Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I think you should instead just read what Worldcoin wrote. It's quite short, and I think easy to consider false.

https://worldcoin.org/cofounder-letter

There are a few words about economic opportunity but little explanation, so you can discount that part. They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as any distribution today[1]

Their main sell:

> scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy

> Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID)

> You can now download World App... After visiting an Orb ... you will receive a World ID. This lets you prove you are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private.

This seems to be the sole feature but "distinguish" and "privacy" are fundamentally at odds. Always! If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private. They may be private for a little while, but as soon as User12345 is outed to be Taylor Swift, there's no going back. There's no worldcoin re-roll. Twitter accounts are more anonymous than that - at least if your anon twitter account is unveiled, you can make a new one! In that way uniqueness is anti-privacy. It has to be.

[1] For example worldcoin has a plan to confirm that people exist. It does not have a plan to confirm that people are dead. https://japantoday.com/category/crime/man-says-he-kept-paren...

> They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as distribution today

Especially since UBI distribution aren't built in any meaningful way on this blockchain. They have some vague notion of one day wanting to use it to provide UBI, but they don't have any idea of what that actually looks like, or when, etc.

They are vaguely gesturing towards the concept of UBI.

It’s the same as any shitcoin roadmap with vague exciting prospects that will be figured out later on but meanwhile promoted as coming soon

> After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID.

Literally everything about this is a huge nope for me.

In the evangelical setting of the 90's, where TV preachers were openly broadcast over the airwaves, they routinely claimed everything was "the mark of the beast".

Credit cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, "new world orders", the United Nations. All of these things were tools of the devil, marking your soul for eternal damnation.

I get the sense they would have had a field day with Worldcoin.

I can hear it now. "The Antichrist is taking control of the global finance system. When you choose to scan your eyes and participate in his world instead of the kingdom of heaven, you surrender your soul to the devil. And that's a place where even Jesus Christ himself cannot save you. Choosing to scan your eyes - that God himself gave you - is swearing allegiance to Lucifer and his armies on this earth. Choosing Worldcoin is making a personal choice of eternal damnation."

The thing is though, each such “mark of the beast”, gets incrementally closer to what the evangelicals warn about.

Except eternal damnation, allegiance with a supernatural being, lakes of fire, etc.

I'm going to be pretty pissed if the world lets itself get trapped into a technodystopian hellscape just because they didn't want to admit that those darned Christians over there got even a bit of something correct and therefore we gotta super duper virtue signal against that by slapping the shackles on as quickly as possible. What a dumb way to go that would be.

IME Christianity is as worthless as a broken clock and only correct half as often. Its foundations are so flawed I hesitate to give any credit when they stumble into a correct answer, just as I dislike giving credit to a dice roll.

Worse, acknowledging even an accidental good tends to encourage lazy thinking and reinforce a very harmful system.

And calling them out every time someone tries to throw them a bone doesn't take away from the bad elsewhere -- such as VC grifting shit coins and their panopticon dreams.

I actually don’t understand _who_ is advocating for this.

Worldcoin seems like the peak of a top-down push to have perfect digital control over every human being.

People who are worried about GPT bot armies flooding the Internet.

If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private.

This is not necessarily applicable. There's cryptography from 20 years ago (e.g. the work of Stefan Brands) that can show that someone has a World ID without revealing which ID it is. If no "username" is ever revealed then it can't be linked to anything.

If the idea is to make "World ID" universal, in that everyone is going to have one, what does attesting that someone has one means? Nothing. Virtually nothing. Everyone either has one or can get one, to attest that they do means nothing of value.

I think the idea is that if you make a botnet of a billion bots you will not have close to a billion "world id"s (is that really what they are called? lol).

Maybe you can find a few thousand on the black market, but that's going to add up fast.

I know nothing really of this worldcoin latest hype. I think that attesting that you have one, without revealing who you are, could maybe be used to attest that you are not a bot? Maybe I misunderstand. Sounds interesting if true tho.

It's honestly the craziest thing I've heard in a while. Talk about solving problems that dont exist

You’re misunderstanding how worldcoin works just like basically everyone who tries to criticize it. There’s no way to tie World IDs together between platforms. A unique ID is generated per platform from your wallet.

If they're all derived from a single source then isn't it possible it could be reversed? Or at least a relationship deduced? Given enough per-platform IDs

No.

Not with known computing methods

Couldn't they apply the same controls Safari uses to all WebViews embedded in other apps? Or at least make that an option?

Sorry, wrong thread. Too late to delete

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