Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Token to Launch Monday
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
There was OneCoin, a $4 billion Ponzi whose leader is on FBI’s Most Wanted list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin
(IMHO it’s bizarre that OneCoin never bothered to actually deploy a cryptocurrency. If they had done that and then manipulated its price, they would be just like every other useless cryptocoin and the bag holders would be licking their wounds quietly. The end result would be the same as a plain Ponzi but the FBI would never have been involved because token-utility-innovation-something-something.)
They tried to recruit a blockchain expert to built them a chain after they'd already started the ponzi but apparently didn't find anyone who was willing to work with them (for maybe obvious reasons).
The history of web3 shows that, if the money is right, competent people will put all their qualms aside and do the work to enable the blockchain rip-offs.
OneCoin should have offered 10 million to the developer because they could have afforded it. Then they wouldn’t be hunted by FBI, and $ONE would be just another forgotten altcoin that gets occasionally pumped up on Telegram channels.
Let's not forget that we are also seeing TPM/WEI type schemes being widely developed and deployed. Ubiquitous biometric surveillance and unforgeable cryptographic signatures for everything you think or do in our now-hyperconnected world is absolutely terrifying.
It's impossible to see all of this (and other dystopian visions from his davos friends like brain transparency[2]) coming to a head at the same time as anything other than a declaration of war on computers, the internet, and general purpose humanity.
I'm begging and pleading with each and every one of you reading this -- stop this. Do everything in your power to stop all of it. This brave new world being created is evil and humanity may not survive it.
[1]From their other co-founder:
> So my high-level response is that something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to happen with the progress in AI. It’s probably going to happen in the next couple of years.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/07/10/an-or...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfqD5aW0X5U
EDIT: @dang can you please purge my IP address from the account creation/login database and logs? I am not comfortable speaking truth to power and I know he was former president of yc. You can go ahead and lock the account too, I don't need it any more. Maybe one of you can email dang for me, I don't want to associate with this account any more than I already have. Thank you for reading.
For me all his latest moves look as the work towards building a dominant power, that will make 1984 look like a funny and naive tale.
Worldcoin appears to be yet another attempt to solve an actual problem, an that is preventing simulation of a biological being in a electronic network.
Back in the day a password and a username was good enough to assume that a biological being is authenticated through a keyboard and taking actions in a system. As the automation become easier and ubiquitous we started using Captcha's, then we moved into fingerprinting and behaviour analysis however at the current stage we mostly lost.
I have no idea if Worldcoin or anything similar will work or if they will attempt to create some kind of dystopia but the problem is fundamental one to using electronic interfaces.
Maybe the solution for all this is going back to being human, and leave all the communications to the machines who would serve us. In other words' assume machine when in not in person. The end of symbiotic life with machines, going back to humans using tools.
This only addresses chatter with unknown entities. Either you or I or both of us could be humans or machines. But does it matter?
It matters quite a bit to people trying to sell (and people trying to buy) goods and services beyond the range in which they can physically attract new customers/discover new vendors.
Maybe in parts of the world. That loss is definitely not evenly distributed – some countries/regions do have working digital signatures, e-government etc.
My plan is to offer e2e messaging services, and non human authenticated sites forever, along with running tor exit nodes, etc. I will go until I am destitute. I refuse to surrender to online kyc implementations. It's like a page out of Enders Game. No thanks.
1. World ID - a database of retina information about people.
2. Worldcoin - a cryptocurrency aimed at incentivizing people to give over this data.
Rather than rehashing a debate about cryptocurrency that's already well-trodden, it's worth looking at what's new here: their iris scanning tool as a way of validating a user's uniqueness.
This is already a well established problem domain, companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple struggle to verify that users are unique (with an account or multiple accounts tied to a single human).
4chan blocks the ip addresses of bad users, many services require a phone number to sign up, some sites have tried requiring a credit card, Facebook I believe uses the social graph to figure out how likely an account is to be real. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all use some combination of biometrics and telemetry data to authenticate users. I've noticed more sites requiring government ID (see LinkedIn's verification process).
I'm not seeing any obvious advantage that World Id will have over these existing systems.
Also any time biometric data comes up it's worth pointing out that if your biometric data gets stolen unlike a password there's no easy way to change it.
* it's more universal; not all the world are americans, using american systems. Good luck using a social graph, phone number or credit card for verification of somebody from Papua New Guinea. Or for somebody who is otherwise off the grid.
* if it works, it's less prone to hacking, since you control the points of registration, and you can verify that a physical human being is there to scan their retina
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but you don't see the obvious advantage because you are looking for the obvious benefit from the perspective of a user.
Having a database of international retina information (which is practically an immutable property), spending history, and connections graph, is probably invaluable to intelligence agencies, oppressive regimes (or, you know, just simply "regimes" as they are all oppressive to some degree when the opportunity comes, as the covid years taught us), big tech/pharma, military industrial complex, news organizations and other arms of the ruling class.
Retina databases are also the identity framework of choice for global identity and payments.
There is no more valuable graph database than one secured by unchangeable and immutable PII.
I see it that way. Not a great look for the guy, but I think smart people often launch their experiments under the cover of stupid pretenses so they only have to lean into what gains traction. Why commit to experiments -- just test it and see if it works. If it fails, cool idea and tried it. If it succeeds, one of the most valuable data platforms for AI… you said it and you’re spot on imo.
No it isn't. That's exactly what they want you to do - get distracted by the (alleged) tech and pay no attention to the scam behind the curtain.
I feel that sometimes the direction where technology "wants" to go points us to a better society. Fighting it and preserving the status quo leads to a lot of difficulites. The techno-optimists of the 90s had a good point.
If we imagine a world where almost every service is free, has an API, and little restrictions, the society that allows that is going to be much nicer than if everything is behind a paywal, controlled and sanitized, and cryptographically verified.
Somewhat-AI-resistant techniques to prevent bots from overrunning a platform seem at least feasible.
Making everything free doesn’t solve this since we still have to move goods to people who need them without fear that they go to scammers instead.
If you know of a workable way to achieve that, please do share it!
IP addresses, phone numbers, government IDs are all forms of outsourcing the problem of identity verification to another organization (IANA, phone company, Social Security Administration in U.S.) so we should ask if those organizations will continue to be able to effectively distinguish real humans from AÍ-powered bots armed with the ability to “deep fake” any person, using whatever tools and techniques those organizations have today.
The implications seem staggering: AI bots that can collect your social benefits, withdraw funds from your bank, open lines of credit in your name. The modern economy might not be able to function if this happens.
From another article:
> The company’s identity technology will be important in a world where artificial intelligence raises new questions of what’s human and what’s not on the internet, [Tools for Humanity co-founder and CEO Alex] Blania said. It’s also an example of the overlap between the crypto and AI industries.
This will be banned in EU instantly.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...
Does anyone remember WorldCom?
At least things where more cheerful and colorful 20+ years ago. Can we get the playfulness back and drop all the dystopia?
We've internalised all the dystopian rhetoric and compounded it with the disappointment of false solutions, while these charlatans have siphoned off tonnes of VC money and sailed off into the sunset (or into federal prison.)
How did tech become so dystopic in such a short time? Does it say something about the tech itself (the nature of hardware and software), the mental and moral substrate of the techies building it or how current society embraces and supports new possibilities opened up by technology.
It does feel as if a vast multitude of non-dystopic tech universes is simply starved of any chance to grow.
There must surely exist an antidote to this poisonous coctail, a tech segment that has an unequivocal feel-good factor associated with it?
ding ding ding. tech-bros are going to enshittify society in parallel to enshitifying software.
Uhuh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC5lsemxaJo [The (US) Office - pyramid scheme clip]
(The first comment on that video is “she’s definitely into crypto now” which seems right)
As a sales rep you earn money every time you make a sale.
Signing someone up with an Orb != making another Worldcoin Operator
Transaction order within a bitcoin block definitely matters: if transaction b spends the ouput of transaction a within the same block, then a MUST preceed b. Also, the coinbase transaction must be the first. Other than that the order is arbitrary.
It's really a pity we use talent, money and attention on things nowadays for this rather than trying to invent new things that actually make a positive difference in people's lives.
Musk is going to preserve consciousness by shooting it into the Heavens… I mean come on; can’t be more on the nose
The transition from story mode is going to hit some road bumps
Are investors actually okay with the CEOs not being 100% committed to growing the business.
This isn't some new LLM based system replacing the work of journalists.
For the record since to many users here this is obviously yet another crypto scam, I want to point out that most who're seriously into blockchains/decentralization are against it too, check out the replies from crypto people to his announcement: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1683187148437192704
Sam Altman is an investor, not a crypto native.
Bitcoin cannot exist as real currency unless it has some real concrete value backing it. That concrete value needs to exist in tangible form for it to be stable.
No wonder more than half of the world wants to build an alternative with the BRICS
We are just fighting each other over everything, wasting time over billionaires ideas, Musk vs Zuckerberg for the "everything app" for example, China moves forward it seems, they already have it, and is not driven by profit, and the rest of the world seems to want to move along too with them
A lot to hate about China, but they seem to have some great ideas, and are able to enforce them to 1.7b people without a flinch
It also seems like they want to fight corruption [1], and their wish to switch to a digital currency seems to go in that direction
"why expect those who got you in trouble to become the solution?"
[1] - http://brics2022.mfa.gov.cn/eng/hywj/ODMM/202207/P0202207155...
quite vulgar and exploitative (and apt) to use a crypto token for this.
casino capitalism.
It has already been a miracle how many world leaders received Altman peddling "his" AI.
This may be a trial balloon for the authoritarians to force this new surveillance tech on their subjects.