Sam Altman’s Worldcoin promised them free crypto for an eyeball scan | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin promised them free crypto for an eyeball scan

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335 pointsdonohoe323 comments

I don’t see how this could ever be legitimate. Giving out an unlaunched shitcoin and a t shirt in exchange for the biometric data of people who very clearly don’t understand crypto or biometric data (read: random person in a mall, regardless of country). This is pretty clearly taking advantage of people.

My question is, couldn’t you do this fairly without even spending that much money? Say you need 5MM scans to build your database (that you’re going to delete the data from anyway). With shitcoins it’s close to free, but you had to pay a bunch of engineers and marketers. Why not give each person $5 USD converted to their local currency? For $25MM you are actually having a positive impact, don’t get dragged through the mud in articles like this, and it didn’t even cost that much.

Because it's not about making an impact, it's performance art meant to accumulate investment money.

“Performance art” is exactly right. Likewise, it’s not a coincidence that the actual field of contemporary performance art is increasingly resembling the entrepreneurship/startup industry.

It's funny, because people tend to think performance artists are the ones full of shit... I suppose life really does imitate art.

You are right, but I think it's performance art plus narcissism and greed.

Akin to "security theatre", this is "tech startup theatre".

Stop trying to whitewash this, this is a scam, just because he was the former Kingmaker of the SV startup scene doesn't mean he isn't a scammer and this isn't a scam.

Referring to the company as analogous to security theatre is not a compliment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater

it is a little “word softening” though, we might be better off calling a fig a fig

It's literally not, though. The whole point of "theatre" is to emphasize that it's not real.

If you call something "counterfeit currency", the word "counterfeit" isn't "softening", it's negating.

> My question is, couldn’t you do this fairly without even spending that much money?

It would actually cost tens of millions of dollars (if not more) if you want to comply with the securities laws of every country.

If you cannot comply with local securities laws you have no business in finance in those countries.

If you cannot comply with local restrictions on press freedom you have no business serving content to users from those countries.

Exactly. It's a circular argument to say a law is good because it's a law. And no one has any idea of financial laws in each country

Saying that Sam Altman is a scammer

This comparison would imply that securities laws are unjust because financiers are regularly targeted by authoritarian regimes.

Which is ludicrous. They aren't the underdogs here. They _are_ the powerful parties who need to be kept in check for democracy to function. A journalist publishing despite censorship is in no way comparable to wealthy promoters distributing unregulated securities.

I think what you were going for may have been that distributing these securities is in some way freedom of speech, which is also just incorrect, or correct in some way so limited as to be irrelevant. If it is freedom of speech, your freedom to distribute securities stops at scamming your neighbor's nose. But the burden of proof here is on your security _not_ being a scam, and that is because unregulated securities markets readily devolve into scam after scam.

The law isn't optional when it restrains things I don't like.

If laws forbid what you want to do, you're clearly, by definition, not in power.

The point of a nation of laws is to restrain the powerful, the powerful don't need laws to do what they want done, and the law is the only safe redress the abused have against them. Which is why unpunished abuses of the law by elites in society is so damaging in the long run, it erodes the very foundation of what it means to be a just society.

By that definition, it's hard to understand why the powerful don't just use their power to stop the legislation holding them back.

I think in reality there are many different kinds of power, and talking about power as if it's one simple fungible thing leads to naive and wrong conclusions.

I agree, the thing is, the person who introduced the idea into this conversation that power was a boolean quantity and that it meant you either could do anything or were limited in some way - was you. I don't mean this as a personal attack or anything, it's just the facts; we weren't talking in those terms until you introduced them. You wouldn't need to disagree with this point if you hadn't brought it up yourself.

Powerful people lobby against legislation constantly with mixed success. They're able to hold a lot of influence, but not able to hold total influence. It is difficult to understand, it's a complex system composed of many fully autonomous human beings. But we do ourselves a disservice when we cast it in such stark terms, wouldn't you say?

Sure.

I responded to an argument I thought was silly with something on a similar level, and what I wrote doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.

Such is life on the forums sometimes.

> I responded to an argument I thought was silly with something on a similar level, and what I wrote doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.

So you're wrong, but it isn't your fault, because you didn't even believe what you said, and you only said it because you wanted to respond to my argument, which you didn't think was worth taking seriously?

I'd encourage you to hold yourself and your public statements to a higher standard than that. If my arguments aren't worth responding to - don't. If you don't believe something - don't say it.

That isn't just "how things go," that's a series of decisions you made. Putting that on me shouldn't be something you accept from yourself.

"So what you're saying is..." arguments are typically fantasies about the opponents flawed inner thoughts, and not worth responding to.

And yet, here you are, responding with a vague observation, which you don't attempt to justify applies to this particular situation. On a website without notifications, you checked your threads in order to see if I had responded, in order to tell me how my fantasies weren't worth your time.

I think it's quite telling that you described us as "opponents." You aren't actually here to discuss anything, you're here to "win." That's why you're throwing out opinions you don't hold, and why you can't admit you're wrong without wrapping it in an insinuation that I am more wrong. That's why you keep responding, even if it's only to assert I'm not worth responding to.

To put my cards on the table, I care about this conversation, I care about what the truth of this matter is, and I want to either change your mind or have my mind changed. I think you care too. I think you're cloaking your ideas in a veneer of detachment to protect yourself from taking my criticism seriously. And I think that's deeply unfortunate.

Upon reflection, I acknowledge this comment was too far, and I apologize for making it.

So if I were the President, and I attempted to appoint an unqualified judge and was denied by Congress, you would argue that I don't hold power?

Power is not a binary quantity, and there isn't just one type of power.

Yes.

A power president would be able to put in unqualified judges.

Considering there was recently a president putting in unqualified judges, while the prior president couldn't put in any judges, that is a difference in their power

So, hucksters cannot be regulated because they don't hold absolute power? Indeed, we can't even talk about power differentials unless there is absolute power?

That would seem to contradict your last statement, so I'm just not sure what you are asserting here.

In a democratic society, the power of the executive is defined by law. The President is a powerful individual, but he is not a King.

By law, appointments of certain positions require explicit consent of congress.

The ability of regressive partisan elements to break government is a part of the design of the government. I personally find it repugnant and stupid. I also think that the short sighted nature of wielding this power in such a trivial and hamfisted way will ultimately backfire and result in constitutional changes down the road.

> The ability of regressive partisan elements to break government is a part of the design of the government. I personally find it repugnant and stupid.

It's amazing the way you guys (small-d democrats) are always dressing up what is nakedly the statement that "everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy (because I say it's good for the people), but whatever I dislike is authoritarian (even if the people want it.)"

It may surprise you to learn that, historically, this is exactly how authoritarianism views itself. Even Saddam Hussein conducted polls of his popularity so he could pretend his sovereignty arose from the people. The Vichy government was legal, popular, and internationally recognized. What the law says on paper is a different thing than what is practiced, and conveniently appealing to what the paper says is a time-honored tactic of eliding inconvenient realities.

Democracy, c. 2020s: "The people must be allowed to choose, but only if what they choose is good for them, as decided by me."

I think you're stretching it to say the only definition of democracy is one where the people have selected some specific situation. This is problematic on two fronts. One is scale. The other is definitional and presupposes that democracy's only definition stems from the fact that people choose.

Democracy doesn't scale. You need representation. Which makes the question of "what do the people want" very challenging because you go through layers of representation. Definitionally it's a problem which surfaces obviously at the extreme - "if the people want an authoritarian government and they get it, does that mean that that's democracy?". You may think that's absurd yet humanity tends to favor authoritarianism in groups, particularly in moments of crisis and/or being swayed via propaganda (see Julias Ceaser).

I think the nuance that's missing is that you can have objective definitions and measures of democracy which you have dismissed as ""everything I like and want is good and proceeds in a way I'll call democracy" when it's more nuanced.

I would like to understand what these objective definitions of democracy are. If you look at ratings and papers created by the people who (like you) suppose the very real science of democracy measuring exists, e.g. Freedom House, what am I to make of the fact that various societal and legislative attitudes towards LGBT peoples (for example) are now a key component of democracy? No country can get a full democracy score without legalizing maximally permissive attitudes towards this population.

Taking your assertion at face value, that means no full and true democracy has ever existed prior to ~2010. Is that what you believe? Because even the then-believed-to-be freest countries of the 80s were probably quite regressive on gay rights.

You would have to believe that, because otherwise "democracy" seems to mean "all the things that good people support today," which is my point. And if that is what you believe, that only in the last 1-2 decades has a real democracy existed, then you must also believe that it's possible that the science of democracy measuring will discover in the future that the True Democracy is even more democratic than what we have today. It's not clear to me how this is any different from "everything I like is democracy," where "what I like" is increasingly progressive policies.

Why are gay rights apparently part of the canonical definition of democracy and not firearms ownership, which directly empowers people to resist tyranny? How can you explain this by appealing to universal principles, instead of simply reiterating liberal orthodoxy? I don't see a way.

Gay rights may not have explicitly persued by democracies of old. But modern democratic values implies at the very least: freedom of expression equality under law and other values which may imply a different attitude regarding what gays can and can't do. Gays have been opressed for a long time. There's some momentum for this type of a sociatal attitudes and norms. So granted democracies have changed and evolved but the idea of gay rights is not an antithesis for democracy.

So in a society that sees gays as people, it's not a large leap to consider gay rights as part of a evolving definition of democracy. Same as all western "democracies" took time to let women rights be a thing. Will you argue that a contemporary democracy which doesn't give women a right to vote is a democracy? If not, then how is gay rights different?

What will stop pedophiles (as an example, not associating them with gays) from gaining the same rights and recognition? Or do you suppose that, if that happens, it must be that society has "discovered" that these rights are also part of democracy?

In other words, is there a limiting principle that you're appealing to?

And why do you suppose that the right of people directly to be armed, and therefore resist tyranny and remain governed only democratically, never figures into these democracy scores?

I think you put words in my mouth and strawmanned it to an extreme degree and then argued with the strawman. A black and white view isn't helpful nor is it one I ascribe to. I think there are objective qualitative criteria of democratic values (which themselves aren't unidemensional and may be in opposition of each other at times). Can you actually numerically ascribe a single democratic value that can be used to objectively compare countries? I think that part is mostly silly. Not sure why you're grouping my views with Freedom House as it's not a thing I brought up. I might agree with them on some things and disagree on others. I don't have that much knowledge about them.

I think statistics can be certainly be used to be illustrative. For example, having a 7x higher incarceration rate than Canada might imply that on some level USA has a larger problem than Canada on this democracy level. Specifically, the US disenfranchises people while in prison and frequently keeps them disenfranchised afterward. I'd say it's pretty non-controversial to say that metrics around the percentage of the population living within the country that is enfranchised is a measure of one aspect of democracy (which means that most countries fail on this metric of letting non-citizens vote). Another might be whether citizens believe that an election result was free and fair (in addition to actually trying to find any evidence that it wasn't). A more democratic country would probably engender more good will and faith from its constituents vs one where the population believe that it only paid lip service to the idea.

Anyway, that's all I'll say on this as I'm done talking with someone engaging in bad faith tactics.

I think history illustrates vividly that when democratic power is watered down by other means of power, the end result is bad for the people as a whole.

Democracy in 2020 in the United States looked more like 1890 than 1980. That’s not good for anyone.

And the regressive elements I reference exist by peddling fear and anger without addressing the source of the grievance or the problem faced. Someday, the people in places like Kansas will figure it out. In the meantime, folks will feast on the bread and circus of “LGBTQ”, or whatever is being served up by the outrage of the month club.

Ok, I am not looking for an argument but based on this response, I don't think you understand the critique at all. You keep using these words like democratic power, and it's not clear to me that you mean anything other than "things I like."

This is why the Founders (in America) made it clear that the human rights have an ontological basis that transcends any law (rights are granted by God, whatever that means to you).

Rights that are granted by laws are not rights at all, which is why the proper understanding of human rights is that they can neither be granted nor taken away by any human law, as any law that would do so is just a coercive force belonging to whoever happens to be in power at the time.

The Anti-Federalists were so concerned to make this clear that they even viewed enumerating basic rights in the Bill of Rights as dangerous / likely to be interpreted as exhaustive vs. transcendent, which is exactly what has happened over time, of course.

This is actually my favorite comment of the year.

Pardon the ignorant question, but what did you study to learn this? My midwestern education completely failed me here. I'd like to read whatever it is you read.

Thank you. :)

Man, I wish I had a simple answer for you, it's basically what I've pieced together over the years by trying to fill in the gaps in my own midwestern education.

A lot of it, I did pick up by digging into the history the Federalist / Anti-Federalist papers themselves, as well as various readings on the Founders / framing of the Constitution. If I think of anything specific I can point to, I'll follow back up here.

Thank you. Honestly, any starting point whatsoever would be extremely helpful. That's the thing that's prevented me from ever seriously diving in, mostly because life makes so little time for it. But I can make the time now.

I find it worthwhile to re-read the Declaration of Independence from time to time, even more so than the US Constitution (for some of the reasons mentioned above).

The Anti-Federalist Papers aren't necessarily easy to breeze through, but definitely worth reading: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Federalist-Papers-Dover-Thrift-E...

They can also be found in audio format here, and elsewhere: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/q3qhq-50128/The-Anti-...

The real mindset change happened, for me, when I saw that coercion in society is THE enemy. All actions and interactions should be voluntary. It's when those lines are crossed that crimes and evil occur. Everything flows from that, in my opinion.

The problem is that the creator isn’t very responsive to requests for clarification.

Without writing down what our natural rights are in a way that is understandable, you’re stuck trying to reconcile religious beliefs. How do you deal with an individual who believes that people of African descent we designated by the creator as less than human?

We deal with this today in other contexts. Ambiguity and conviction don’t mix well.

That was basically the debate that occurred, the risk of not writing them down was also very large for the reasons you mention. It’s only a problem if that list is then viewed as a) what defines those rights and / or b) is an exhaustive list. Unfortunately, that is what tends to happen over time, hence the need for constant pushback on people who attempt such shenanigans.

As far as your other question, it comes back to coercion vs those rights. If some jackass wants to believe that, I can’t change those beliefs. But I can certainly support the right of self-defense or shared defense of the intended victim if that ideology is used to attack them.

It's a complex issue for sure. There was a time where I was more drawn to being against the list.

But... when you look at how the world turns, and that Jim Crow was legal well into my parents lifetime, and that some individuals fight against things like privacy rights in pursuit of their own agenda and others fight for universal payments under the guise of "general welfare", the scope provided by a written list seems like the pragmatic choice.

Right, the pragmatic approach is fine as long as the ontological basis of rights is maintained in the culture.

This is why, in debate, i prefer not to use the word law and instead refer to them are "regulation"

Regulation is generated by those in power and largely

The law comes from the constitution alone.

What kind of excuse is that?

That’s like saying it would cost tens of millions of dollars to comply with health regulations in different countries when you sell foodstuff. Yes, of course!

Maybe electric automobile mfgs can just ship cars all over the world without going through safety standards too!

What kind of excuse is that?

The standard Silicon Valley Ethos excuse.

Which is what a lot of these "self-made men" have and built their careers and fortunes on.

The internet and electronic commerce needed some breathing room during its nascent period, but now that its self-sufficient and does not need these kinds of allowances to survive, it's time they get rolled in to existing oversight or the .gov rollout a new Administration/Commission, etc. to govern these new areas of the economy to ensure it's not a free for all.

The question was literally "couldn't you do this without spending a ton of money?". Why isn't saying "no, it'll cost a lot of money" a valid answer?

Mirror neurons and nostalgia for a particular modal.

When a mind latches onto a modal for problem solving, every problem is a nail.

Technocrats have to try and illustrate the value of their technocratic solutions.

I once heard a disturbing ghost story:

Certain tech company was building a training set of faces.

Hired a contractor in $poor_region.

Contractor asks if eyes need to be open in photos.

Doesn't sound right to $tech_employee.

Asks why exactly the eyes in photos aren't open to start with?

They were taking pictures of corpses.

Contract ended.

This sounds so unlikely, unless they already had a huge set of corpse photos for another purpose.

It’s easier to find live people that’ll let you photograph them than corpses.

Lots of places will collect biometric data from the dead. If your cousin works at a funeral home taking these photos, or in the city government collecting the photos, you can basically make money for no work.

I assure you this is real.

Good data is worth it's weight in gold. I've heard stories of startups paying journalists 40/hr to write samples for nlp datasets. Imo this is not a good place to cut costs

Trying to break into AI training business for a while. I have access to tech enabled semi-skilled workers who are willing and can be fairly compensated however launching this business isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Medium and bigger companies need to work with bigger firms and require audits and certification and LLC registration in NA or Europe. And smaller companies can or willing to pay less than 5 bucks per workhour. At any scale the break even is 4 bucks because you can get the job done by semiskilled people but you need skilled people to revise and supervise.

Even though the story is highly unlikely when it comes to AI training with data you have to balance scale, legitimacy and budget. Nobody has figured that out.

It’s the same type of supply chain issues faced in minerals extraction.

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.

Give a man a homemade shitcoin and insert yourself as the transaction processor middleman, and you feed yourself in perpetuity.

Feed yourself in perpetuity and you make billions.

Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning.

Thats not what this is about. It's about identity. How do you prove identity of a wallet and ensure that this is my only one? Say i want to do an airdrop but only to real people? This technology solves the identity problem in a secure way. It's just a hash of my retina data, proves this is my wallet and is based on unique retina data. Also with ZK Snarks, they don't know anything about that bio data.

But crypto is an adversarial network, so i don't see this solution working on it's own. I know biometric data is intrisically secure but is also intrincicly arbitrary. So, this data could be spoofed and will create this constant cat and mouse game where the parameters for verification are adjusted, creating centralization. But they are on the right path.

They’re “devolving” because that’s exactly what the article says WorldCoin is doing:

> But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even though it has captured and stored almost a half million iris scans to train its algorithms.

> But they are on the right path.

The right path to what, exactly? Is there any remotely plausible sequence of events where this evolves into a positive contribution to the world rather than a way for a couple billionaires to role-play as, well, whatever they are role-playing here?

I like playing around in the crypto space. I always have. Using ZK-Snarks with biodata allows you to verify, profit and protect your data. Instead of handing it to some entity to do god knows with. I give it to apple and their database isn't just a hash, it's full and open catalouging with all my other data taken from the the many sensors in the phone and products.

Worldcoin's vision is a positive contribution to my life and many people i know who also enjoy playing around in the crypto space. People are adults, let them be adults and make their own decisions. & stop bashing the crypto-autists like me who enjoy playing in the cryptoverse, for the only reason that it's wierd and different.

>I know biometric data is intrisically secure.

I work in security (at a crypto/web3 company!) and the opposite line of thought prevails in the field, most security experts argue that biometric data is fundamentally insecure especially for auth. A quick google search shows a lot of research backing that, from universities to major tech companies.

>Using ZK-Snarks with biodata allows you to verify, profit and protect your data. Instead of handing it to some entity to do god knows with.

How is this going to happen exactly? The requesting entity, like a doctor, asks for medical history. I use my retina to verify, and thanks to ZK-Snarks they have no knowledge of my retina data. How are they going to get the blood pressure readings? They need the data to analyze and understand. And what stops them from saving it in their own DB?

Similar with many of these web3 products. Think, uniswap or defisaver. Ok you can use ZK to auth, they have no idea what wallet address is connected. But as soon as you use it they know exactly who and what you transferred and traded, all stored in a DB.

"Worldcoin says it eventually wants to erase the iris images to protect the privacy of those who sign up for its currency. If perfected, the company says the technology will distill the image of each set of irises into a unique string of letters and numbers, called an iris-hash, to be stored in Worldcoin’s database. As the company’s data consent form states, data gathered by the Orb will be used for “purposes such as training of our neural network for the recognition of human irises.”"

Eventually. If perfected. "Will."

That doesn't change the fact that you will most likely be able to take someone's iris-hash and then associate their transaction history with that hash.

At least Bitcoin has pseudonymity.

Imagine a world where everyone on earth start with the same amount of coins, not based on how many gpu are mining for you or how early you are in the pyramidal game.

Will probably end up with some people holding most of the value anyway, but at least you start equally.

I see the appeal of this, but don't understand how anything like Worldcoin would be able to achieve that. People already have wealth accumulated in the real world, and there's no reason giving everyone an equal amount of a cryptocurrency would suddenly place everyone in an equal starting position.

OK I imagined it. Everyone in the world now has some number of digital “coins” tallied in some kind of system created by a bunch of Bohemian Grove type billionaires.

Now what?

Something similar happened around the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yelstin gave every Russian citizen a certificate worth 10,000 rubbles to buy shares in state owned enterprises that were being privatized.

Those with ready cash bought the certificates from those without, and this led to the current oligopoly.

> Will probably end up with some people holding most of the value anyway

Yes, exactly. It's an entirely pointless exercise because it doesn't take place in a vacuum. A "great reset" is pointless regardless of your particular aims because the world is the way it is for a reason.

Imagine a world where everyone on Earth has their iris scans recorded by a Silicon Valley company in return for a voucher for a small amount of a cryptocoin that doesn't actually exist and may never have any value at all, much less its stated $20.

Having reliable personal identities would enable some interesting stuff, like inflation-funded basic income, reputations, and loans without collateral. But I don't really think having a central actor collect biometrics is a good or safe way to achieve it.

> Having reliable personal identities would enable some interesting stuff, like inflation-funded basic income, reputations, and loans without collateral

In a way that, like, say passports, have never done?

> and loans without collateral

Here's my US passport, a drivers license, a picture of my home, some tax records, and you can verify all of this beyond a reasonable doubt via the various credit reporting agencies. Now hand my my $100k please. Oh BTW I don't actually have any money in the bank and I have no income and etc so you're never going to see me again and good luck collecting anything.

> Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning.

Because there's many recent examples of companies building databases to sell and a lot of companies are harvesting data for machine learning? I'm sorry if I'm coming across as glib or rude, but these aren't theoretical exploits. This company has apparently collected data on hundreds of thousands of people and raised millions of dollars; I don't think they deserve a ton of benefit of the doubt.

Edit: changed "long history" to "many recent examples"

I don't think you are sounding glib or rude. In fact, the person you replied to sounds naive to me. It's great to go through life only looking for the positives, but if you don't look out for how the thing can be gamed then it is pretty much guaranteed to be gamed.

Glad to hear it! My initial reaction was quite harsh and I guess I was afraid that would bleed into my comment.

"Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning."

Because "building a database of biometric information in a nefarious manner" is exactly what they are doing.

"How do you prove identity of a wallet and ensure that this is my only one? Say i want to do an airdrop but only to real people? This technology solves the identity problem in a secure way. It's just a hash of my retina data, proves this is my wallet and is based on unique retina data. Also with ZK Snarks, they don't know anything about that bio data."

They are on the right path to build a database of biometric data. All the rest of this is handwaving and dreams.

>Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning. Thats not what this is about. It's about identity.

Because all collected data is eventually sold. First you try to sell access to the data. If that doesn't work, then you sell the data itself.

No one wants this crypto/nft/web3 world except rent seekers.

> I don’t see how this could ever be legitimate. Giving out an unlaunched shitcoin and a t shirt in exchange for the biometric data of people who very clearly don’t understand crypto or biometric data (read: random person in a mall, regardless of country). This is pretty clearly taking advantage of people.

Welcome to the business model of those who want to align their old business models of 'web2' with this re-packed new thing (but not really) and call it 'web3,' which is totally not a scam and not their to sell your data.

Altman is the typical Valley trope tat Silicon Valley lambasted, and showed to be a hypocrite of the worst kind: those that sell an image of and 'making the world a better place' with insert inane startup name (Worldcoin, really?) attached to some pernicious data mining business model.

Honestly, YC may still have tons of capital and some cache in the Valley, but outside of it, especially if you've actually been in the Bitcoin community you will see Altman's work for the same type of ICO scam that it is. And like most of these guys they're transplants to CA, which is no surprise. I really wish they'd stop trying to cling on to our disruptive culture, and perverting it with their headlong greed.

Is he still CEO of OpenAI? At this point I'd consider it equally as scammy as this project.

Honestly, I'm just wondering if they're going to hire Carlos Matos [0] for this shitcoin, too.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5nyQmaq4k4

It's not an unlaunched shitcoin. There is already a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. This is actually a plain scam.

Giving real money escalates the fraud potential (as noted in the article - the frauds reduced when they switched away from BTC).

Worldcoin talks about UBI which based on what Sam has said in the past I would take them at their word on. But beyond UBI what WorldCoin is going for is identity.

In the nonblockchain world your identity is your Country ID, Passport, etc.

In the blockchain world none of that stuff exists and people get uncomfortable when you start asking for it.

This leaves a situation where a person is often just represented by a wallet. Well as you may know a person can make dozens or hundreds of wallets.

This problem leads to all kinds of weird tricks that crypto projects get up to when trying to verify 1 wallet 1 person. For example in the idea of 1 person 1 vote on a project or for something like an airdrop early in a project where people on a discord get free crypto for being early adopters but you don't want one person registering with many wallets.

Today that might look verification based on a phone number associated with discord or something. Real flimsy stuff.

Worldcoin bases it on retina, which I admit creeps me out as well even if it's just a hash. But I can see what they're getting at. The need is there, maybe there is a better way.

I used to work at crypto startup and we ran into this exact problem.

I appreciate this insightful comment.

You seem to know more than the average person about this topic.

Would you care to elaborate on the risks associated with this retina blockchain tech?

I'd value your thoughts, as would many others here I'm sure.

Thanks either way!

This project faces a few risks:

- Abuse of orb operators by Worldcoin, as outlined in the article. This is basically equivalent to abuse of Uber drivers by Uber. They are offering a job and they need to be good employers.

- Abuse of orb operators by other actors, again, as outlined in the article. Since they are "giving away free money," it's quite natural for legitimate and illegitimate authorities to imagine there's an opportunity to prosecute or profit from taking advantage of the system. So far as I can see, there is no such opportunity, but it won't stop people who don't understand what's happening.

- Abuse of the biometrics themselves to create an unfair distribution, as mentioned in the article. If the eye scanners actually don't create a unique hash for each individual, or if people learn how to create fake irises, or otherwise hack the device, people could sign up multiple times and receive more free money than other people. If this scam works at scale, orb operators could become targets.

- Abuse of Worldcoin "users." Orb operators could sign people up, then steal their crypto wallets from them. This could be done through coercion or through misinformation.

- Scams: namely, people creating fake orbs that do collect and abuse biometric information

- Unlikely, but: collecting more information than needed and then getting compromised by bad actors or by some kind of corporate takeover. As far as I know, Worldcoin only collects hashes of irises (and maybe telemetry). This data is pretty much useless for any purpose other than the intended one: providing people with a unique wallet. Abuses of such data could do one thing: given the original person and the device, prove that they signed up for Worldcoin. If Worldcoin accidentally collects some other kind of data, which has some other abuse potential, this could be a problem. I suspect they will be very careful not to do this.

In conclusion, the "retina blockchain tech" has, really, no risks associated inherently. Distribution, however, must be carefully handled to avoid abuse.

This is especially complicated because most people will not understand how the technology works and will attempt to exploit it in ways that, in the end, won't work. Nevertheless, they may cause harm in the meantime.

The problem is analogous to a bank offering free money to anyone who shows up. Provided they can prove identity, there is no problem inherently. People show up and get free money, then leave. However, how would you maintain order in the line that has formed? What to do about someone who shows up with a gun? What if the teller is assaulted? What if the tellers are not protected or paid appropriately for their service?

Worldcoin, if it succeeds, will merely put everyone in the world on more equal economic footing, and make a few people rich. It will also launch the first ever decentralized identity system with a significant user-base. If they can pull this off, I'm more concerned about the geopolitical, governance and economic consequences of a cryptocurrency with wider distribution than Bitcoin, and of the identity system. What happens when anyone in the world can airdrop cryptocurrency to more than a billion people?

Worldcoin is absolutely collecting more information than iris hashes.

Would you like to invest in my new blockchain technology? Send me $100,000 and sign a non-consent and I'll explain it to you.

The risks of retina scanning are the same regardless whether in blockchain or any other domain. The company collecting your retina signature/hash/data gets breached, your PII is stolen, sold on the black market, and criminals use your biometric data to create fake, fraudulent identities and accounts and steal stuff in your name. This is already happening, just without the biometric data.

Is there currently a way to create a fake identity from a photograph of an iris?

Here's what I don't get about this issue: Given that crypto's value prop is a decentralized, democratized currency free from any regulatory body's oversight, why are crypto people viewing this as "a problem"?

It seems to me that they want to have their cake and eat it too.

The "identity verification" function is one of the roles that governmental agencies are well-suited to perform.

Another is prosecuting fraud.

If crypto doesn't want government "interference" then why is the crypto community so invested in replicating that "interference", except in an objectively inferior way?

It's not an all-or-nothing situation, e.g. you might want to ensure that every user gets 100 tokens only once in their lifetime without further constraints afterwards on what they can do with this. Not saying there's any crypto project where this would make business sense, but a priori and without concrete example, why not.

Why would I prefer to offer up my immutable biometric data if I'm uncomfortable offering up my government issue id, this reasoning makes no sense.

Devil's advocate: I think the point is not to solve a problem the users have, but rather a problem the company dabbling in crypto has, e.g. that no user benefits twice from one-time offers, this kind of things.

Because in our current environment, a data breach of your government issued ID can have more negative real world consequences through various forms of identity theft than a data breach of your retina can.

You don't offer up the biometric data itself, you offer up something anonymized and derived from it (think a hash of your biometric data).

Proof of Work’s raison d’etre is to mitigate Sybil attacks so a naive solution to the problem would be to have people “mine” their airdrop.

Bitcoin/crypto solved the “proof of resources” problem in a decentralized trustless way, which is cool.

What would be neat now is “proof of unique living individual” in the same way.. that would solve a number of problems, related to UBI and voting.

In the past, or in dictatorships, resources == votes, but in democracies we want individuals == votes.

> What would be neat now is “proof of unique living individual” in the same way.. that would solve a number of problems, related to UBI and voting.

So, there was a project called Aurora that tried to do exactly this during the financial crisis fallout in Iceland, it failed, mainly because it was way too early and the blockchain itself wasn't protected as well as Bitcoin: it was presumed that PoS could serve as a possible solution if it has a specific usecase.

Unfortunately, we didn't gain as much info and data as we could have other than then from a security standpoint deviating from BTC was not tenable.

Jack Dorsey is seeking ways to just this with Block, he did a recent talk on how UBI could work via Bitcoin's blockchain as a way to facilitate seamless txs, the biggest obstacle being that this would need to be a layer 2 or possibly layer 3 because of the ID component that ensures that this info is not retained: think zero proof knowledge protocol.

It can be done on mainchain via a derivative for incredibly low cost (100 million sats/BTC), but just like colored coins was too early this may prove tricky.

What we learned from the COVID unemployment debacle was that the payments system in the US is entirely broken and cannot function even at the best of times, much less under any strain without being subject to total collapse or perpetual grift so this needs to happen either way.

Personally speaking, I'd really wish that we can derive more data from all the UBI test runs and then have this be a major part of layer 2/3 development: for all this talk about 'Web3,' a total boomerism if I ever heard one, and the money pouring into this space I wish some of it would be spent in this space.

I'd offer to help get involved if it were the case as a former co-founder, dev and consultant in this space, if that were to happen.

>What would be neat now is “proof of unique living individual” in the same way.. that would solve a number of problems, related to UBI and voting.

The Bitcoin way is asking the person to kill his or herself. That way it is guaranteed that the person only exists once.

So if someone hits you in the face with a baseball bat and your eye dies, the wallet goes with it?

Sounds pretty dumb.

I had a few interactions with employees at Worldcoin. At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto.

HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle. If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you. I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain.

There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted.

Given the interesting potential of the idea, someone was going to eventually work on it. Worldcoin should have approached the problem slightly differently. First, testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it. Since the idea is controversial, they would have gained more goodwill by initially launching in the EU/North America under the more strict legal frameworks. Second, make the orb look less dystopian. Third, launch with a non-economic use case. Worldcoin won't solve UBI or inequality in one shot, so why not launch with a lower stakes use case such as an online forum or community that requires proof of personhood to post?

Sadly I think because of all the missteps, I can't see Worldcoin tackling the proof of personhood problem in the longterm. I hope another project comes along and makes an attempt more "sensitively".

> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world.

This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?

I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc., in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even easier.

I can name a couple of other blocking issues:

- political will

- perceived lack of funds

Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.

This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things.

I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.

Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.

Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.

> There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent

Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon.

That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.

10% is not very much when it comes to barriers to UBI.

If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop opposing it?

This is a good point. By widespread concern, I meant rather that tax return fraud generally does not rise to the level of campaign issue for people aspiring to political leadership.

I'm not actually sure whether refunds or total revenue is the appropriate denominator. The IRS collected about $3 trillion dollars in revenue, which would bring the rate down to 1 percent. On the one hand, refunds are linked to the total tax paid. On the other hand, there's other kinds of tax evasion, which would raise the fraud rate up again.

$30bil is not the correct numerator, regardless of if you take total tax revenue or refunds. The $6bil is.

That number also includes people who got scammed out of their tax refund by third-parties. Worldcoin would not prevent that; if anything Worldcoin looks exactly like one of those scams.

> decrepit government infrastructure

This is a common misconception. It's a political battle regarding the extent to which the government is permitted to tabulate and link the various details of people's lives.

> could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow

That ability implies keeping and regularly querying detailed information about individuals that many here aren't comfortable with.

> Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.

The system isn't as bad as you seem to be making out. Using a credit card without a chip is effectively the same thing. It's simply a claim that a numbered account has agreed to transfer you funds. Lying about that is fraud and your financial institution will have identifying details about you.

I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud.

Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.

Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset.

Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.

Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized.

Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue.

Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions.

You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.

Worth noting that the only thing centralized here is identity. Once everyone in the world has a trustworthy unique identifier, any number of currencies and services can make us it.

The rub is: what to do about newly born humans, and about death? Worldcoin is far from solving that problem, and probably won't even if they succeed, since by then numerous actors (including governments) will have gotten involved.

> Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today.

The main obstacle is that there is just not enough money for everyone. There is absolutely no problem to prevent fraud by checking government-issued IDs.

Can you provide sources on that statement about CERB? I'm aware of some people claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud), and people claiming when ineligible which was a risk they were aware of, but not any type of fraud that would be resolved by "proof of personhood" as in biometric scans of every person in the country.

This argument sort of reminds me of Reagan-esque "welfare queen" talking points.

If the government has a list of all citizen wallets, they can ensure efficient and even distribution without risk of fraud. There are no checks in the mail to interdict or fraudulent details to enter on an application.

> people claiming when ineligible

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that.

> claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud)

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that. A government assigned wallet is merely a different target than a bank account number.

I feel compelled to mention the charity Give Directly which is actually operating charitable UBI in some countries. I think they are very worthy of donations, and their programs are directly relevant to this discussion.

You could look at their operational overhead, but I don’t think it’s high enough to justify the assertion that global UBI would be impossible. But I also think the concept of a global UBI, beautiful though it is, skips out some evolutionary steps that are necessary. It’s entirely possible that a better end state is that each nation implements it’s own UBI program. And that is definitely doable with non-crypto.

Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and government money programs, so why would crypto be any different? The US’ Payroll Protection Program covid response paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program was still mostly effective; I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over a 90% success rate for instance.

I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.

Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a shell business than a personal bank account that does not map to a real person, at least in the US.

I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible.

In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.

> similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner

Source? I find it hard to believe.

As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud.

Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need.

We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.

> paid out tons of money to fake businesses

It did not.

> I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum,

You should not use it as an example especially if you don't know how efficient it was.

It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the average person to distinguish real from fake computer generated images.

IMO tragically naive to blur and equate legal framework definitions with market participation with fundemental life on earth. Whose legal framework and in what spoken language are the rules of personhood written? There is one and only one Oracle for personhood, in the possesion of some money-driven teams? There are more holes than Swiss Cheese once the assumptions are really examined. "Performance art intended to attract investment money" is more accurate and to the point here, than exposition on human personhood. run away...

> HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle

A "word" of advice from someone with decades of experience writing and public speaking: Don't. This type of line has two problems with respect to making your point.

First, it's not your actual point, so it invites debating the nature of HN rather than debating the ideas you spend the next three paragraphs discussing. And because it comes _before_ your ideas, it is planted in the reader's brain, taking up their attention. You gave it priority!

Second, and more seriously, it can appear to be making excuses for a bad reception before you find out whether you get a bad reception. You may think this will condition people reading your post and its replies to discount any negative sentiment because of the bias you allege, but what it actually does is tell readers that there is social proof for resisting your thinking.

You are literally tilting the playing field against your ideas. I may not agree with everything you say, but I believe your ideas deserve the fairest, most even reception. I recommend avoiding this practice in future.

Thanks for the advice.

I really appreciate this reply as a reader too. You are absolutely right. I've done the same in the past too and you've made me aware of this.

FWIW, in practice this type of disclaimer is shockingly effective in a comment forum. The point is to short-circuit the reactions of the average comment-reader, who is skimming, who has already mostly made up their mind, who is inclined to see comments which further reinforce their view as insightful, and comments which contradict their view as misguided or not worth reading.

Obviously, if everyone read everything, and read it with the same temperament, it should be useless. How could something you can attach to any argument be persuasive? But people skim and skim with bias.

It's really significant effect on places like reddit, where "this will get downvoted but mediocre insight" will get far more upvotes than "mediocre insight". It can be used and abused.

Well, if what you're saying is that a reader who is already biassed towards agreeing with the post will be motivated to upvote a post that complains about "cancel culture" because "culture wars," so use this one weird trick to get more upvotes even though it isn't going to persuade anyone who has yet to make uup their mind, you may be right.

(hard winkie, you definitely did not say anything about cancel culture or culture wars.)

But while you may be right about upvotes, I still feel correct about the fact that the tactic undermines the quality of the communication with respect to meaningful discussion amongst people seeking understanding. Furthermore, my fear is that such tactics increase polarization and knee-jerk reactions in comments, further devaluing good-faith debate.

If I'm roughly correct, the "disclaimer" feels like click-bait titles and other tactics that amount to "defecting" in game theory: They produce a very narrow advantage (worthless upvotes) for the poster, at the expense of the value of discussion to the forum overall.

The existence of tactics that undermine the quality of social discourse is a very hard problem, as we all know.

> feels like click-bait

That seems like a good way to put it to me. In particular, when it's at the top of the comment, it comes off as a prompt to the reader that they should buckle up for something spicy.

Who said anything about cancel culture or culture wars? The original post was just posting out a bias that many people have (anti-crypto). Everyone has biases and a lot of people are somewhat aware of their bias. By pointing out the bias, it helps people keep their bias in mind.

Your original comment said it was not effective and serves against you. Now you're saying it produces a narrow "shallow" advantage. I think it effective as it forces the reader to confront their biases.

I've seen this used in nonsensical anti-FB rants. You acknowledge that many people think facebook bad and you're not disputing that. And then you can go on to say "yes, people in fact still use facebook. in fact billions use it every day". It's been very effective in my experience.

Presuming we agree with the post I was replying to, this "shallow advantage" is only relevant if the outcome we want is upvotes and shallow engagement. Sometimes, that's exactly right, for example if we're promoting a new crypto coin, maybe it is beneficial to begin a post with "Crypto-Luddites will hate this, but WhyseeCoin..."

However, what I am also saying above is that there's another motivation for a post in a forum like HN, which is good-faith debate amongst people with open minds. I stand by my assertion that such openings detract from the post when we're seeking good-faith exploration of ideas.

I believe these two stances can coëxist happily.

Agreed. I'm also generally skeptical of unwarranted advice, because more often than not it just turns into an exercise to brag about one's achievements (or lackthereof) instead of saying anything useful.

I'll confess to having a flat policy of downvoting any comment I see that says "I'll get downvoted for this", regardless of whether I agree with the rest of it...

Another reason to avoid "I'll get downvoted for this" is the possibility that moderators will consider it a violation of HN's guidelines. In general, whinging about upvotes and downvotes is discouraged:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I sometimes downvote comments about voting to help enforce moderation. What I think is interesting about the topic of commenting on voting on comments is that the vast majority of my downvotes are fat finger mistakes while scrolling.

You might think this is a waste of your time, and that this idea sounds ludicrous -

Despite the previous comment not exactly following the form, going through an accusation audit prior to making your case is an extremely useful way of neutralizing the negative and getting your counterpart to open up to your ideas.

I highly suggest reading Chris Voss' take on this topic in Never Split the Difference.

I agree that there are times when challenging the reader's bias can be effective. Yes, that's slightly different than challenging an entire community's bias, but certainly worth calling out.

Thank you.

More details on how this book would apply here would be welcome.

I don't imagine the stance OP took (saying that HN is skeptical about crypto and implying that HN is biased and thus wrong) actually works here. What would work better would be to acknowledge some limitations of this whole field so far, so that readers expect a balanced opinion with possibly new insights that go beyond these well-known limitations.

If you take an extremely unreasonable opinion and a reasonable one, meeting in the middle is still not acceptable, and it's a bias in itself to lean towards this position. If it's not obvious within 10s that you're a reasonable and knowledgeable person, it's hard to convince myself that I should spend more time and give you the benefit of the doubt in the meantime, when so many other sources seem more promising.

> going through an accusation audit

"People here dislike this" or "this will probably get downvoted" is not an accusation audit. "I realize that the following objections to this idea have been raised previously" is entirely different.

I'd guess that line is in there to create debate and make the comment more controversial.

Alas, controversy and debate do not always go hand-in-hand. Highly controversial comments and posts often contain a lot of comments, but many of them end up being people yelling past each other, rather than engaging with each other.

They have the surface form of a debate, but it's very low-quality, consisting of people trying to talk to the audience by scoring points off each other, rather than organically engaging with each other.

JM2C.

Your comment and the response from u/unholiness both make really good points. The response comment I boil down to, know your audience and when this can be used effectively.

However our default writing style should not do this preempting disclaimer because it is a distraction.

This is something I think about almost daily, probably not healthy in itself, but I am really glad I read your comment which articulated why this writing style can work against the author. And the comment from unholiness which demonstrates how online discussions are hostile by default and almost warrant this writing style by default, although there are other steps an author could use to accomplish their disclaimer

I feel like your advice assumes having a good faith debate on the internet about a subjective and highly charged opinion is a reasonable possibility if you express your opinion clearly and fairly.

I would like to know what part of your decades of experience writing and public speaking led you to that assumption.

Have I been using on the wrong internet my whole life?

I’m glad you acknowledge the terrible missteps here, so I won’t focus on them, but I’d like to hear more about why you think this problem can be solved with biometrics. The missteps of Worldcoin highlight exactly why an arbitrary “personhood” claim is meaningless: anybody can go to a low income country and harvest personhoods!

Personhood is arbitrary, I’d appreciate any insight into why personhood is a meaningful replacement for identity.

It's not, the point of personhood isn't that it's exploit-free, but it acts as a fundamental rate limiter. Certainly there will still be theft downstream of the verification, but (assuming the approach delivers on the goals) you will not be able to do anything to generate an arbitrary number of recipients.

What is a fundamental rate limiter and why do we need one?

If you could make arbitrarily large numbers of accounts that each receive the token, that would break the system

Yeah, this is pretty obvious. I don't know that the phrase "fundamental rate limiter" can be used to describe a solution to this problem. Maybe it's me but it seems very odd choice of words.

Any system that is predicated on "one X per person" needs to ensure that a single human can't synthesize multiple "persons" in order to get more than one X and cheat the system.

Systems like this include:

* Democracy: One vote per person.

* Universal basic income: One income voucher per person.

* Some sales: One coupon per person, or one purchase per person.

* Many resource usage licenses: Can only catch one salmon on this river per person, etc.

Basically, it's good to have systems that are fair and equitable and in many cases, a way to do that is to distribute the good uniformly to people. That requires you to accurately determine how much each person gets, which requires a reliable notion of person.

At the same time, I think Worldcoin is complete nonsense. Almost all of the above systems function much better when scoped to a smaller regulatory authority that already has an existing reliable notion of person: passport, driver's license number, etc.

There’s billions upon billions of people, any motivated actor could have access to millions of people (Worldcoin have access to 500,000 and it only cost them 25 WRLD each!).

There’s already a black market for this sort of fraud, so this isn’t theoretical, Uber have a lot of problems with it.

Sure, but it's zero sum. It's a bounded amount of skew in the distribution that's innate in any system that is subject to vulnerabilities that have a high return on violence. This isn't the same as generating people, which is what I said is basically the main thing worldcoin is trying to prevent.

At the end of the day, Worldcoin is just "proof-of-Worldcoin": the same people who make that little orb can forge the existence of any number of new "personhoods". I work in crypto, and I thereby also think this project is stupid: this goes against the entire point of a decentralized trustless platform.

I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable, logical, and worthwhile goals a company that is bootstrapping themselves would take to ultimately solve a very complicated problem.

Then, of course, there is the approach to announce some ridiculous, overarching, near-impossible goal and then do the YOLO "fake it till you make it" dance and hope for the best.

Given the hype around Web3, I'm not entirely sure what their best route would've been. However creepy/problematic the shots of poor Africans looking at an Orb may seem, I think sadly there is a nontrivial amount of VC money that would follow that exact sort of approach for "moving fast and breaking things." Conversely, the unkind way to describe your approach is one of a very unambitious, slow, and "not investable" kind of way of running a company.

Your approach is undoubtedly the saner route to try to build a successful, ethical, and sustainable business. I'm just not sure that, in the near term, for founders chasing after that VC money (especially how plentiful it seems to be in the web3 space now!), that it is the short-run optimal strategy.

Not everyone has eyes. Just like not everyone has fingerprints.

Proof of Personhood is - like lots of ideas - ignorant about how people will abuse it. So you need to scan your retina to post? That doesn't stop someone stealing your laptop just after a scan. Or stop you scanning someone's eye when they're asleep / unconscious. Or any of a host of attacks.

The UBI requirement is interesting - but it comes down to how much cost is lost to fraud vs the cost of fighting that fraud. If you need to spend a billion pounds to stop a million in fraud - is that worth it?

> Or any of a host of attacks.

I imagine the truly ruthless/desperate gouging out other people's eyes to collect their payments :(

This has all happened before: https://usafrikagov.com/how-belgium-chopped-off-hands-and-ar...

> In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.

> Not everyone has eyes.

This is silly. The number of people without eyes is tiny, and so can be served with an alternate solution.

As someone who spends a lot of time with a deaf person, in a high-quality of life country with a social welfare system, I can tell you that these alternative systems to support off-mainstream modalities generally suck, if they exist at all.

You can’t hand-wave these things aside as if some powerful faerie will come solve the problem for you. It hasn’t worked like that for centuries and even in my country, where we’re comparatively quite good with this stuff, we’re shit with this stuff.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to call someone to book tickets for something requiring deaf support, on their behalf, when I can use a web interface for my booking. It’s crazy.

I don't see how an iris scan can be a "proof" of anything. One can simply generate any number of realistic-looking scans. There is a website that generates human faces, it should be possible to generate iris images as well.

Also, I don't see why cryptocurrency is needed for UBI. Is real money unsuitable for this purpose?

The idea, as I see it, is that with government issued money, you either need to collect the money somehow first, or if the UBI is to be done by the govt, the govt has to be convinced to issue the money,

whereas, with a cryptocurrency, it can just be issued exactly in accordance with the UBI payout, where the designers need no permission from the govt, and where recipients aren’t limited to a particular country. If the issuance produces too much devaluation of the token, well, then the experiment didn’t work, but it didn’t interfere with people’s existing savings or the like.

Even if it is not possible to fool the iris scan directly you could always take scans of animals. Just imagine farmers scanning their pigs or chickens to get a UBI.

Eh, "proof of personhood for crypto" is not part of the design by design. The whole idea of crypto was to establish a channel that is harder for one government to control. In that sense, it kinda succeeded.

But with that success came attention of various interested parties, whose goals are anything but the original intent including compliance with KYC/AML laws, which crypto mostly ignores ( exchanges don't, but it is a separate story ).

In short, "personhood" is not a problem.

> proof of personhood for crypto

How is any participant in Worldcoin able to verify that all funds in circulation are backed by unique persons?

Should they just blindly trust Worldcoin and all their operators to be honest and not make up biometric profiles to generate extra unbacked funds for themselves? I don't see how to solve this problem in a publicly verifiable way...

You could read their website, which explains their concept in detail: https://worldcoin.org/

And notably doesn't answer the GPs question how to verify the organization is honest, just how they protect the organization against user fraud.

Fair - I misread. It does seem that you'd need some kind of classic processes and/or auditing to de-risk a scenario where a bad actor who has access to the necessary keys prints themselves money. Maybe there is a way to also analyze the chain state for anomaly detection.

Airdrop recipients don't suffer from monetary risk. Only people who accept the coin as money are taking a risk.

People divulging their biometric data do suffer, since in exchange they receive a coupon that's supposedly redeemable for Worldcoin in the future, which won't be worth its advertised value if there's no trust in the system's integrity.

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto.

> There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person. Like all powerful ideas, there are ways that this could bring great value to the world and unfortunately also ways that this could be horrifically abused. Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. It could also enable mass surveillance if widely adopted.

Wait. Why is this a worthy problem if it has such extreme downsides? What good is UBI if you live in a panopticon? How would the resulting world be different than the former USSR where many things were paid for but you lived in fear of your neighbour ratting you out for "anti-government sentiment"?

This is good feedback. They can definitely still pivot out of any issues. It still seems to boil down to if they determine if the approach they're taking will actually work from first principles. You only need it to work once, because once known proof-of-human wallets are on chain then the rest of the ecosystem can build downstream from them.

> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world alongside a lot of noise and speculation. Eventually the "signal" and core ideas will rise through, perhaps after a long period of pain.

I love how we're almost twenty years into cryptocurrency yet people still produce these vague, literally zero content statements preceded by accusations of bias against anyone who has had enough of this vaporware talk.

In the bitcoin whitepaper it started with a "peer to peer cash system replacing banks". Doesn't really seem to work but at least sounded straight forward. Nowadays we're at "eye scanning orb for proof of personhood" and monkey NFTs. It's not even getting better every year, it's getting more stupid

Two decades? You quasi-doubled the age of cryptocurrency, it's been 13 years since Bitcoin's chain started and (apparently [0]) 11 since the first alt-coin.

I don't hold any crypto and am ambivalent about it (seems to have the equal potential of hardening money/tempering inflation as well as providing a backbone to dystopian regimes), so I'm not talking my book, but how much of the Internet's potential was figured out 13 years into it's creation? That barely gets you to TCP/IP going public if you start counting at DARPANET, doesn't even get you to the Dotcom bubble if you start from the former.

I'd add, if you're gonna quote Satoshi about peer to peer cash not materializing (arguably disproved by Lightning) to discredit how far it's strayed off it's essence, you could paint a fuller picture and pick one of many quotes highlighting that hard money/digital gold is just as much of a core idea to Bitcoin (from the genesis block message, to inflation, gold and gold mining discussions), which has arguably manifested.

0: https://e-cryptonews.com/what-was-the-first-altcoin/

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, but the concept dates back a while when we consider centralized applications. The bit gold architecture dates back to 98' and is arguably a direct ancestor to the BTC whitepaper, but only existed in theory.

In any case, I'm in the 'decentralized cryptocurrency is still relatively early in the grand scheme of things' camp. What's really going to matter, in my opinion, is Gen-Z and younger generation's adoption and iteration on the concept.

Fair point, it is indeed over two decades old if you start from bit gold (and hard for me to argue against with a straight face after using DARPANET as an inception point for the Internet, even if bit gold was only theorised).

> Doesn't really seem to work

What are you talking about? Multiple large businesses in the US accept crypto. You can pay Newegg for a new computer using crypto. You can transfer currency between countries using crypto as the intermediate method of exchange. What about crypto "doesn't really seem to work"?

> What are you talking about? Multiple large businesses in the US accept crypto. You can pay Newegg for a new computer using crypto. You can transfer currency between countries using crypto as the intermediate method of exchange. What about crypto "doesn't really seem to work"?

This is YC, I used to think it was just ignorance when it came to Bitcoin, which it still partly is since this space moves so fast; but the more time I spent in the Valley and met more of these type of typical FAANG footsoldier who fancy thesmeslves the next Musk while they toil away in helping create the surveillance economy it's more pernicious these people were highly rewarded for their subservience.

Why would they 'get it' when they only thing they've been successful at is only possible in the fiat system?

Seriously, I gave up years ago trying to engage in good faith with them, now I just have utter indifference for them, either way we already won: they just haven't realized it yet and will throw out the typical misinformed rebuttals why it doesn't work: energy use, criminal use, hard to use (this one is kind of true but only because of OPSEC).

You write as though there were a wide array of businesses that accept crypto. In reality, only a vanishingly small number do so, and many of those that used to accept crypto do so no longer. Tesla, for example.

Bitcoin, at least, is much too volatile to serve as a useful medium of exchange.

> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world.

Just as a FYI, there is already https://ubic.app/ that does that using passports as source of zero-knowledgee identification.

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto... There are a whole class of ideas in crypto that require one wallet/address to correspond to one single person.

This is such a bad dumb framing for a bad dumb idea, I can't stop laughing. Godspeed you fucked up technofascists.

> I tend to believe there are some great ideas embedded in the cryptocurrency world

Name one. Just one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge...

These are used in blockchain technologies, but blockchain technologies are not necessary to obtain them, or am I missing something?

I don’t think a product exists that provides the benefits of blockchain technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and EVM broadly, and Monero. Not all blockchains have the same security properties or processing capabilities. That said, I don’t think you can get the same combination of functionality without using a blockchain.

Do you have some examples of tech that delivers comparable features/functionality to blockchain tech, without using the blockchain?

Do your above examples have usable products with market reach and availability, today? Because that’s the alternative. Warts and all, blockchain tech works when it’s implemented properly by good faith actors. Just like any enterprise involving assets you control, folks you don’t personally know, and being online. Modern day e-commerce didn’t spring whole-cloth from capitalism’s womb fully-formed. The status quo took time to be created and to get to what we have today.

You have to be more explicit about the properties you're referring to for us to have a meaningful discussion. The post you answered was looking for a "great idea", and it's not clear which one you have in mind in your comments.

Anonymous or pseudonymous online transactions themselves comprise the main “great idea” of cryptocurrencies, I thought. I don’t know if you can implement them without the specific properties of the math used, combined with the distributed ledger and security affordances of specific cryptocurrencies like Monero, or even things like Tornado Cash.

Cryptocurrencies are enabled by blockchain technology. I don’t know that they fundamentally rely on it by necessity, though all current cryptocurrencies that I’m aware of do use some of derivative of a blockchain, even if it may not be distributed, or may not allow the public to mine it or run validator nodes.

Does that make sense? Perhaps you can reply to what you think I’m saying in good faith, and I’ll respond in kind?

The existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler seems to indicate that you don't need a blockchain to implement anonymous payments. So that might not be the best example.

Full decentralization (more exactly, to the extent of the mining power centralization) and full censorship resistance (if I have the private key and some Internet access, game theory says I'll be able to send cryptocurrencies) might require blockchains such as Bitcoin. But it's unclear whether these benefit societies at all once you take the drawbacks into account.

> But it's unclear whether these benefit societies at all once you take the drawbacks into account.

Taler has such a small userbase, doesn’t it? I don’t really know much about anything, but that seems like a high SnR?

I do like Taler, though. More choices means more perspectives and fresh eyes on old problems. They’re looking for devs, btw. I posted about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29860114

You haven’t mentioned any drawbacks?

Taler is just a counterexample to "anonymous or pseudonymous online transactions" inherently requiring a blockchain; the userbase is not relevant for this. I could also question the actual userbase of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies when so much of the transaction volume seems to be rooted in speculation and scams rather than someone buying groceries in BTC.

> You haven’t mentioned any drawbacks [to full decentralization and censorship resistance]?

I don't think the specifics matter so much, it suffices to say that there are some. These properties make it easier to launder money and evade taxes, for example.

> the userbase is not relevant for this.

The userbase size and transaction volume are both directly relevant to any particular signal being able or unable to be disambiguated from the others. This seems to cut across your point.

> I could also question the actual userbase of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies when so much of the transaction volume seems to be rooted in speculation and scams rather than someone buying groceries in BTC.

This is immaterial in the context of the debate we’re having about anonymous or pseudonymous transactions being good for those that use them.

I wouldn’t expect those who don’t use products or services to somehow confer the benefit of using or having them. That doesn’t make any sense. So obviously the users of cryptocurrencies receive the utility of cryptocurrencies’ existence and functionality.

> I don't think the specifics matter so much, it suffices to say that there are some. These properties make it easier to launder money and evade taxes, for example.

Bad acts don’t make inert implements bad by proxy or association. Folks do bad things to each other and to the environment directly and through externalities. That’s what hypercapitalism, society, geopolitics, resource extraction, and hypernormalisation have wrought.

You can’t lay the costs of doing business at the feet of cryptocurrencies. Crypto didn’t start the fire of capitalism. It’s sharing the fire with the commons, and combining that light and heat to feed the new cryptoculture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw

Not sure how we're talking past each other re Taler. You answered the request for "great ideas" related to blockchain with a wikipedia article, which I pointed out is actually unrelated to blockchain tech. We followed with other technical properties, but I pointed out that the ones that might be unique to blockchain tech may not be so desirable. Maybe you're talking about something non-technical, but then I was not and am not following.

> This is immaterial in the context of the debate we’re having about anonymous or pseudonymous transactions being good for those that use them.

There are technologies that allow this without bringing a whole can of worms along, so it's hard to see the drawbacks of blockchain tech as a necessary evil.

> You can’t lay the costs of doing business at the feet of cryptocurrencies.

I can definitely point out where we stand in terms of trade-offs, and 10 years in, the burden is still on blockchain tech to prove it's a net benefit once its drawbacks have been considered.

My basic response to any KYC initiative is, you don’t have a right to know who I am.

For a much more interesting and community led effort I suggest you see https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

"HN is very anti-crypto"

Minor correction: "HN is full of people who understand the actual math and implementation of blockchain technologies, business models being tested, and have seen more than a few 'revolutionary' technologies come and go. This knowledge puts them miles ahead of lay people's understanding."

hn is a privacy/piracy/(decentralization but not on the blockchain) enthusiasts. we produce gems such as this highly upvoted alternative to Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224:

> getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

we are by no means business models experts

> solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto

This is a problem? Like I have a SSN, a drivers license, and a birth certificate. These are tools developed already by my local and national government to prove personhood. They are used in a legal context, often. I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.

> I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.

Worldcoin tries to solve this exact problem. There's already a way to involve your identity in crypto, namely centralized exchanges using KYC. I don't have data to back this, but I would guess most crypto accounts are in some way doxxed via links to KYCd exchanges. Worldcoin provides a way to prove you're a human (that doesn't already own an account) without having to provide any info about yourself, except a scan of your iris.

I share the overall negative sentiments about Worldcoin, mainly due to it being a VC-backed for-profit project. But you cannot ignore that it solves a real problem in crypto: Sybil resistance without access to hardware (mining in PoW) or capital (staking in PoS).

Like another user pointed out they could just use government issued ID and give out tokens based on that. There is no need to scan people's iris.

> If you're generally sceptical of crypto, Worldcoin will seem outright useless to you.

How about those who are simply skeptical that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have any interest in solving global poverty?

> At a high level they're trying to solve a worthy problem: proof of personhood for crypto.

Crypto people keep saying blockchain will be great for managing digital assets, proving ownership and so on… but they can’t mint an NFT of my passport and use that?

Sybil resistance/proof of personhood is a serious problem and interesting challenge to work on, not just in the cryptocurrency ecosystem but for the internet in general. I'm really surprised reading this thread and seeing that so many HN users apparently have never even heard or thought of this.

The very website we use can be and probably is gamed by Sybil attacks. The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts.

I am very skeptical of Worldcoin myself but you shouldn't simply dismiss the idea.

As for minting an NFT based on your passport: Sure, that's absolutely possible. Sounds like a better idea than what worldcoin is doing. The hashing would also be a lot simply since all you'd have to do is check the validity of the passport and base the hash on the passport number which is unique. My guess is there are legal reasons to them not taking this more sensible approach.

There are many other projects working on solving the problem. Check out Idena for a non-creepy idea, but that too comes with its own drawbacks imo.

> The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts.

I don't think I would ever be willing to use or recommend a service that could ban people for life in such a manner. Even with hashed biometrics, the difference between "doesn't currently have any accounts" and "not on our list of banned hashes" is minuscule.

I agree censorship is another issue but keep in mind language models are getting better and better, soon you wouldn't be sure if you're talking to a real human or bot used to influence your thoughts. Arguably on twitter where posts are limited in length and users don't interact as directly that threshold is already reached.

We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online. What to do about sites silencing users is another issue. Imo these (social) media corps need to be regulated and forbidden from arbitrarily banning users. Same as water or electricity providers can't just cut off people they don't like. Users being given the option to block other users is enough. If there's anything actually criminal it's a matter for the courts.

> We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online.

I disagree. There are indeed a few cases where you can't initially be certain that you're interacting with a human but sustained interactions over a long enough period of time solve that. So the only time we would "need" such a approach is for people to know that something written by a total stranger was written by a human. But you should be getting to know people and not trusting complete strangers anyway!

Even then it doesn't actually solve anything. Paid actors can still post things in an attempt to influence complete strangers. This is exactly what happens right now. So you'll know the paid actor is a human. Or at least paid off a human to provide access to one of their online identities. Great.

So it's a knee jerk response to scary new ml but the ml isn't actually that scary once you think about it and the proposed response doesn't actually solve the supposed issue or any other current problems and it erodes our freedoms in the process.

Paying real people is a thing, but it doesn't scale the way using AI does. Those who do wish to speak to a machine can still do so, but users should be protected from bots randomly showing up in their social media and feeding them misinformation about science or commercial products without the user being aware of it. Again, depending on how the app is set up users wouldn't be aware, especially taking into account ever improving language models. Soon your "long enough" period won't be long enough anymore and a bot tricks you into thinking it's human.

ML isn't scary to me at all, humans with bad intentions are. The same way I'm not scared of nuclear fission in itself but a warhead containing enriched uranium in the wrong hands is a serious danger.

Saying that fighting the problem won't do anything unless it can be completely solved is an illogical statement, one could bring the same fallacious argument against any law. The issue with liars, misinformed folks and paid human actors remains, but a future where billionaire individuals or governments can flood us with thousands of seemingly different takes from apparently different "people" while secretly creating a consensus between the majority of them which is what you're feed when accessing internet media, that is massively worse and more dangerous than anything we have now. Imagine HN were this now and almost none of the people you're interacting with are real. It costs the attacker only server time but it brings them power over potentially all humans.

> proof of personhood for crypto

But one of the promises of the blockchain is anonymous transactions, free from evil incumbent central authorities. If this needs a proof of identity then why not use existing government systems, such as passports, which incidentally, in most countries, already contain biometric information.

> testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it

Yes, that makes this especially disgusting.

> HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle

Well, it seems every single story about crypto shows it reinventing the wheel with worse tools, poor insights, and trying to make it square.

Crypto only really makes sense when it's tied to sovereignty. Using passports ties it to nation state sovereignty.

It's worth keeping in mind Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list, which gave birth to all of this:

  Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
  anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
  knowledge, reputations, information markets,
  black markets, collapse of governments

https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/people/timothy-c-may

That's what's at stake here.

- So how can we do UBI?

- Well we don't have the political capital to do it in real world currencies, but we can spawn crypto from nothing, so that could work. Obviously we'll need to have a way to make this crypto currency actually valuable, and stable, but let's figure that out later.

- Ok, ok, so technically, what do we need to make this work?

- Well, the main problem is surely that people are going to want to claim their UBI several times, so we need a way to control that.

- Ah, ok, we have AI to do that right?

- Well yeah, but we need to send an army of people everywhere on the planet, each with a specially created device that scans everyone eyeballs.

- Uh? Can't we do this with a webcam?

- No people will cheat.

- But that's going to cost an awful lot of money, how are we going to fund that?

- We'll go to VC, they'll give us the money, and well that crypto money is going to raise in value, so we'll have that, and otherwise we could monetize the planet wide authentication scheme that we created.

- And you are sure this is going to solve the world's poverty problem?

> People may never receive the money they were promised. “We make no warranty … that we will be successful launching the Worldcoin network or issuing WLD tokens,” says a contract distributors must sign before receiving an Orb, which was viewed by BuzzFeed News. “We are providing the Orb to you for experimental purposes, to advance our objectives, including to gather data on the use of the Orb by end users, and for no other purpose.”

So they're taking advantage of people in poor countries to collect their biometric data. Yikes. The people who made this are the same people who talk endlessly about the virtue of innovation and technology.

What are the odds this will end with Worldcoin being sold off for parts - namely the "orb" technology and the biometric database? I'm sure a company like Palantir could find a use for this stuff.

Ever since I heard of Worldcoin, I've been thinking that's the plan...gather enough biometric data and sell it off to a larger player (likely a surveillance company), while pumping some shitcoins on the side.

Or maybe they'll monetize the database themselves...the whole thing is just creepy

(I work for Palantir but any opinions are my own)

Palantir is not in the business of collecting data, and as such would have no use for this data.

Here's an official blog post explaining this: https://blog.palantir.com/palantir-is-not-a-data-company-pal...

I don't like Palantir, but I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You are correct that Palantir probably would not want to acquire a bunch of biometric data. My mistake.

Especially since Palantir gets all the biometric data they want from their government clients anway.

That's not accurate. The article I linked is better at explaining this than I am:

> We license this software to organisations, who receive secure and unique instances of our platforms in which to conduct their own work on their own data.

> We do not and cannot reuse or transfer our clients’ data for our own purposes. Attempting to profit from customer data in this way would be illegal and would undermine the trust that is necessary to work in the sensitive environments in which we have built our business.

Sure, I wouldn't be surprised so if three letter agencies and their foreign counter parts were using Palantir as a clearing house for information. Plus I am far beyond the point of believing company announcements and statements.

> Palantir is not in the business of collecting data

From all we know about Palantir collecting and visualizing data is the whole reason for their existence.

Thus I think that a critical view of this post is warranted.

Regardless if this specific data would be of interest.

e: clarification

Unfortunately, this is a reputation your organization cultivated for itself.

For gods' sake, the name is _Palantir_

If anyone truly needed rebranding right now, it's you guys.

> Unfortunately, this is a reputation your organization cultivated for itself.

Yeah, I agree! The article acknowledges this in the first few paragraphs.

I'd argue it's an honest name and their reputation is fairly well in line with what they actually accomplish in the world. They should change but not the branding.

"The data consent form says Worldcoin can share user data with third parties who can use the data as they see fit."

Doesn't this completely undermine all of their claims about privacy and being responsible stewards of people's biometric data? You can't make promises about data that is freely given to third parties, and I'm sure the people involved here realize that. It's hard to see this company as anything other than sleazy when their public statements are completely contradicted by the legal terms.

It's worth taking a step back to think just how awful this whole enterprise is. The article is mostly about their marketing and scanning affiliates feeling scammed in what looks like very direct labor exploitation. Also the biometrics they are collecting are not being collected with informed consent. There's a distinct air of colonialism about the whole enterprise. The cryptocurrency they promise will be the payment for those biometrics does not exist. And even if it did, it seems quite possible the whole thing is just another crypto scam.

And financing all this perfidy is Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sam Altman.

I've heard that there's been pressure to shut down or significantly reduce BuzzFeed.News in order to lower the cost[1], but I really hope that they manage to keep the organization running and effective. I struggle to think of many other newsrooms, let alone an upstart like this one, that are able to produce articles of this quality through investigative journalism, especially on a story involving topics like cryptocurrency and privacy ethics.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/buzzfeed-investors-have-push...

They say they scan irises so that each person is unique and "nobody gets more than their fair share". Why then not use the clasic identifiers: name, date of birth, proven with a state issued document, and a facial picture holding some sign. These are easy to do remote and are the current standard for financial KYC, which any "world currency" needs to take into consideration in the post-Bitcoin world.

Sure, some people don't have access to government issued IDs, but they are a minority in the world population. The economic benefits of having a government capable of issuing IDs are so great, that Worldcoin, if successful, could provide technical and financial assistance to those states directly to implement such systems, instead of pushing dubious "Orbs" onto the world.

The whole "nobody gets more than their fair share" trope is dubious. What will the typical person from DR Congo do with $20 worth of altcoins on his phone? 99% of them will sell it for $20 minus fees and pocket the money. A very small investor minority can afford to hodl, select few will purchase and accumulate w-coins, and those will earn the speculative appreciation Worldcoin founders are really after. The whole populist act is a ruse to get the bubble going.

Yeah the fair share comment felt scummy as hell. I presume the coin founder’s “fair share” is quite sizeable.

Ok, so here's a general notice to the techbros of the world: Most people, when you say "X is true" believe that you are saying that X is true. Not that you are saying X will be true in the future, not that X might be true at some point in time, and certainly not that you are asserting that X is physically possible.

Anyone remember the argument that rather than waiting to recharge an electric car's battery, you can just drop the battery, bolt a new one in place, and be on your way? Yes, that is physically possible. Yes, it might be a way to do things sometime in the future. But no, it is not possible now, no one is building out the infrastructure required, and as far as I know no vehicle manufacturer is designing their vehicles such that the battery can be easily and quickly replaced. The possibility that something may be done in the future is not a solution to a current problem.

This may be news to you, but most people who might exchange a iris scan for $20 in currency that you cannot access now, and may never be able to access, would consider that to be fraud. You have lied to them.

But that's just the start of the craziness here.

"The documents indicate that the true value of Worldcoin’s continent-spanning field test lies in its distinctive Orbs. Rather than just facilitating the company’s utopian promises, the Orb appears to be at the core of Worldcoin’s ambitions to dominate the emerging business of anonymous digital authentication: in other words, proving that an online avatar is a real person without revealing who they are. [...] Worldcoin says that once its systems are perfected, it will anonymize and delete users’ biometric data, thereby guaranteeing their privacy. But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even though it has captured and stored almost a half million iris scans to train its algorithms."

Yes, they're simply lying about the reason they are collecting data.

"Blania strongly pushed back on the suggestion that Worldcoin’s purpose was to harvest the world’s eyeballs in return for a cryptocurrency that may turn out to be worthless. That notion “is just very wrong. I don’t even know where to start, like this is just very wrong,” he said."

Yeah, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and spends its time quacking, it's probably a duck. Theranos!

Crypto Startup That Wants to Scan Everyone’s Eyeballs Is Having Some Trouble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30699327 - March 2022 (30 comments)

Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 - Oct 2021 (298 comments)

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin wants to scan eyeballs in exchange for crypto - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 - Oct 2021 (95 comments)

Worldcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945557 - Oct 2021 (101 comments)

Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27674598 - June 2021 (30 comments)

Others?

While I watched or read dystopian sci fi horrified at the twisted scenarios presented, these tech nerds on the other hand were furiously driven to be the villains in the story. I hope I'm wrong, but at least that is how it feels from the outside looking in.

And now people (lesser level of the same kind) flock to their companies to be edgy. Trust me guys I know it’s called $nameOfSomeEvilItemHeldBySomeEvilCharacter but don’t worry we’ll be using it for $randomBenignSoundingThingButReallyAScam

What's with the orb gimmick - a spherical metal camera? Why not use a normal camera?

Slurping up biometric data, on the promise of free money - lol

PS Apparently the orb is for:

Our approach relies on a custom biometric device - we call it the Orb - that verifies the uniqueness of a person through iris recognition, while ensuring their privacy through zero-knowledge cryptography.

https://worldcoin.org/how-the-launch-works#field-tests

But I thought people's irises can in fact change colour and pattern.. maybe there's some special software that updates that too with zero-knowledge... what do I know?

The Orb itself is actually a remarkable piece of technology (considering what is available in a package of this size).

"Normal camera" won't do for the same reason Face ID won't work without PrimeSense.

I think the OP is referring to the form factor. It seems impractical and gimmicky. Why not stick the same technology into something shaped like a DSLR or video camera - i.e. something easier to hold? Making a shiny orb betrays an obsession with the technology and not the problem they're ostensibly trying to solve.

Edit: The article includes 2 pictures of orb operators using the orb. In both cases it seems like a more traditional form factor would be better. The first picture shows an orb operator balancing the orb in his hand - seems like a handle would be useful. The second picture shows the spherical orb awkwardly strapped to a flat platform on top of a monopod or tripod. I'm guessing that the orb does not have a tripod mount, but it really should.

I had an interview with the company and the interviewer was kind enough to show me the device.

When I was solving this class of problems in 2016 (image acquisition, object detection, identification, measurement etc.) with same kind of limitations (everything has to happen within the device itself, no uplink to the cloud) I managed it with a box of 100 kg and a size of really big suitcase.

Seeing this (sensor package and computation) within small device impressed me personally.

It's literally an "oooh shiny" tactic

> What's with the orb gimmick - a spherical metal camera?

How are you supposed to start a cult with a normal camera though? At least that's the vibe I'm picking up from how they revere the Orb in their copy.

Maybe they could include an E-meter?

Regardless of the meritoriousness of Sam Altman's startup, I find at admirable that the admins allow these kind of discussions about Y Combinator to go on. There is so much outright censorship on the internet these days. It would be easy for YC to just have a policy of deleting any content or threads critical of YC, and it's good to see that's not what's happening.

I am going to give from 231 to 789 HNCoins[1] to anyone who reads this post. The number of coins awarded will scale depending on factors we will discretely and securely apply using our proprietary algorithm that determines how we decide to reward our HNCoins during the decision process. [2] If you are a cryptographer, SME, blockchain guru, or brain surgeon take a gander at our peer reviewed whitepaper! [3]

[1] Past and Future performance do not indicate an ability to convert from HNCoins to any alternate currencies.

[2] Not all people will get awarded within the stated range of HNCoins.

[3] https://www.usmint.gov/learn/kids/resources/coin-activities/...

I think a lot of commenters here would benefit from adjusting their scam-radars. The way you scam people is by offering something that sounds great and plausible, but actually isn't. Consider Theranos, Bernie Madoff, etc. Worldcoin doesn't fit the pattern at all. To almost everyone that they need to sell to, it sounds ridiculous and dystopian. If Sam wanted to scam the poor to make himself richer, why would he make it so difficult for himself? There's far easier ways to do it that would escape public scrutiny.

I don't know whether the approach will work, but we'd have a much more productive conversation if we assumed good intent.

To almost everyone that they need to sell to, it sounds ridiculous and dystopian.

I've heard this kind of apology for scams before.

If a "scam that sounds like a scam" still rips people successfully, well, the scammers are still guilty of fraud and I still view people who do it with contempt.

And "scams that sound like scams" are marketed to desperate people. In many ways, finding a promise people want to believe is more important than finding a claim that you easily defend. The people who check out frauds in detail are never a fraud's target market.

I believe the correct term for this is sketchy, and that's probably being too generous to Sam.

This is some next level dystopia nonsense. There are plenty of KYC (Know Your Client) imperatives out there that don't require yet another blockchain driven platform and a scan of your fucking eyeball.

It's a no from me. This is more than sketchy it's downright awful.

You're putting it mildly. This is the most tyrannical technology in the history of humanity.

New day, new crypto scam.

I thought this comment was being glib, but I think you're right. It has all the hallmarks of a crypto scam: "Operators" being pain in coins instead of money[1], a pyramid/MLM like structure where operators hire other operators, and using Discord for tech support.

> They are encouraged to hire sub-operators to work under them so they can cover more ground.

> Orb operators were normally paid a flat rate of $3 per sign-up in tether, a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar. It doubled to $6 for every additional sign-up beyond their targets. At the time, Worldcoin blamed the payment delays on back-end problems as the company updated its technology, according to screenshots of a Discord where executives communicated with Orb operators.

[1] To be fair it's USDT which is, at least, pegged in value. But why make operators go through the hassle of finding and using an off-ramp? Reminds me of employees in some industries being paid with special cards that have transaction fees to take money out.

>It has all the hallmarks of a crypto scam

It also took the name of an existing coin from 2013.

I wrote a post digging deeper into the Proof-of-Personhood problem and Worldcoin's design here https://mirror.xyz/johnsgresham.eth/6lL5QT6UqW9VBCdUb6xK2gjh...

Although many of the complaints seem like operators getting their hopes up and Worldcoin miscommunication, it's unfortunate to hear about the growing pains in the buzzfeed article, and I hope Worldcoin can work them out.

This whole thing gives the impression that these tech gurus view the rest of us (particularly less developed countries) as cattle, to be identified, categorized, and allocated a pre-defined amount of resources.

You are definitely beginning to 'get it'.

So if you lose your eye in an accident or something do you then lose your coins?

Scam Altman should not have associated with these kind of scams. Lost any credibility he built till date.

I like how someone definitely based the UX on vanilla sky (abre los ojos) and the scam part on minority report (stealing eyes)

> “Face detected,” said the Orb in its robo-staccato voice when one of the men pointed it at Kudzanayi. “Open your eyes.” The machine stared back at him for about 30 seconds before the men fiddled with their phones and told him they were done.

> “Its now more than 3 months, what did you do with our eyes?” one person wrote in a text to an Orb operator, which was viewed by BuzzFeed News. “This was all a lie this worldcoin is the same as other scams. Prove me wrong if l am talking lies,” said another. A third called the operators “thieves” for stealing their eyes.

in theory there should be a cryogenics phase next? or switch to arnold and do like a free trip to mars

This is horrifyingly dystopian. Glad that the media is starting to cover this critically, I bet the fallout will cause the VCs to pull away soon.

Well this is a pretty good social critique, but I would like to tackle the technical side a bit more.

1) As the WorldCoin people know, there is no way a raw iris scan is going to be consistent enough to produce the same hash every time. Every scan of the same person's iris is going to have slight differences compared to previous scans. And a hash, as HN well knows, is designed to amplify slight differences, so it is, if you will, a "different-maker." (It makes two things more different from each other.) So to address this, they're saying "Wait, wait, we'll spread some ML in between like so much peanut butter," with the goal of transforming multiple slightly-different scans of the same iris into something "the same" enough to generate the same hash. So this part is a "same-maker," that makes different things more similar. Aside from how half-assed this sounds (a same-maker and a different-maker fighting each other[0]), now throw in what you already know from every "Turns Out Some Problems Came Up with This Particular Widely-Hyped ML Application" article in HN for the past 5 years. No ML model is perfect and they all have false positives/negatives and the like. Remember this is supposedly for identifying people. What if, before you apply your different-maker, your same-maker makes two different people's irises the same, such that they have the same hash and the different-maker can't tell the difference? Then your shit is fucked there, happy camper. I'm saying, not in this decade, will this work right.

2) If you're ever wondering whether a particular tool or piece of technology is something designed to serve humans and adapt and accommodate itself to humans, vs. something humans are supposed to serve and to which we're supposed to adapt and accommodate ourselves, just look for the handle. Obviously I'm being a little facetious but you get the idea. Someone brought this up elsewhere on the thread and I thought it was spot-on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30932568

[0] ...although it does sound like fertile ground for something GAN-like

> Orb operators in Africa, Asia, and Europe spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from Worldcoin as well as local authorities.

Show that sentence to someone in 1995 it would blow their minds.

Worldcoin isn't an effort to accumulate biometric data — Clear (the private company that competes with TSA PreCheck) does this at most airports in the US. Instead, Worldcoin uses sophisticated cryptography[1] specifically to avoid the collection of biometric data.

The value appears to be in the ability to resist the Sybil problem[2] with this cryptographic proof of uniqueness[3] as well as the wide distribution of tokens (a play on Metcalfe's Law)[4].

Of course, I expect the usual unrelenting crypto skepticism from HN, and see that proudly on display today. :)

[1]: https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack [3]: https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1451204467815235587 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Except as the article states based on quotes and leaked presentations, they are collecting the data. The page you linked confirms it. You might be right that their aspiration is to not collect biometric data, but they are collecting it and that’s what this article is about: Worldcoin collecting 500,000 people’s biometric data.

“Images of users’ body, face, and eyes, including users’ irises (visible, near infrared and far infrared spectrum)”

“Three-dimensional mapping of users’ body and face”

https://worldcoin.org/privacy-during-field-testing

You're making my point — Worldcoin's business isn't to collect biometric data, as alleged by many comments here.

Their business is whatever they’re doing, we can’t give organisations a free pass on bad behaviour because they aspire to be well behaved once they’ve extracted enough value from their bad behaviour.

Your comment implies that the article is wrong: it isn’t.

The article plays to the idea that "the company is using its cryptocurrency as a way to amass millions of biometrics", which is factually incorrect. The company is using biometrics made private via advanced cryptography, which aren't amassed or stored beyond the testing phase, as a means of distributing the token widely and uniquely to each person once.

The explanatory arrow for their business is backwards. It's totally factually incorrect.

Sure, you're right, it is factually incorrect to say that they're using a cryptocurrency to amass millions of biometrics, because they're actually using the _promise_ of a cryptocurrency to amass 500,000 biometrics. Very important difference!

You're putting so much weight in "...the testing phase..." as if that grants carte blanche to do whatever because the goal is (ostensibly) noble. The biometrics they're collecting and storing and processing belong to real people, whether they're in their "testing phase" or not is immaterial. The goal of this whole Orb-on-tour program is to collect biometrics, their primary activity is biometric collection.

They've pushed back their launch multiple times because they've acknowledged that their technology is susceptible to fraud and still needs work... so when does "the testing phase" end? When they've made their technology perfect? What if it takes 1 year, 5 years or even 10 years? What if they spend the next decade collecting millions of people's biometrics, is that okay because it's "the testing phase"?

They're going to poverty stricken countries and taking advantage of economically disadvantaged people (and then not even delivering on their meagre promises) and that's okay because it's not their explicit intent, it's just what they haaaave to do in the testing phase?

Let's play this out, let's assume (based on their inability to do it so far) that they fail to turn this experimental biometrics device into something that can uniquely identify people using a privacy-secure cryptographic process. Now let's take this quote from the Worldcoin CEO:

“We didn’t want to build hardware devices — we didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found,”

Doesn't take much to imagine them saying:

“We didn’t want to [store privacy-insecure biometric data] — we didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found,” he said.

Then what? Well they didn't want to store biometrics but they had to so it's okay?

They literally cannot even pay the people they sought out in poverty stricken countries the $25 that they promised, a task so trivial it can only be a wilful choice to fail to do it, so why on earth would we be charitable in how we assess the likelihood that they stick to their (as yet unproven) promise?

Worldcoin is a biometrics collection business until they do anything else.

I believe that a GAN could simply create a million irises [0]. Making all claims of defeating the Sybil problem difficult to trust. Someone also pointed out that the person being scanned doesn't need to be alive, which reminds me of some conspiracies during 2020 election

[0]: https://www.thisirisdoesnotexist.com/ (i didn't expect this to exist!)

Not only fake and dead people, but also real and living people who did not consent or fully understand what they’re consenting to. The whole premise just sounds so absurd.

The only valuable thing about Worldcoin is the eyeball scans with possible additional geolocation metadata for where the person was scanned. I can see something like Palantir buying the data when the company goes belly up.

The fact that most of these eyeball scans have been collected in developing nations with little/no concern to data privacy laws (imagine doing this in a GDPR EU location) makes it extra-suspicious in my opinion.

Reposting a comment I left here [1] after realising it will be totally eclipsed by this thread.

This "defence of" post [1] is absolutely cringe-worthy, both in the poverty of its arguments and shameless apologetics. The arguments basically say, for each terrible, insecure and dehumanising act X:

1) Don't worry about us doing X because soon everyone will be doing X.

2) Everyone can safely do X because some people are already doing X.

3) We'll all definitely get very rich from doing X but don't worry, maybe some other people can get rich doing X2, X3, X4 too.

4) Please just ignore that X provokes visceral horror from everyone who encounters it. The association with dystopia is likely caused by those silly science fiction authors.

5) Don't worry about X creating a dystopian hell, because it will preserve privacy (hint: privacy is not the only dimension of human dignity and is barely relevant in this case anyway)

6) The track record of the team making X is unquestionable. They are already ball-deep in other projects of questionable merit to society. The masterminds of X are not interested in extracting profits from the project, they will have more than enough raw power from controlling them.

They basically admit the whole thing is a scam to get people to accept the dystopian bait - proof of person-hood - "The Worldcoin coin only needs to retain value as an incentive to get people signed up".

I guess the problem, from a simple philosophers point of view is that nobody who actually is a person needs or wants to prove that they are, because that self-evidently constitutes what a person is.

But there are two other matters.

One is that the very definition of "proof of person-hood" implies non-person-hood. That's the road that leads to the ovens at Belsen.

The other point is that the only excuse you'd ever have for a "proof of person-hood" would be in a world where humans were so disconnected and disempowered that they'd have to compete within systems with AIs designed to be indistinguishable from people. And guess who is building those?

Seriously, understand what iatrogenic means, and why a company that wants to "change the world for the better" [2] by making the poison and the antidote should worry you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30935213 [2] Anand Giridharadas. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

"“Ensuring a person is human, unique, and alive is an unsolved problem,” reads an internal Worldcoin deck marked as confidential, which was viewed by BuzzFeed News."

I mean, this is true. But I don't get how this solves that - it's not like we'll scan our eye every time we need to login to something, so there will be a digital bit of data associated with the retina we'll need to log in with instead, and boom you have the same problem of identity fraud as could happen if someone stole you social security number. Except it may be worse, because you can't alter this unique identifier.

I have yet to hear of a single crypto idea in the last 5 years that was either stupid, malicious, or both.

“How do we print free money for everyone in the world? Oh I know, we’ll just make it virtual money! Also eyeballs!”

  Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment on this story. Khosla Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.

Just not good enough.

Is a lazy way to ensure one wallet per person. Just look at how real world does this. There are layers and layers of checks throughout a persons life that verify they exist individually, sign off from nurses and docs at birth etc. Taking photos of a government id is one of them. Even that, it can still be faked if you go enough lengths, let alone a one time iris scanner.

Basically the same article that ran ~6 months back...

Anyhow, I happened to interview with these folks a year or two ago:

   20% interesting concept 
   80% red flags

At that time I could barely find anything more than tenuous links to Sam Altman. Seems like maybe he's upped his role as they're getting into bigger $$$ raises.

> concerns that the company is using its cryptocurrency as a way to amass millions of biometrics and perfect a new kind of authentication technology for the blockchain era.

Isn't retinal scanning an "old" technology by now? I know we (the US) used it in Afghanistan to identify people years ago.

I would love to meet whoever designed the Orb. That thing is insanely creepy. I'd be worried it would steal my soul and I'm a materialist. I can't imagine it goes over well I places where superstition is common.

I like the concept, a lot, because I've always thought that money should be redistributed equitably. But can we maybe think of a better way of doing it? Like just giving everybody credit or smth?

I find the fundamentals and implications of Worldcoin to be a really neat idea, but moreso for the potential to have true online anonymity while simultaneously being a provable Verified Unique Real Human Being. The idea of just having a public/private key that is associated with your biometrics. If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all sorts of things.

Obtaining biometrics is a critical component of this, though--and doing this in a non-dystopian way is tough. Hashing that data is needed (as the article mentions), but even that has a bunch trickiness under the hood to unpack.

The Worldcoin/UBI narrative seems like it would be a smart play to spur rapid adoption for this, but--again according to the article, it sounds like that execution has been...challenging.

>If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all sorts of things.

No it won't. It will only ensure that certain people and groups can be the absolute final say in what information people can say and hear. Only an extremely generous and unhistorical interpretation is that this will "reduce disinformation." It will only consolidate who is allowed to have the loudest disinformation.

This is disastrous for so many reasons. For example, suppose a whistleblower has damning evidence of human rights abuses. The powers involved decide to flip a switch and digitally quarantine all individuals who could possibly be whistleblowers, and everyone N-hops away from those people, so the story can't get out. The public never learns of it, and the abuses continue. This is not a novel idea, but now we've just made it push-button and absolute.

How do you propose whistleblowers exist in the system you are advocating for?

Just blue-skying here, but you could have a process that allows the individual to revoke a previously used key pair and generate a new one associated with their biometrics whenever they want. The history of their online identity gets wiped as needed, but they're still a Verified Real Human Being online.

Now of course, again -- the devil's in the details with this central entity and how it acquires/processes/stores those biometrics. And of course that central entity could be be morally/ethically dubious. It would be cool to have a more distributed way of acquiring and processing the biometrics instead of having a corporation run that part.

Also to be clear: I'm not advocating all online communications need to have this identify verification in place. I'm envisioning something like Twitter badges, where you have some identifier that you're a guaranteed real-person, but people can still communicate without that. Like if I'm Reddit, I'm probably not going to care while perusing r/music if someone's a Real Human Being, and similarly if I get a whistleblower tip over an email. If I'm reading r/politics or r/worldnews where disinfo and troll accounts run rampant, I then might want to be able to filter the discussion or interact with Real Human Beings.

I also readily admit my whole excitement for the concept assumes (and it's a big assumption) it's designed and implemented in a way such that it can't be abused. And I'm also not saying Worldcoin is taking the right approach to this overall concept.

This problem is easily solved with cryptography and proper decentralized identity design

Sama join the long list of shitcoin paddlers. Sad day

Reminds me of the United Nations using eyeball scan payment systems instead of cash to let refugees buy stuff from local stores.

What a stupid idea. Of course, it's very simple (i.e. cheap) to create fake irises.

Someone thought about this before you, and made it true

https://mobile.twitter.com/roelven/status/145229070354816614...

Has Altman had his eyeballs scanned and added to the dataset?

The solution to 99% of problems is conscientiousness and competency.

Technology and provide some game changing opportunities - such as for example access to information, access to basic banking, maybe a couple of vaccines can re-shape a region ...

... but generally speaking there will never be a substitute to social organization at all levels.

If people are corrupt and incompetent, they will have nothing.

If everyone from the barber to the president act diligently and thoughtfully, for the most part, most social malaise would disappear.

Many poor countries have ample natural resources with which to provide a foundation for a base economy, funny that places like Japan, Singapore, Germany etc. are able to provide very high standard of living without much in the way of 'free money in the ground' ...

Okay, but does it have to be my eyeball?

metaverse is such a scam, but at least it's a way to do random wealth redistribution

It baffles me that Altman picked up such a creepy, woo-woo tech project. It's not like the guy is desperate for cash, he's already really rich and has a stellar reputation from running Y Combinator (formerly) and OpenAI (currently) as well as investing in many other startups...it's just weird

Have you seen the creepy interview of Altman and Zuckerberg? Upright posture, hands on thighs... the borg talking with itself...

https://www.facebook.com/YCombinator/videos/1015399369382910...

its on Facebook, but no need to log in

Not so far off when Paul Graham also vouched for Coinbase, which CFTC ordered it to settle on its False, Misleading, or Inaccurate Reporting and Wash Trading.

It's quite unbelievable that this type of grift is defended by YC. When the crypto mania ends and the obvious consequences from tens of thousands of people who have been destroyed by Coinbase are realized, they will be just as quick to distance themselves.

I'm really disappointed in YC, especially in its founders. When Paul Graham mentioned that he specifically looks for Founders who break the rules but not outright illegal, I had no idea he meant a break from moral ethics and brushing very close with US securities law.

I just don't get how some people can look away at what's truly happening in crypto—it is a systematic wealth transfer via digitized ponzi. any money you make in crypto comes directly from somebody's loss and this is NOT at all like the financial markets where pricing mechanism are enforced and regulated for price discovery on real world assets that is widely adopted.

Yet this will not stop thousands of applicants who apply to YC for their chance at riches. It's a shame how we glorify grift and enrichment through the destruction of others.

It is this specific culture that we chose not associate ourselves with YC, others are already aware of the grift that YC founders have publicly supported, invested, and vouched for. What saddens me is that many YC hopefuls and commenters will look the other way because of what they seek to gain.

If you drink from water that others had muddied, you too are dirty.

> tens of thousands of people who have been destroyed by Coinbase

Could you elaborate on this part? Are you referring to people whose crypto was stolen?

Likely referring to normal people who lose money with coinbase. Trading stocks has at least some amount of protection because stocks have some legal requirements/vetting/etc to get on the major exchanges. Where as there are a whole lot of shitcoins, rugpulling, fraud/etc enabled by coinbase.

Not to mention the exorbitant monopolistic fees they can get away with because regulation keeps competitors out of the US, compared to the extremely low fees associated with trading stocks.

I’d stomach the holier than thou attitude more if we didn’t just experience the SoftBank WeWork era of “real” companies being just as fraudulent and pumped by hype as dogecoin.

The startup bubble will be the next dotcom. Only the best, led by nietzschean Musk clones, will live.

Except that there are legitimate and non fraudulent "real" companies.

Consider percentages and probabilities rather than anecdotes.

dogecoin was invented as an intentionally inflationary currency as a joke on financial speculation; it was literally designed to stay worthless. THAT was the joke. The doge was a reflection of laughing at overly serious people. Dogecoin at its outset was a really fun and entertaining project and scene, because the entire thesis was about removing the get-rich part of crypto to just play around and experiment. It has, over time, warped into something else entirely.

Two things can be bad at the same time.

"Moral ethics" are not a thing, they're conflicting concepts at their core on an individual level.

just because you do not possess a moral compass does not invalidate the rest of us who value it.

Having a proof-of-human system for crypto which avoids storage of biometric data and allows pseudonymous wallets would be a massive win that would change literally everything about what's being developed right now. It's a pretty big and important problem.

You don't offer a convincing argument.

We're witnessing the current real estate system destroy society before our very eyes, to propose then this idea that an inherently deflationary currency system is going to be a win is, I say as respectfully as I can, abhorrent.

Let's please learn this and just move on: the ones who got in early are rich just like it is with housing, just by virtue of having gotten in early; at this point it is only defrauding the ignorant.

I couldn't have come up with a better way to fuck humanity as efficiently as cryptocurrency manages to if I was paid to.

SA: "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”

So Sam Altman has never heard of the hedonic treadmill, I guess.

Do you have a source?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

Thanks!

> an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x.

How can anyone take this person seriously, spewing pseudomathematical woo like this.

Quite the contrary. When you're rich, you start doing projects that have impact that are not necessarily tied to money, but rather power.

Bezo's owning WaPo

Elon taking board position at Twitter

Zuck/Gates giving away net worth to charity

etc. etc.

For sure. But I fail to see the impact here. If the crypto currency element is not intended to be a get-rich-quickly scam, how else will this thing benefit anyone? The value proposition looks ... funky.

Impact? They're talking about providing a universal global currency. The geopolitical power and capabilities there are enumerable.

Charity didn't stop Gates from becoming richer. It's weird. In my opinion the biggest problem in the world is that people don't want to step down and let someone else have fun.

SA and PG only have a stellar reputation in entrepeneuer-religion circles. To the rest of the world they are just annoying billionaires rotting society.

> It baffles me that Altman picked up such a creepy, woo-woo tech project.

As the kids say today, maybe check your priors.

Doesn't baffle me at all.

Outside of HN, publications like the NYT/Buzzfeed/etc, and maybe far-left twitter, crypto isn't hated that much. So what seems like woo-woo tech to you, in reality is a fairly valid crypto project. I think HN's hatred towards crypto is borderline irrational, and will likely be similar to the infamous dropbox launch comment over the next decade.

Didn't the Dropbox launch comment end up being true in the longer run ? I don't hate crypto, but most of it is just mania that VCs are exploiting. There's a couple of nice ideas that may live on in other forms

I trust Sam with my biometrics more than I would trust most other people.

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