Because everyone knows that the trouble with people pretending dead people are still alive to collect their entitlements or obtaining access to other peoples accounts is lack of a VC backed startup that prints its own crypto tokens and scans people's eyeballs...
The actual problems here are both hard and not being solved by WorldCoin
"During Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, the IRS collected more than $4.9 trillion in gross taxes, processed more than 262.8 million tax returns and other forms, and issued more than $641.7 billion in tax refunds."
So 5.7B is about .1% of the IRS's transactions that year.
That's also less than it could possibly cost to deploy and maintain Worldcoin.
The IRS is better at preventing fraudulent transactions than most credit card processors and fraud prevention providers. I know they have a more restricted system so it's probably easier than credit card fraud, but it's still at least an order of magnitude.
That figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1].
Recently, to deal with this foot gun, Congress repealed the personal income tax. President Biden signed this bill into law and said it is a tremendous step toward civil rights and equality.
> How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.
He literally defined a pyramid/ponzi scheme (depending on how or if value is shared with existing users). That’s very interesting that he feels protected enough to say that out loud.
I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes).
That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it.
The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...
Or even a signed hash against a confirmed/known/distributed public key.
Blockchain is only useful in a decentralized + adversarial context where there is a need to remove one-another's ability to game a given system. And even then, it doesn't imply a perfect security around it. Since it won't stop theft, breach, scams or other vectors.
How is this published? On a single server somewhere? What country would you put it in? A friendly one I hope. Also one that won't block access to other countries that it might have petty disagreements with in the future. It might be a good idea for it to be replicated across a number of servers across the internet. We call those "nodes" in the blockchain space.
So you're suggesting that publishing a hash in a newspaper every day is a better solution than a digital ledger? This is peak buttcoiner logic. That actually used to be done [1], because Blockchain are valuable, but not anymore because digital versions are more scalable, efficient, reliable, global, trustless etc. Etc.
Actually I would say that that is exactly what blockchain does, except as a protocol and relying on a network rather than a newspaper. Actually I might use this to explain blockchain to people on a base level.
you forgot the shitcoinery - there is a token, with a premine, unfairly distributed. the VCs that invested (SBF, a16z,etc) will benefit disproportionately.
I cannot argue with bad token, premine - I have not researched but I believe it. "VC coins" in general have these issues it seems. Just trying to say that not every shitcoin is trying to get people to give them their biometrics, that is a separate issue in my opinion.
There are legitimate reasons to premine, and creating a token with the intention of using it as a channel for UBI (literally giving money away) doesn't really scream "scam" to me considering the people backing it
maybe worldcoin is just another unregistered security offering, launched on dubious exchanges like Binance, to ensure the backers can pump and dump their shitcoins on retail to meet liquidity issues elsewhere?
Yeah, my take is that during the rise of the internet and mobile, tech earned a lot of social credit. But since then tech companies both large and small have been burning through that at a prodigious rate, especially social media, monopoly-seekers, and the trash fire that is crypto. If I had to sum up the new attitude of European regulators toward tech, it would be, "We're tired of your bullshit."
I'm glad to see it. Maybe with some better policing, the tech sector will again turn into something I can be unambiguously proud about working in.
Tech hasn’t “burned through social capital”. The media has shifted from being positive/neutral regarding tech to actively hostile, mainly because tech has been increasingly approaching their turf.
Regulators follow public opinion, public opinion follows the media.
Sorry, if you want to claim that tech hasn't burned through social capital, you'll have to make that claim separately from anything about the media. But you'll have a hard time making the case. Look at how much HN commenters have to say about issues with privacy for example. Or we just had an energetic conversation about Google's stewardship of Chrome.
I also think that tech is not "increasingly approaching [media's] turf". Tech absolutely destroyed the funding model for newspapers, but that started in the Craigslist era. The fraction of journalism that survived has successfully made the leap to an online era.
We are still going to have to work with people who had no qualms about working for five different breeds of charlatan. Some of them two or three breeds at once.
I once was contract to hire at a place that was skeevy. The management team was horrible and abusive, the most senior developer was defensive and cagey.
I said no because of the management situation, but I also wasn't happy that the putative lead had a side hustle that involved driving around the city looking for cell towers that would let him get away with sending spam SMS messages.
My current job, he and another person from that company were working for someone in the same building as us. They didn't seem to recognize me, and I wasn't going to remind them who I was.
What hurt the worst though was that I was replacing someone from the local community who I had a lot of respect for who recommended me for this role. He basically created a giant goodwill bonfire and lit up the night sky.
Yeah, to me that's one of the most poisonous things about bubbles and gold rushes. A bunch of people make good money doing things that are terrible, ridiculous, or both. They don't learn the lessons they would in a normal environment, and so they may be like that forever, and may continue to do terrible/ridiculous things as long as the money holds out.
That's not what he said. He said people that won't trust any platform [regardless of the reassurances, auditing, open source nature, etc] are welcome to not sign up. I assume the somewhat pointed subtext of what Sam said is also that if you're going to be a hater no matter what, he doesn't seem the point in engaging with you.
As much as the whole worldcoin thing is bizarre and dystopian, I do sort of enjoy the nouveau nihilistic take that you can’t trust or believe anything anyone says anyways, so if trust matters to you, you might want to stay away from the digital future.
Maybe, but you shouldn't underestimate the popularity of mobile banking/money transfer apps in East Africa.
If it's easier and more secure (against literal telecom hacks, we don't need to get into crypto debates) than the alternative it very plausibly can get users.
The fact that they are popular means it's an argument against making a more secure version? You are implying the problem is solved perfectly already. They are popular because they are needed, not because they cannot be advanced.
No, because money transfers are such a central locus of government interest everywhere in the world.
It’s like asking “any good way to avoid paying taxes?” You’ll definitely get lots of opinions, but you should also be cautious about taking the advice.
A huge amount of the value of big tech companies comes from outrunning regulators (AirBnB, Uber) and/or existing in a state of exception (section 230). Congrats to Kenya for calling BS in short order.
I bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs.
And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.
Ugh. This is probably the true nature of the thing, it's shocking how this happens at nearly every company I've been at. Eng is super concerned with privacy and security, and then as soon as Marketing gets a hold of it, it's all coated in 6 layers of analytics for funnel tracking leads.
I need to write a blog post about the time an ad network told me that their required integration was to integrate their JS bundle that would send all text input to their servers.
When I told them No Fucking Way (in not that many more words), they said they would need to get executive sign-off on a "custom" integration. The "custom" bit being us doing everything ourselves server-side and sending them a single opaque identifier for conversions.
Molly White points out [0] that they seem to have gotten awfully vague about what they store, emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained (and encouraging the assumption that those themselves are rigorously impossible to extrapolate personal information from)— but also insinuating to people at en-Orb-ment that they need to opt in to letting the company store full imagery of their iris scans in case the company decides to change the hash algorithm someday.
> emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained
Even the context of the primary reason they cite for collecting retinal data (to prevent the same person from getting $50 multiple times) requires they keep this data for at least as long as they're paying people to scan their eyeballs.
Why do they need the original to prevent people to get paid multiple times? What good is the hash they're storing if the same person's retinas don't reliably produce the same hash?
I'm talking about retaining the hash, not the original eyeball data. Retaining the hash is nearly as bad as retaining the original data, so I consider them both to be roughly equivalent for this use case.
> It has also launched in various countries including Indonesia, France Japan, Germany, Spain and the UK. Data watchdogs in some countries have already said they are examining Worldcoin.
I don't know about Indonesia but that's not going to fly in the other countries of this list either.
Especially not in very privacy-oriented EU members.
charitable interpretation: this project is trying to address the problem of distributed and anonymized KYC. Because the current setup where you upload your passport to Coinbase turned out to be a cruel joke on the original idea of a cryptocurrency: it's the exact opposite of anonymous/pseudonymous, and the exact opposite of distributed. By this point Coinbase is really no different than a bank (with one "improvement" that it also tries to entice you to play lottery with shitcoins). Whether it will succeed or has any additional agenda i have no idea.
This is pretty off based on my understanding of Worldcoin. They want the opposite: they don't want to know who you are. They only thing they are interested in is are you a verified unique human, or operating the account of someone is a verified unique human (less than ideal but will happen).
The biggest use cases for this are to establish a finite limit of online accounts to combat inauthentic online behavior, to provide a robust way to vote, and to provide robust way to evenly distribute UBI.
> In Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, Kenya scored 32 on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"). When ranked by score, Kenya ranked 123rd among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector.
> Despite market reforms, several business surveys reveal that business corruption is still widespread and that companies frequently encounter demands for bribes and informal payments to 'get things done' in Kenya, a trend that has contributed to an increased cost of doing business in Kenya. The country ranks 56 among 190 economies globally on World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index 2019.
> The public procurement sector in Kenya suffers widespread corruption and is the leading form of graft in the public service and always at the centre of all major corruption scandals. The use of agents to facilitate business operations and transactions in Kenya is widespread and poses a risk for companies, particularly at the market entry and business start-up stage.
It's cute on HN everyone is bashing Worldcoin while there is not a single discourse in regards to gov regulation and the business environment in Kenya and how it may (or may not) be relevant in this case(?)
I knew a few kenyans personally many years back (who were working in Mainland China and Hong Kong) and they were clearly not big fans of the kenyan gov. I wonder if there are improvement in the recent years.
A lot of shops have popped up recently in the city purporting to sell high-res prints of your iris. I thought it was pretty weird, in the same level as mattress stores suddenly appearing everywhere. Now I wonder if there isn't some iris-scanning crypto scam underneath.
Worst case scenario, WLD seems to be a Ethereum token, so you can the very least trade it for Ether, which is accepted pretty much anywhere cryptocurrency at all is accepted.
Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.
(Note that it's the StackOverflow users voting on questions - the same ones that you are soliciting answers from. Mods have actual moderation tasks to deal with.)
seems like several african countries are getting fed up with post- and neo-colonialism especially with regard to attemps of the west to control their economy by parasitic currencies like the cfa tethered to the franc guaranteeing cheap French access to their natural resources while at the same time handicapping the competitiveness of their economy.
Using developing countries to build “social proof” in terms of user numbers while not even registering a company and surely not paying taxes. What do we call this, dystopian tech neo-colonialism?
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I was just traveling recently and found a number of iris art shops set up in high traffic tourist areas. These IRis Art shops (places that scan your iris and enlarge it into a picture for you) seem to me to be capable of the same aim as world coin.
My last trip to Kenya I got stopped by the police at the airport for a bribe for some stupid made up stuff. I expect this is mostly a shake down for bribe money.
I'm also a happy WorldCoin user. I think a lot of people who want it shut down are kind of miseries that don't like seeing other stuff being successful.
1. Scan biometrics. They should not restrict themselves to just irises, because not everybody has irises or eyes. But they should only scan things that you can get surreptitiously without too much work... meaning things that everybody gives away anyway just by walking down the street.
2. Bind the biometrics to keys generated only for that purpose, and never used for anything but attesting to other keys... in zero-knowledge so that you can't associate different sub-keys attested by a given master key.
3. NOT bind the biometrics to names or any other information about the person.
4. Go right ahead and publish the biometrics themselves, together with the associated public master keys. Because again, they are not things anybody should be thinking of as secret... and pretending you can keep them secret is foolish even if you don't put them in a database.
5. Stop centralizing the system that attests to the bindings given in (4); do the work to eliminate trust from that. Or at LEAST don't go out of your way to RELY on a centtral authority.
Once you have that, you have all you need for Sybil resistance, which gives you the global uniqueness they need. Then go build your crypto system on top of it.
1. For now they do collect biometrics with opt-in, because it's valuable data for refining the ability to scan only irises and determine if they're legitimate
Their critical error is that there's a single, central authority that certifies that a person with a given set of biometrics exists. They didn't bite off the hard, but necessary, part where you figure out how walk an attestation graph and come up with a confidence level.
And they only do irisis.
And they're doing the ZK at the wrong point in the chain. Publishing the actual, raw, unhashed biometrics wouldn't be a problem as long as they didn't tie them to anything but a key. And that future-proofs you.
I wonder what proportion of people in the comments section here use Clear, which stores biometric data in a centralized database (unlike Worldcoin, which instead uses cryptography to avoid storing anything unnecessary, and never stores biometric data).
Why does this have to be a crypto currency? My ssn is not a currency and it is used for id. Why can't it be like that, a database of id's? Should we make our drivers licenses or passports into crypto currencies? What is the advantage?
They’d say it proves you’re an actual human and not a fake profile, but there are existing solutions to that, and it doesn’t solve identity theft at all.
Same as every project that involves cryptocurrency - the advantage is that the scammers who promote it can make money from badly reinventing an existing system.
I'm waiting for religious zealots to start smashing those Orbs. Looking at long lines of people waiting to stare into one is enough to make me (very briefly) wonder if my crazy uncle might have had a point with his take on Revelations.
Did Sam Altman forget to bribe the right people? Because if he would bribe I would understand why governments would allow a private entity to steal data, content, ip, and identities en masse, as it currently happens in some jurisdictions.
Even if they have a database, what can they use it for? scanning eyes isn't a simple operation, you can't scan with a smartphone etc. How can it possibly be used or sold to?
Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers.
Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.
Kenya is a reasonable choice to launch a project like this. Among African nations, Kenya is very connected to USA and UBI. Altman already had OpenAI work in Kenya. It has both a stable government/economy and also high poverty and rural population. It has ~5% of Africa's population, so if you just picked a random place with a lot of people to operate, it's unsurprising to land in Kenya.
I don't think this is at all about UBI, if anything "competing" with Give Directly (who are doing truly excellent) would require more work and justification of Worldcoin's approach.
I do suspect the real reason is much more exploitative.
Extreme wealth distributions also indicate a tiny, extremely wealthy elite who, from their multi-million pound London flats, are happy to sell everything about their home countries to anyone who will pay.
> Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny
Iris scanning is already widely used in the U.S. and hasn't received much scrutiny. It's in the news all the time, e.g. with the owners of Madison Square Garden using it to keep their political enemies from going to concerts. You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already. Even LinkedIn uses CLEAR to power their verified profiles.
> More importantly, however, this is an example of the "you're already doing it so it's not a big deal" fallacy
I'm not saying it's not a big deal, I'm saying it hasn't gotten much scrutiny, at least relative to comparable innovations in the past. E.g. when airports introduced body scanners, Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this called The Naked Crowd. Where's the equivalent scrutiny for iris scanners?
Good question. Probably because they aren’t as widely deployed (yet) but there should be just as much and more scrutiny on these as well. They also seem pointless given ambient facial / gait / body morphology recognition (which I am also against).
They're probably referring to the optional facial recognition based boarding systems that many airports in the US are rolling out, primarily for international flights. It uses facial recognition to match you to your passport photo based on the documents verified during check-in, to ensure the person boarding the flight is the same person who checked-in when their documents were manually verified and recorded in the computer system.
You can still hand your passport and boarding pass to the gate agent, it's not required to do facial recognition boarding if you don't want to, and at any rate it's not doing an iris scan, it's using a standard facial dotmap to match to a photo. It's not even doing 3D mapping, because it's source material is a standard passport photo.
You are not. There are three different programs by which you can accelerate entry/re-entry to the US and all three rely on facial recognition. All are optional.
There is no facial recognition in the normal re-entry line (and all these processes are before customs as part of border control). Foreigner entry may now require facial recognition, I’m a US citizen so don’t experience the process foreigners go through.
Taxation and control of the money supply is the single most powerful and fundamental right reserved by a government, and it's backed up by lots and lots of guns.
Those guns require ammo, toilet paper and food for the men holding them. Modern governments would be wise to study the situation the European aristocracies found themselves in wrt their merchant class financiers 300 years ago.
> Do you solve all your problems by shooting people?
All power on earth emanates from the barrel of a gun. We abstract that fact away in modern polite society, but it is the base level truth of our existence.
So yes, when it comes down to it, governments can, will, (and have) used guns to solve this.
Countries don't need wars to shoot people. You make laws and issue executive orders, and when they are violated, you send people to hit the violators with sticks until they comply, and if that doesn't work, to shoot them until they stop moving.
Any and all economic policy is ultimately backed by violence. That's what governments are for.
Great Britain actually did this regularly. For hundreds of years they would war all over europe until they ran out of money, make up some scheme to refill the coffers (including eventually inventing the central bank and other shenanigans with the "South Sea" bubble), and then go back to war in europe.
WorldCoin is a stupid idea and the entire crypto thing is a scam but these things are not as bad as MLM, lotteries and gambling. Everytime some country tries to ban them they will come under heavy US & WTO pressure.
You can find all three of those in much worse forms embedded within crypto.
There's this recurring refrain that the US is threatened by losing its reserve currency powers to bitcoin, Bitcoin can't be a reserve currency. The great depression was caused by double digit deflation, Bitcoin experiences double digit deflation and inflation every few months.
Well, another ideas used for identity in the crypto world was having a twitter account for more than a specific time period, and a number of followers. So I was considered unidentifiable as a person because I had a Twitter account that did not have the requisite number of followers - so I couldn't get test network tokens for development work. SMH.
Limited partners (pension funds) are paying for this aspirational idea (less any funds from selling tokens perhaps) while a16z will pocket a Venture Capital fee.
Lots of money sitting around might as well roll the dice.
