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Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

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lazzlazzlazz

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So founder of ethereum and his crypto/nft pal [0]. That does not seem to be a neutral and unbiased point of view.

[0] https://nitter.nixnet.services/TaprootWizards/status/1676260... ("Eric Wall: troll-demon @taprootwizards [...]")

I am surprised that vitalik was so uncritical. Lost some respect for him from reading that.

Any substantial comment or profound insight? Otherwise you’re ranting in the wind. We’ve seen these things regularly enough. If you think a good argument needs to be made, then make it. Just dropping 2 links without any form of context just makes you look like a shill or a crank; most people are simply going to ignore them. Particularly if one of them is a tweet, or whatever they are called today.

In the end it comes down to the actual implementation. The article states that the data stored is just a hash of the iris scan. From that hash accounts can be created that can be used to verify against that hash to make sure your are an actual person. According to the twitter post multiple accounts can be created and and used for verification independently, so indeed providing some privacy. So the question that remains is can the world id be used to discover these accounts, which would be bad. That question remains unanswered. There is of course the point that you have to trust Sam Altman that the system works the way it is claimed and no actual biometric data is stored.

>Airdrops for token distributions

Pass

> Token or NFT sales

Pass

>Voting in DAOs

Pass

>A way to "seed" graph-based reputation systems Quadratic voting

Pass

>Protection against bots / sybil attacks in social media >An alternative to captchas for preventing DoS attacks

Hmmm, those are probably the real reasons behind all of that, it is just the bullet-proof way to de-anonymize the internet users, and building a database that can be purchased later for billions by other entities, ones that likes to “end the captchas” aka web environment integrity [1], or the ones who buy it to force serving ads regardless of any ad blockers and having a fully detailed profile about you, or the ones who integrate that identity to their fingerprinting services, or the ones who will use to “fight misinformation” aka opinions doesn’t align with our narrative, or the ones who will integrate it to social media signup process or votes [2], or the ones will add it to their electric cars, and the list goes on I could write a book how’s that a horrible bad evil idea. It’s all power and control game, The article tries to list ways to protect and prevent such cases, but we all know it won’t be applied as the motivation is against that, luring people for the $20 is just the bait, literally a bait.

[1] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

[2] in the article itself “If proof of personhood is not solved, decentralized governance (including "micro-governance" like votes on social media posts)”

Yeah, the article and this whole comments thread is very intellectually dishonest.

Disclosure: I’m like, 70% optimistic about the project. I don’t believe that the team are lying. Anyway, as with many things, time will tell. I wouldn’t get worked up over it. If it fails it’s pretty inconsequential.

> I don’t believe that the team are lying.

That would be really crazy if the team behind a crypto startup just lied about their business and intentions - certainly has never happened before!

>I don’t believe that the team are lying

Why not?

>If it fails it’s pretty inconsequential.

Definitely, it only collected the biometrics of thousands of desperate people into the hands of private people who work with law enforcement agencies everywhere to provide surveillance as a service.

You’re misrepresenting what it’s collecting and you’re part of the problem in this discussion. Worldcoin isn’t storing anything that could be used by any other entity. It doesn’t store biometrics and there isn’t a way to use the store information to know what the iris looked like that generated it.

A hash of a biometric has the exact same negative properties of a biometric data point itself: That it is not concealable, you cannot change it, and that it is tied to you explicitly. Surely you see how a giant database of biometric hashes provides the same usefulness to bad actors as an actual biometric database? It's a unique identifier tied explicitly to your physical body. Anything that hash is tied to can later be trivially de-anonymized.

After collecting everyone's biometric "ID", that database can be helpfully leased to Peter Thiel's (one of the early investors) wonderful surveillance machines, so now when the officer pulls you over "for a broken taillight", their body camera can get a nice view of your iris and buy your entire worldcoin history from say Palentir, for a price of course, and zero warrant.

As I said, you're misunderstanding. The hash can only tell if your iris has been scanned before. It doesn't tie to your identity in any way. And there is no tie between your World ID and the activity on any website that uses an account generated from your World ID, because your wallet makes a new anonymous, private account for each platform.

Thanks for proving my point that virtually all criticisms stem from people misunderstanding or not putting in the effort to learn how it actually works.

>It doesn’t store biometrics and there isn’t a way to use the store information to know what the iris looked like that generated it

You don’t know this for a fact, is it an audited open source project and the security/privacy vouched by some known people in the field? No. It’s just marketing crap

They are in fact discussing third party audits and the project will be open source

How do you know? Because they said so?

Go look at the data stored on the chain yourself

Why would they have to store it on the chain and could not send it to some server?

Maybe they are not lying, who knows, but their work can twisted for sure for other unethical results but still legal to do so, after, that team is motivated by money.

Every single criticism I see about worldcoin gets something fundamentally wrong about how it works

Why should anyone care how a perpetual motion machine is purported to work? You just call it a scam and move on.

Why would anyone care to hear the earth is round? You just call it heresy and move on.

Yeah it’s pretty disappointing and really highlights for me that there isn’t anything special about the HN crowd versus other online platforms.

If there's anything special about HN participants, it's that many of them are slower than most at recognizing crypto scams. How many blow-ups does one need before adjusting one's priors on the legitimacy and utility of crypto? FTX, Celsius, 3arrows, TerraLuna, Binance, MtGox, etc. The list goes ever on.

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