Comment by sirreal14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirreal14 | Hacker News Reader

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> The while premise of needing a nin-centralized wax of confirming ones identity is, at its core, deeply un-demicratic. As of bow, government issued documentation confirms anyones identiy. These governments can be democratic, and are. Puting a different system in place, controlled by some tech-billionaire-liberitarian, is as dytopian as it gets.

I deeply hate this line of logic. This exact argument was presented against the Signal messaging app in an Op-Ed in the NYT (https://archive.is/tJoem), to quote from it:

> They are a small group of people who govern these powerful tools, and they are not accountable in the way that, say, a democratically elected government is. Whether law enforcement should tap our phones on the condition that a warrant is obtained is, at the very least, worthy of public discussion. Signal has unilaterally decided for us all.

Boo hoo, math makes it so that governments (yes, even democratic ones) can't tap phones, therefore math (and the technologists who code up this math) are evil and anti-democratic.

For all WorldCoin's faults, merely attempting to offer a decentralized alternative (even if it's not a very good one!) to government proof-of-person solutions is not one of them.

>) can't tap phones, therefore math (and the technologists who code up this math) are evil and anti-democratic.

it's usually much more than that. A lot of those projects founders, including Signal's, are pursuing deeply ideological projects, "it's just math" doesn't really cut it. Many aren't just after providing services that are largely in line with existing values of privacy or what have you. Hell, Moxie wrote an actual anti-democratic treatise whose central premise was:

>"[..]Our critique is of democracy in all its various forms, whether representative or direct. We are not echoing confused cries for more democracy, we are calling for its entire abolition."

These kind of attitudes are often baked into the projects themselves, hence why there's a worldcoin and MobileCoin in Signal. Don't really need your own currency for either of those projects right?

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/moxie-marlinspike-an...

I am all for privacy and encrypted communications. Until a legitimate law enforcent body gets a legitimate warrant against a specified organisation or individual.

Outsourcing some, or all of that to some VC backed companies, facilitating access for the various intelligence agencies, is what I have a problem with. And a crypto start-up setting out to build a global database of peoples retinas is exactly that.

> I am all for privacy and encrypted communications. Until a legitimate law enforcement....

So you're against encryption then. Simple as that.

> Outsourcing some, or all of that to some VC backed companies, facilitating access for the various intelligence agencies, is what I have a problem with.

I also have a problem with that. We should aim to build systems that are resistant to all attackers, even intelligence agencies. And like Signal, it should be impossible for companies to facilitate access for anyone, including intelligence/law enforcement.

> And a crypto start-up setting out to build a global database of peoples retinas

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with real criticisms of WorldCoin (Vitalik has a nice critique here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html), because they don't store biometric data, they only store hashes.

What's the worry here? If WorldCoin surpasses their wildly ambitious long term goals, governments won't be able to revoke someones passport for being a dissident anymore? What specific issues do you see with a successful decentralized proof of personhood system?

EDIT: Specifically, what issues does _decentralization_ bring to proof-of-personhood over government run proof of personhood, other than removing the government's ability to un-person someone.

What mechanism prevents the government from “un-person-ing” someone if Worldcoin was used as the global identity system?

Obviously the government can stop issuing services to a certain ID, but being run on a decentralized computing platform (plan is an Ethereum layer 2 I believe) means that they cannot stop you from interacting with other governments or with third parties.

Just like nobody could change etherum until DAO hack when it became inconvinient.

You wont solve social issues with technical solutions. But just like the DAO hack you can solve technical issues using social solutions quite easily.

Other than everything that they can do today to prevent you from interacting with other governments or with third parties like imprisoning you or worst.

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