Sam Altman’s Worldcoin wants to scan eyeballs in exchange for crypto
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Building that out into a larger idea, it feels like the operators are trying to make this appealing to people in less-well-off areas that don't have so many regulations. One might even call it exploitative.
I'm unsure about what happens if you lose your phone, since you lose your keys. Do you get a new wallet? Do you get recovery keys to your old one? That seems very scary, if any Orb can sign recovery keys for any wallet for eg.
Aadhaar also had to spend a decade getting to a billion enrollments just within India, with the full power of the Indian government. I'd say their projections are a tad too optimistic.
I wrote a thread with the comparisons noting how the incentives are aligned to let operators scam their way to money: https://nitter.net/captn3m0/status/1451259136365105154
But seriously, I get the feeling software people just assume hardware is infallible somehow? Hardware-centric blockchains are extremely sensitive to Sybil attacks. Somewhere in that glorified iPhone of an Orb, there's a sensor sending a plaintext 'yes this is a valid iris, proceed' message. Now the validity of your blockchain is based in the physical security of a device..which you're distributing to contractors worldwide?
>Orb is deployed to unsecured environments and used by independent Operators.
>[...] We’re confident that the Orb’s state-of-the-art security systems will prevent fraud deemed profitable for a would-be attacker.
That's an oxymoronic sentence if ever I saw one.
Step 1: create a blockchain.
Step 2: add some weird twist. Maybe each token represents an acorn of an oak so that we can save the planet by planting more oaks.
Step 3: hold onto most of the tokens yourself but give away a bunch to kickstart the economy of your coin and give it some minimal value.
Step 4: get Coinbase to pick up your coin to increase its value.
Step 5: sell your coins and profit while providing absolutely no value to anyone.
Setting aside the fact that the Orb idea will strike many people as creepy...
> The internet is powerful because of large networks. Email, social apps, and marketplaces are examples of such networks. The more participants they have, the more powerful they become. For the first time, cryptocurrencies make it possible to distribute ownership and control of those networks to their users, rather than a single entity.
>If a cryptocurrency were adopted at scale, it would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make applications possible that are now unimaginable.
Any sort of specifics would be great. The website says little about why it is important to get a new cryptocurrency in the hands of every person on earth. It sort of sounds like they want it to be used for UBI disbursement? Even if inflation, cost of living, etc. is radically different and changing at different rates in every sub-municipal area?
I tried digging a little deeper... There are more technological and not ontological/existential details provided here: https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works. Given that the founders do not make explicit their motivation, they seem to expect that people will go through the Orb procedure based on vague crypto promises?
Solving the "proof of personhood" problem for digital crypto wallets is important because... it will allow literally everyone to vote on how to run an email service? Own a fractionalized share of an NFT? And if everyone has a Worldcoin, then by definition, it isn't scarce.
I'm left to conclude that either the founders all know something that is opaque to the rest of us in terms of what problem they are actually intending to solve (with the eyeball thing being just one part of the solution)... Or they are in for being on the receiving end of a surprising number of wicked coordination problems which aren't technological in nature.
The world has gone mad.
Also, this tells me Sam Altman has never seen Demolition Man.
2. Buy stock in rapid-acquisition iris scanners (I heard about 10 years ago that there were open-air scanners that could acquire 50 irises per minute, from a startup that wanted to use it for identification in an IoT setting)
3. Sell iris database to oppressive governments
4. Profit
Serious comments aside, I know one place where this would take off: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/world/middleeast/trump-gl...
Unfortunately, Worldcoin plans to deploy it in untrusted environments, which sounds like the biggest "hack me for free money" sign ever.
At least with 2FA devices, when the thugs show up to ask, you have something to hand them that doesn't involve cutting off a part of your body.
and ( warning: NSFW ) Yes - https://youtu.be/CbM--4-z0cs?t=87
Seems a rather expensive piece of kit to ship around the world.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/sam-altma...
Should stand for "Unbelievably Bad Idea."
We already have some form of this in the US. That is what WIC, SNAP, Section 8 etc are...and our neighborhoods were devastated by all the "free" money. Nothing in this World is "free"....just ask farmers who end up having to dump milk on the ground because the cost its selling for is less than it cost them to produce. Lights, Fodder, Land, Taxes animals...none of that is free either.
I really wish I could make everyone understand that the things that are valuable are intangible: dignity, honor...knowledge and trust in one's abilities. You can't be given those; you have to earn them by doing the WORK.
Those Section 8 apartments? Filled with lead, asbestos, roaches. Not free. The costs come in the form of horrible respiratory numbers for minorities who live in them.
WIC?? Government cheese made mostly of oils and bad fats??? Not Free. The costs come in the huge obesity numbers for people on food programs. No, it isn't the only contributing factor, laziness plays a part, but crappy free food is where it starts.
Do you really want the rest of the World to look like our neighborhoods? I don't...stop trying to manage and fix everything for everyone. Let them ask for help when they feel they need it. Otherwise, you are simply creating dependency. Self motivation is the greatest poverty ender ever. And you would rob them of feeling it's effects by your "generosity"...which by the way is suspect. Why aren't you teaching them to code instead? That's how most of you got wealthy...
I thought biometrics = a password you cannot change = a bad idea.
How is this different?
Not dystopic at all.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/remysmidt/president-tru...
Though that always reminds me of Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator:-
https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/The-Great-Dictator-Charle...
That said, at first glance I thought the headline was for an article in The Onion.
I wanted to do Human Captcha[0] and people told me it is creepy but this is on another level.
Bots can be nice. Humans can be bad. Focus on the right problem.
I think a better solution that would be both cheaper and more effective would simply be creating a good digital bank.
> Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s,(A) and to God what is God’s.”
Matthew 22:19-21
> It also forced all people, great and small,(A) rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,(B) 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark,(C) which is the name of the beast or the number of its name
Rev 13:16-17
It's like all the worst things about SV rolled into one silver turd.
At least some Machiavellian or dumb things are actually workable, in the 'business' sense, I think this one doesn't even make sense as a startup.
This strikes me as a good problem to solve. Giving a free share to every person is exactly how a new global currency should be launched, no?
How would you solve it differently?
No, that's not how currency works at all.
A currency is just a means of exchange, it itself is not wealth.
A 'global currency' for example, might be something backed by assets. So anyone with assets can trade those in for some currency. (Which would be hard because it's hard to value those assets, but you see the point.) You'd need a regulator to try to control how much currency exists at any given time, if you're trying to keep it stable with respect to other currencies. (Or not if you don't want to that.)
In order for the Orb scheme to have any use use, you'd have to start everyone off with quite a bit of 'new currency', but because it's issued arbitrarily, it's unlikely that anyone would value it. For example, why would the surgeon accept a currency at face value when the same amount of currency was given to his 17 year old kid who played video games all year?
Imagine if we did this with regular, paper bills.
Imagine if you printed high quality physical currency, called 'World Bucks' and gave everyone on planet earth 100 000 each of 'World Bucks'. Would that catch on as a currency? It might in some niches for some things, but pragmatically no, it would not. It would be treated about as valuable as Monopoly money.
You can't print value out of thin air.
Crypto has a way of distracting people from the reality of what's going on, especially those without any financial background might tend to believe that if you just printed a piece of paper and called it money, that you could finance an economy that way.
If SV want to help poor people, then they can probably help the most by helping to root out corruption, by investing, setting up real industry etc..
However, one thing to this is interesting to me. The idea that access to token of value exchange can (and maybe should) work based on biometrics, just because you exist. I absolutely can’t see how such a thing can be privately owned though.
The smartest minds of this generation are wasting on crypto.
For example Gates and Jobs were never about ad business model.
> https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OrbOperato...
Wowing the natives with shine and magic. Neo-colonialism alive and well in SV. They have to be self-aware, right? Right?!
Then you'll love Fecalcoin!
Think having your eyeball scanned by "The Orb" to prove you're human is too dystopian? Just squat over The Block and pinch a loaf to mint a block on the Fecalcoin blockchain that is tied to your unique fecal biome.
Then take your steaming fresh Fecalcoin over to Fecalcoin's NFT marketplace, OpenGutter, and invest in whatever bullshit tickles your colon.
Why is it even matter if you are human or not if you are able to input computational power to PoW coin in order to mine then trade coins or use them to trade goods. Imagine AI bot which is programmed to mine PoW coin then trade and make you profit while you input computational power and electricity as the energy resource.