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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> ensuring that every person on Earth can prove that they are indeed human

>To address it, we built a new device called the Orb. It solves the problem through biometrics: the Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes

I'm sure absolutely nothing can go wrong with this at all. Wow. I hope this is satire.

Imagine what a major nation state intelligence agency could do with a data set of globally-unique eyeball vein pattern images of billions of persons.

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It seems to me that there are some not-uncommon diseases that could affect this, e.g. if someone develops macular degeneration, do they lose their savings? Or can they double their coin share?

What is the state of the science behind retinal-imaging-as-authentication? Are these patterns truly known to be stable over the course of a person's life?

> if someone develops macular degeneration, do they lose their savings

The irishash is used to get an initial airdrop, not to access funds/make transactions later.

But since equality seems a key principle, I am wondering how they'll deal with people without eyes.

Unfortunately, they have painfully admitted that they are not joking and they're serious about this ponzi scheme.

So now one of the creative ways of building an exit scam also involves having 1984 as a business model, even worse than the majority of cryptocurrencies out there.

Oh dear.

I'm assuming they don't store the images in the same way we don't store plain text passwords.

Let's hope so... er... wait... Except there are way too many systems that store plain text passwords.

I'm totally sure we should just take their word for it, on some magic network connected eyeball scanning apparatus developed by the cryptocoin industry.

The "Become an Orb Operator" link has got to be satire.

this page seems like a lot of work and very lengthy for satire: https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works

Well, they claim not to save the images, just a hash.

As-if you can ever actually hash a biometric and expect it to match in the future. The whole idea of a hash is that a tiny perturbation makes the output completely different.

It almost by definition cannot work for biometrics.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204587

> Touch ID doesn't store any images of your fingerprint, and instead relies only on a mathematical representation. It isn't possible for someone to reverse engineer your actual fingerprint image from this stored data.

Remember when Apple claimed similar about their CSAM photo-scanning but then it turned out it was pretty easy to generate a hash collision?

AFAIK Apple has not opened their TouchID hash scheme so you must take them at their word that it cannot be reverse engineered.

Sure, I think there are a million attack vectors for getting these "orbs" to send the same person money multiple times. Crafting a face that doesn't generate a hash collision (which would be the goal here) is probably an even easier problem!

I'm just pointing out that perceptual hashes do exist.

> The whole idea of a hash is that a tiny perturbation makes the output completely different.

That would be a cryptographic hash you are describing. Not all hash functions share that property. As long as arbitrary input is mapped to a fixed size output it is a hash function. For example see NeuralHash [1] which is a hash function designed to be "insensitive to small changes in the input image."

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/apples-neuralhash-how-it-work...

If it's insensitive to small changes in the input image then it leaks substantial information about that input image.

Perceptual hashes have the opposite set of traits (similar inputs produce similar outputs).

there are also these things called perceptual hashes that are designed to get the same hash for similar inputs, where "similar" is domain-specific.

> Alex Blania, Sam Altman, and the Worldcoin team

O brave new world, that has such people in it!

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