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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a kind of uncharitable article (surely Sam and the rest of the people involved have spent a ton of time thinking about the problem and the existence of black markets and possibilities for abuse), but

>I don’t know if it’s the best attempt but I understand what it is and what the goals are.

a bad solution can potentially be worse than no solution in this case. A false belief in identity guarantees can facilitate fraud and other manipulation, while "you should never trust anyone or anything, including that there's a 1:1 relationship between public keys and individual humans" at least advises everyone of the risk.

Agreed, I just have a hard time with articles I know to be uncharitable or written with an obvious bent against the subject.

Maybe world coin has thought of these problems? Maybe not, but I wouldn’t trust the author to have done any due diligence.

There’s an interesting article to be written here, but this isn’t it imo.

Also seems unfair that my root level comment was flagged, dang?

But it doesn't achieve that goal. It can't.

Worldcoin only verifies someone is a real human once, when the identity is created. There is nothing stopping someone from lending or selling their verified identity to a bot.

It already happens. Identity dealers will go to poor areas and buy people's proof of identity for just a few dollars, before selling them on the black market.

A company I used to work for had a massive problem with this. I'd detect a fraudulent user and check their proof of identity, and in retrospect it was obvious these were black market identities. They always fell into clusters, one vendor always sourced their IDs from an area of southern Russia.

Another vendor sourced their IDs from a city in northern China. They weren't trying very hard, you would find a bunch of new users all created on the same day, the users were always retirement age women and the photos would show them all in the same room.

> The goal is how do you verify humanity in a world where bots are indistinguishable from humans.

You don't. Crypto evangelists, as usual, are trying to put their square blockchain peg in a round hole. They need to stop and check their premises.

There are things you can do to verify humanity.

Make a human go to a place for example (though even this has difficulties with fraud). I'm not making any specific claims about world coin other than the goal they're trying to solve makes sense as a goal in a world where bots are increasingly capable of mimicking humans successfully, we want to know when something is human and when it isn't.

Attempting to solve that problem now before it becomes critical makes sense, not every attempt will be good.

A better article than this one would have dug into that problem.

You must also prove it's you, not another person went to that place.

Yes, that's why I mentioned the difficulties with fraud. There are things you can do with that too (Iris scans are one example, but there are others).

Thanks.

Absolute and utter bullshit, and you know it. Sam Altman is always in for a single person: himself. I have never seen less altruistic, less simple to understand than him [0]. Everything, the world ID, the money, the coins, is just a pretense for a single purpose: that he gets involved in everything whenever the idea of a global ID appears anywhere in the world. Or an ID at all. What's that Alabama, you want to create a state ID ? For the low low price of the GDP of a small african country, you can have access to our World ID database of all Alabama-scanned eyeballs.

[0] Aside from Larry Elison, but there's still debate on whether he's actually human or not.

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