Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
capitalfm.co.ke
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I'm just curious who you think the CEO is?
As the peer comment says, formally though, Alex Blania is their CEO.
And he did say that they were dampening the volatility of the price for WLD (together with the help of market makers, etc. I would guess?).
Or Worldcoin leadership could use your biometrics for whatever they want e.g. stalking as done at Uber or forking their coin to fund a new ICO.
Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane.
The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.
"private keys are randomly generated, completely independent of any biometric information, and each other."
from their docs
Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.
If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.
Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?"
Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!"
Protagonist 1: "Shit, of course! What will we do?"
Audience: Laughs at this shit being played so straight it comes off as a farce.
The usual morality play is either the evil business hurting people who has to be stopped by the benevolent government regulators, or the evil government regulators hurting innocent businesses who are just trying to make a living and keep prices down and keep jobs from moving offshore.
To which the traditional solutions are either more regulations that businesses don't like or fewer regulations that businesses don't like.
Regulatory capture is when the villains of both sides are working together, and the solution to it is fewer regulations that big businesses do like. But nobody wants to see their hero as a villain so anything that accurately portrays this is unpopular.
The other problem is this isn't how regulatory capture happens. OpenAI was flexing its badass credentials in the halls of Congress while it wrapped up a multibillion-dollar fundraise. There was no path from Altman's testimony to any sort of regulatory apparatus that wouldn't immediately constrain him.
Actual capture involves industry coöpting existing regulators through revolving doors and burdensome rules that reduce the threat of new entrants. It happens quietly. The only times industry proposes new frameworks in public is when they're cornered.
The "regulatory capture" playbook OpenAI purported to follow has zero actual precedent. It is only rhetorically precedented in crypto, where the same nonsense about creating a new regulator that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages was pitched to the naïve.
> that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages
But that's classic regulatory capture. The industry gets the government to impose regulations that are wasteful and bureaucratic but can be navigated by a large organization with economies of scale, which allows regulators to appear as if they're doing something, but the rules don't prevent the incumbents from making a mint by consolidating the industry and charging monopoly rents or avoiding taxes paid by the middle class and smaller competitors etc.
AT&T wanted a regulator so it could scale like the railroads. The regulator wasn't to regulate AT&T, if I remember correctly, it was to regulate the states. (It backfired in the long run.)
Broadly speaking, if you’re weak enough to need a regulator to guard your moat, you’re weak enough to be overpowered by the regulator. Regulatory capture, successful examples, at least, begin from a position of strength. Altman pitched doom and gloom and then, when the EU began reacting, seemed surprised that they weren’t permissive.
It was to consolidate the regulation so they could focus on capturing the one federal regulator instead of 50 different state ones, sure. But you do that so that when the public starts clamoring for something to be done, you get to control what gets done, and do something that benefits the incumbents and not new entrants.
> (It backfired in the long run.)
It seems to me that it's still pretty hard to start a competing telephone company.
I might be able to get some open source VoIP software running on a VM in one day. Now I want to offer WiFi calling plans. There is some domain name in the public DNS where phone numbers are subdomains that resolve to the IP address of its associated phone company so I know where to route calls, and I just go to some free government website to have some numbers routed to me so I can assign them to customers, right? No?
> Broadly speaking, if you’re weak enough to need a regulator to guard your moat, you’re weak enough to be overpowered by the regulator.
But the strength comes from the moat protected by regulations. The law inhibits competition, so you extract lots of rents from customers, so you have lots of money to influence regulators with. The regulators are the source of your power, but you and the rents you extract are the source of campaign funding, and they don't want to cut that off. Or worse, have it directed to the other party, if they can't actually bankrupt you before the next election cycle.
it really changes the flavor of it from cambridge analytica to dr evil.
You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot) or do any number of things that lean in hard on the 'stupid AGI' angle, never clarifying that their actual product is a spicy autocomplete. You'll never hear OpenAI say 'ChatGPT is a stupid AGI' out loud, but they'll never correct any mainstream misunderstandings that it is.
a lot of the dismissive takedown of LLM's intelligence uses their spurious knowledge of the world, but it is quite easy to have them 1. search the internet 2. search research articles 3. read books and have them work to iteratively improve something.
Right now they cannot do much reliably but calling them a parrot is miopic how little we understand how humans are intelligent and to how LLMs today are more intelligent than a non negligible chunk of the population.
ChatGPT can “write code” in the most literal sense that it will give you code when given a prompt, but (unlike how OpenAI markets-by-omission) it does not reason about code like an AGI could.
btw, i think i have tended to see these pessimistic takes by people who have only used 3.5, which is impressive but not reliable -- i strongly recommend using 4 in the course of your job to see how useful it is. every day in the course of interacting with it, it produces novel lines of thought which shock me.
Here's a recent example: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
> Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity
In big letters.
They are very clearly playing the game of positioning themselves as the AGI good guys, and at the same time Sam Altman has been encouraging the view that AGI is dangerous.
Regulatory capture.
That is literally what he is doing.
People walk up to an "orb," get their eyeballs scanned, and a unique key goes into a database.
What part of the parent's statement is untrue?
Not that I think any politicians/governments are doing a good job, but I’d rather not ”change” the system and end up in similar shit.
None of it, of course. The things that makes implementing UBI difficult to implement are socioeconomic, not technological, in nature.
But I think WorldCoin is cynically hoping that invoking "UBI" will trick people into thinking that WC's efforts will be of benefit to everyone.
It's very obvious that the vast majority of people hating on Worldcoin have never taken a moment to consider the actual problems being solved here, and especially the critical importance of solving them now.
> Tax and Government Fraud Cases Spiked 68% in 2022
> The IRS flagged $5.7 billion in tax fraud in 2022, and there were nearly 8 million reports of suspicious tax-season activities.
"During Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, the IRS collected more than $4.9 trillion in gross taxes, processed more than 262.8 million tax returns and other forms, and issued more than $641.7 billion in tax refunds."
So 5.7B is about .1% of the IRS's transactions that year.
That's also less than it could possibly cost to deploy and maintain Worldcoin.
The actual problems here are both hard and not being solved by WorldCoin
Recently, to deal with this foot gun, Congress repealed the personal income tax. President Biden signed this bill into law and said it is a tremendous step toward civil rights and equality.
Oh, wait, .
Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten the biosphere...
Bitcoin was designed to act like gold, but this was a series of design choices. (as someone, maybe foldingideas, put it: the crypto bros looked at the concentration of wealth in society and decided that the problem was that /they/ weren't the ones with all the wealth.)
You can just as easily design a crypto scheme to generate tokens and distribute them to everyone with an ID regularly: this is UBI, so long as the tokens have recognized value. The problem is that you need to prevent people from registering a million accounts to get a million UBI credits, deflating the value of tokens held by honest folks. Thus the unique identifier problem.
But I think grand parent poster is right on the money, it’s a attempts to take governments roles.
After all nation states are not that old of a concept. Basically Napoleonic wars. Some type of distopian corporate nationality might come to fruition to replace them.
Being an employee at a lot of corporations is nicer than being a citizen of a lot of counties.
But corporate benevolence mostly demands on human capital supply and demand balances.
If the government wants to link a retinal scan to a SSN, that might make sense with regard to UBI, but how does it make any sense for some random blockchain? Are we expected to think that even if a government wanted to use a blockchain they would use some third party blockchain and not roll their own? I find that highly unlikely.
It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
* Any UBI is going to be government based, as there needs to be a way to collect (tax) and redistribute (UBI) money between all people, whether or not the amount collected and distributed is the same relatively for each or not.
* Governments already have (in most cases, if not all. I can't speak for every country definitively) ways to uniquely identify their populace. They don't need some external service to do such.
* Given that UBI will be government based, and the government already has a way to uniquely identify people they govern, what purpose does a third party blockchain to uniquely identify people service with respect to UBI?
> It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud.
There are plenty of benefits to that. That has nothing to do with UBI. I'm not making a case that there's no benefit to identity verification, just that I'm not sure how some third party is supposed to help with UBI by providing it.
> If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
In some small ways (at least for the U.S.) they do. For example, with Tax services to look up people. Additionally, while not provided as a service to companies, SSNs are routinely used to uniquely identify U.S. citizens for financial reasons.
The Government could offer more services to companies for this, but there might be perverse incentives involved. Again, none of this has anything to do with UBI from what I can see. Once someone gets money, who cares how it's spent? Let it be deposited in the financial institution or asset of their choice. Again, no third party arbiter needs to be present for this, we do this today with tax returns and while different services often help with this, they are both not requires and there's multiple to choose from, not one external trusted entity that must be used.
Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in which case I'm honestly curious as to any explanations from anyone of how that works.
Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~.
So, here you go:
Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account.
This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.
FWIW, AuroraCoin did /something/ like this in Iceland, using Icelandic identity cards for identifiability, but didn't destroy tokens: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-hist...
Some crypto company trying to help enable UBI by solving the identifiability and distribution problem is like some artist trying to help build a car by offering to find the right shape for the wheels, and then using the fact they offered in promoting themselves. Thanks, but really, you aren't offering much, pretty sure we're already going with "round".
That, in a nutshell, is what I've been trying to express. I think they just attached themselves to UBI as a buzzword to sound better, when really their change of usefully being involved in a real UBI implementation is likely close to zero because it makes no sense for them to be involved in any feasible plan that could move forward.
It's no different than if they said they were going to help enable people to pay taxes (except in negative connotation instead of a positive one). The portion of the problem they'd be helping with is a mostly solved problem, so what are they really offering that's likely to be of use? If it's extremely unlikely they'll be used for whatever reason in the problem space they're advertising themselves in, what's their reason for doing so, to actually advertise their intent or to associate themselves with something?
> This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.
That's a prime difficulty of a cryptocoin, not of a government entity dealing with its citizens. Again, I'll note, in UBI the actual distribution of funds is so simple and solved as to be inconsequential. Who to give money to and how much are the main things to work out on the distribution side, and are entirely policy based, and thus no blockchain product is going to help.
I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less[1], but I don't recall the outcome).
Maybe, possibly, a religious organization such as one of the various Morman churches that strongly encourage tithing could do so, but it would probably be cast more as charity than UBI. That's also ignoring all the other problematic aspects of something like that.
Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.
> How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.
I admire the optimism (I think of myself as a pretty optimistic person too), but you've got to realize that there are reasonable people on this planet who think that waiting for governments to fix this is probably not going to turn out well. Some of those people are actually doing something about it, which is what we see here. Maybe Worldcoin works out, maybe it doesn't, but in my personal opinion, it's definitely an experiment worth running.
You and your environment have to "click together" so you live. In the wild, this means mostly surviving cold, hot, stay dry, find things to eat, and not be eaten.
In society, however, it means being useful to the system somehow, so you get access to other useful things the system makes, like air conditioners, housing, and food, ways to get around etc. If you're not useful to the system, the system may pretend it cares for you, but it doesn't really care for you. This is not up to the morality of the people in charge. It's up to the system. The system elects the people and tells them what to care about. The system is quite resilient. It can withstand certain amounts of welfare, corruption, crime, and so on. But only certain amounts. If you cross those certain amounts, what happened in 2020 with COVID handouts, and the subsequent doubling of prices of food, and so on, happens infinitely and suddenly money is worthless paper. Like Zimbabwe. So if you have somewhere else to run where they're not as stupid as Zimbabwe, you can be useful in that new place and live. If you have nowhere to run, as with a global UBI, you die.
Of course, people won't just lay down and die, they'll just have a revolution like the Bolsheviks did, and speak about how everything will belong to everyone, and of course resources will concentrate to those on top again, instead. With AI however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful. So revolution after revolution, new people will sit on top and promise it'll be different this time, in a smaller and smaller population.
{mechanical looms,mechanized farming,factory mass production,computerized tabulation,AI}
This has been the progression of economies since steam power after ~1720.
Automation replaces a category of work, everyone decrees the loss of jobs, workers reallocate into new jobs, everyone is the richer for the increased output, repeat.
The only version of this that is substantially different would be 'AI eliminates all jobs below an education threshold, while not creating sufficient surpluses via efficiency gains that they can be supported by welfare'.
Ultimately, I predict UBI is going to look a lot like more general food stamps: standardized basic goods are free, and sufficient for {food, shelter, entertainment}.
We have the industrial capability now, if we so chose.
And we're not richer today. It used to be one person (usually the man) provided for the family and the other (typically the woman) took care of the home and children. One job per family was enough. You may consider it outdated, but think of why it is. It's suddenly not fashionable to take care of your home and children. It fashionable to have two jobs, and for your spouse to also need two jobs. And you're miserable.
No one "chose" this. If they were offered a choice, no one would pick it. The system picked it for us. And we're too myopic to understand what we're walking into. The current employment figures are a sham. The homeless and the unemployed are on the streets, crime is rampant, and this is still paradise compared to what it'll be in 5 years.
So the last refuge is our intelligence, like during the industrial revolution and computing yes? The good old times. "Machines will do the work, so we have more time to think." But this time, AI is coming for our intelligence. Thinking machines. Education won't save you because your education is outdated before they even give you the diploma. And AI doesn't really need you that much lately. You're just clicking a button. And then your boss notices that. And lays you off. Welcome to the singularity.
This is how the USD works by the way (in systems like the petro-dollar), and why so many are trying to replace it. It's not easy. But they'll keep trying. And when they succeed, the American hegemony is over.
In Mexico there's technically a government. But really there are the vast networks of drug cartels. They have their own military, they control politicians, they choose who is and who isn't. It all started by them making a ton of money. The rest followed. If you control the money and who can spend it, you control the economy. If you control the economy, you control everything.
It stems from human tax base (after we mostly eliminated direct government capital ownership when we did away with monarchies).
And human tax base ultimately stems from... the ability to count. Which is the identity question.
People. Assets. Productivity. Profit.
A government which lacks the ability to count cannot have a stable tax base, which increases stability risk and therefore decreases the value of their money.
For example, the resource curse implies there will be great reasons for companies to risk gifts of small amounts of money to lots of people in a country about to vote on whether to protect collective assets from corporate theft..
All the weird action committees of US corruption haven't even had the logistics to directly bribe voters of a low population state to piss in the pot. Should they get iris wallet addresses for everyone correlated to scan locations? Is anything the US would do about this beyond the capabilities of Kenya?
The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain.
Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???
[1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
France minima sociaux are not enough to live on by themselves.
Last time I checked the RSA was around 400 euros / months.
The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it.
I have friends who lives with the French RSA, they have previous stash of money to complete it.
One is close to spend only 400/month, but he lives on land he bought with his last job.
Not really, or rather it depends who you ask: on the left's perspective on UBI, you're right, but on the right side (Milton Friedman being the most prominent on that side having talked about UBI) then it should be barely enough to replace all other form of state wellfare without necessarily be enough to live from it.
Seems like the past 30 years have been ongoing interventionism to shovel money to war makers.
I don't think UBI will really work if it doesn't even have support at the poverty line. Part of the point of UBI is a segment of the population which can't find work due to obsolete skills can at least spend the energy to retrain, or perhaps pursue some endeavor that is difficult to monetize but provides some benefit to society. That's difficult to do when one is destitute. As well, it needs to be effective for large swaths of the population if we are indeed heading into a post-work society over the next 10-20 years.
The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI. It ought to be a safety net that makes otherwise impractical growth possible.
As a crypto, CirclesUBI is a bit of a disaster (e.g. the hosted UI, and sensitivity to certain kinds of attack), but I think they got the tokenomics right: it encourages Sybil resistant behavior among the users without trying to bind an address to your body and without relying on an issuer's good behavior.
Crypto Anarchism is not attractive the vast majority of people.
I'll argue the UBI people want involves their government sending them a check, direct deposit, or cash.
I just have a hard time imagining a government that both:
- keeps the U in UBI
- is not under some kind if existential threat from its people
You need the latter to have the former. But if you're coordinated to achieve the latter then you don't really need the government to achieve the former anyway.
If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.
Which underlines the ridiculousness of the thought experiment. The solution to wars being destructive is...a blockchain?
And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat and your evaluation of their tokens as well. Reciprocal exchange and utility, not market value.
This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. (Ceteris paribus.) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.
Contrary to the freshwater meme Inflation is rarely primarily a monetary phenomenon, but it's even less the case during a war.
I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.
It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.
> you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed
How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Keep in mind, you are in a war zone, which means no guarantee of safe imports or exports. (Also, whose tokens?)
Managing an economy on a war footing is old business. There is nothing Worldcoin does to even remotely approach giving a semblance of an indication that anyone on their team has actually thought about this, like, once.
> that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal
This is, in a nutshell, the problem with anything that purports to maintain its value over long durations of time. Value keeping takes work. We can't meaningfully convert ancient currencies to modern ones because it makes no sense to ask how many days' labour a Roman peasant would trade for an iPhone. These problems are fundamental to the notions of value. They don't have a technical solution. Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
Followed by
> Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?
If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere, nor does it matter what the "value" of our coins is in terms of some number, so long as they are issued to each of us at the same rate.
You only have to bother with establishing a correspondence with some allegedly valuable thing in the real world (gold, factories, whatever) if you want a globally consistent notion of value. A notion which, as you've explained, is a fiction, and which I'd argue, is a harmful one.
Yes. (It’s paradoxical because it is, though an unremarkably old paradox at that.)
> If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere
It does if that war just blockaded the barley!
> Better to just value the coins in a nonspecific way
With each area that tends to trade together having a common coin or set of coins for reference purposes, and large interchanges between them?
Things would differ from traditional currency in cases where users are not well connected. Imagine a newcomer, flush with tokens from a disconnected or distantly connected part of the network. They may not be able to find any locals that will accept their tokens. (This sort of hygiene discourages Sybil accounts and makes difficult the kind of bank-driven shenanigans that were typical of US foreign policy in the 70's). If you want to do remote business you should have to gain the trust of the locals first, and you should have to fear that they'll revoke that trust in response to bad behavior on your part.
The value of a loaf of bread, as expressed in a conventional currency would then be a function of whether the baker had needs that weren't met by the local economy. Communities that are highly dependent on the global economy would have a great need of conventional currency. Self sufficient communities, less so (this is to prevent the formation of the overly complex, and therefore fragile, supply chains that we see today).
So yes, I expect that the structure that you describe would emerge, with densely connected hubs etc. The UBI token would only make sense for use within a hub though. You'd probably use a strictly-scarcity-based currency like USD or whatever for inter-hub commerce.
This is because if the goods are coming or going a great distance then you don't really need all the trust stuff since you're unlikely to be in a position to care about the externalities of their manufacture/use anyway. By contrast, if the goods are coming from your neighbor's back yard then you probably want to be using something besides conventional currency, something that lets you threaten to revoke trust if their operations are poisoning the drinking water or whatever.
Mostly this design is inspired by how CirclesUBI does it, but there's a few tweaks I'd make of I were going to try to build such a thing.
That's not how economics works.
The purchasing power of any currency, for example USD, isn't the same everywhere even at a fixed point in time, because we don't have negligible-cost transportation in war zones (amongst other places).
Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.
Yes, it would; neither form of the “U” in UBI includes free of borders in the sense used in the term, and reinterpreting that way and pretending its what the term means is just lazy equivocation.
“Universal” seems to be a later construction, it was originally “unconditional”, and in both cases the writings on it for many years under either name made it clear that the reference was principally freedom from means- and behavior-testing, contrary to status-quo welfare programs, but that it would target a population based on (exact scope differs in particular proposals) residency, citizenship, and/or age. Not surprised that the “no borders” crowd has seen it differently, and their version certainly is a valid instance of the general idea, but they don’t get to rewrite history and narrow the scope of the broader concept to their new version.
Is there a book or something you'd recommend?
You could do it through the agency known as the IRS by adding a standard refundable credit, you might need a few more employees, but nothing like twice as many.
World coin has always looked like a thinly veiled attempt to generate a biometric dataset which would later be used against its users.
I just don't know who its audience was supposed to be. If you're suspicious enough of fiat to want this kind of escape hatch, how can you simultaneously be trusting enough to embrace a system that relies on biometrics and allegedly trustworthy hardware?
And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta.
History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.
"open-source"
You're saying clear-cut objective lines exist--where exactly do you believe they are placed?
Again, not everyone agrees with those of course, and I guess that's fine. But I think most software developers who are in the FOSS ecosystem could agree that Llama is not "Open Source" as most people understand the term.
To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI.
The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments.
It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
Now he can't really back out, and can't say bad about it anymore, but you bet he doesn't want any association with it anymore.
Except he's doing neither of these. He's just talking about them while raising money.
He's not just talking about them. The whole reason this thread exists is because he is acting on the second one.
There was a more detailed article about the whole scheme, and how far it's gone in the New York Times yesterday.
It's not about humans asserting their humanness over some evil AGI/ASI machine, it's about sybil resistance. Malicious humans pretending to be thousands or millions of other humans.
These people are pretending they're fighting fraud, when instead they're trying to reinvent government responsibilities/campaigns as passive income sources for 3rd party rent-seekers. Uber for welfare.
The important thing that I think your argument is missing is that everything here is additive. I'm sure the whole Worldcoin team would love it if governance organizations of all sizes, from tiny villages to billion+ population nation states would run UBI programs to take care of their people. The thing is, today, that's not really happening, so there are a number of people working to make it happen from different angles. Maybe all of them fail, maybe one succeeds, maybe a bunch succeed and any given citizen of the world might be entitled to payments from a handful of UBI sources.
Do you think there are better global scale UBI projects and ideas out there, or do you think we should just stop trying to solve this problem?
To the degree Worldcoin is doing anything to UBI, it's in tarnishing its brand. (Identity verification is not what's holding it back.)
If they were serious about this as anything but another crypto pump-and-dump, they'd focus on direct foreign aid.
This is valid. But even if we reduce scope to a privacy-preserving UBI, nothing Worldcoin solves the core hurdles thereto. It's solving a side problem tangentially related to those involved with a privacy-preserving UBI, but entirely germane to an a16z-style crypto pump-and-dump.
Adjunct: how is Worldcoin privacy preserving? At least with Bitcoin you can plausibly deny ownership of a wallet. In a world on Worldcoin, every traffic stop lets the cops inspect your bank account.
So exactly what's happening with Worldcoin right now [1].
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...
Is the obvious related problem this solution brings forth supposed to go unsaid? (Criminals don't buy something they can steal.)
Imagine we live in a future where Worldcoin is ubiquitous, all the hardware/software is open source. Several orb operators exist in every city in the world, and operators have a non-trivial amount of WLD tokens staked to ensure good behavior. Misbehaving orbs have their keys and subkeys revoked at the first sign of illicit usage.
Maybe a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steals an orb, and uses those 10 iriscodes to register 10 new credentials on the network. How much profit would you expect to come to the criminal before their credentials are revoked?
Is there another attack you're thinking of?
This is a lot of work. Just steal the iriscodes. If they're used for re-issuance, they're being stored and transferred. If they are not directly used, there is a hash-like reduction that can be exploited.
For sake of argument, though, let's assume perfect security. Infallible security. All the way through. Congratulations, you've turned every pair of eyeballs into an oil spigot. When the Taliban or ISIS carves through a town, instead of beheading the leaders and taking their treasures, they take everyones' irises. Every authoritarian state would require scans of its citizens so payment could be routed through (read: stolen by) it, a requirement they would back up with violence.
How does Worldcoin provably know that an attacker is not using a dead person’s keys?
AI can just run the DMV and issue itself a REAL-ID.
Worldcoin doesn’t solve the problem, though, especially with Sam Altman involved.
Promotional statements by corporate executives aren’t necessary reflective of their beliefs, but rather what they believe it is useful for other people to believe they believe, and Worldcoin isn’t a side hustle.
It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.
That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it.
The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...
Write once media on a server is what you want.
How does that solve this problem:
>[company will] go out of business and take down the servers with it
Maybe some sort of globally distributed time-stamping mechanism? Oh hey look, it's a blockchain.
If you aren't in an adversarial context with multiple publishers, you don't need blockchain.
How is this published? On a single server somewhere? What country would you put it in? A friendly one I hope. Also one that won't block access to other countries that it might have petty disagreements with in the future. It might be a good idea for it to be replicated across a number of servers across the internet. We call those "nodes" in the blockchain space.
Mirrors existed long before blockchain.
Blockchain is only useful in a decentralized + adversarial context where there is a need to remove one-another's ability to game a given system. And even then, it doesn't imply a perfect security around it. Since it won't stop theft, breach, scams or other vectors.
If you want to proof you didn't temper with the historic data, publish a daily hash in some newspapers.
1. https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/first-instance-of-block...
Like publishing merkle tree hash in a few daily newspapers.
it’s a scam.
sounds like a scam to me.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211021160923/https://worldcoin...
[1]: https://twitter.com/KyleSGibson/status/1511065326624063501
[2]: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-102
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Arrest_and_c...
[4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-11/three-arr...
[5]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/crypto-g...
much wow, very legit
From what I understand, until the end of July when they launched, WLD was not yet available to people.
I'm glad to see it. Maybe with some better policing, the tech sector will again turn into something I can be unambiguously proud about working in.
Regulators follow public opinion, public opinion follows the media.
I also think that tech is not "increasingly approaching [media's] turf". Tech absolutely destroyed the funding model for newspapers, but that started in the Craigslist era. The fraction of journalism that survived has successfully made the leap to an online era.
I once was contract to hire at a place that was skeevy. The management team was horrible and abusive, the most senior developer was defensive and cagey.
I said no because of the management situation, but I also wasn't happy that the putative lead had a side hustle that involved driving around the city looking for cell towers that would let him get away with sending spam SMS messages.
My current job, he and another person from that company were working for someone in the same building as us. They didn't seem to recognize me, and I wasn't going to remind them who I was.
What hurt the worst though was that I was replacing someone from the local community who I had a lot of respect for who recommended me for this role. He basically created a giant goodwill bonfire and lit up the night sky.
“The aforesaid entity is not registered as a legal entity in Kenya.” Even for crypto, this is a particularly stupid fuckup.
What does this even mean?
If it's easier and more secure (against literal telecom hacks, we don't need to get into crypto debates) than the alternative it very plausibly can get users.
Many people appreciate payments the state cannot arbitrarily censor. Blockchains are good at this.
"many" people in your argument is more likely a "minority"
Most people care about the rule of law, payment systems that subvert this possibility are not desired by "many" people
It’s like asking “any good way to avoid paying taxes?” You’ll definitely get lots of opinions, but you should also be cautious about taking the advice.
CIA as a Service
It seems more about having the world's largest financial network.
Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash?
Glad they’ve been shut down at least.
And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.
When I told them No Fucking Way (in not that many more words), they said they would need to get executive sign-off on a "custom" integration. The "custom" bit being us doing everything ourselves server-side and sending them a single opaque identifier for conversions.
[0] https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/worldcoin-a-solution-in-...
A picture could work with any algorithm.
They’re both bad though.
Even the context of the primary reason they cite for collecting retinal data (to prevent the same person from getting $50 multiple times) requires they keep this data for at least as long as they're paying people to scan their eyeballs.
I don't know about Indonesia but that's not going to fly in the other countries of this list either.
Especially not in very privacy-oriented EU members.
The biggest use cases for this are to establish a finite limit of online accounts to combat inauthentic online behavior, to provide a robust way to vote, and to provide robust way to evenly distribute UBI.
> Despite market reforms, several business surveys reveal that business corruption is still widespread and that companies frequently encounter demands for bribes and informal payments to 'get things done' in Kenya, a trend that has contributed to an increased cost of doing business in Kenya. The country ranks 56 among 190 economies globally on World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index 2019.
> The public procurement sector in Kenya suffers widespread corruption and is the leading form of graft in the public service and always at the centre of all major corruption scandals. The use of agents to facilitate business operations and transactions in Kenya is widespread and poses a risk for companies, particularly at the market entry and business start-up stage.
It's cute on HN everyone is bashing Worldcoin while there is not a single discourse in regards to gov regulation and the business environment in Kenya and how it may (or may not) be relevant in this case(?)
I knew a few kenyans personally many years back (who were working in Mainland China and Hong Kong) and they were clearly not big fans of the kenyan gov. I wonder if there are improvement in the recent years.
Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD?
But you can generally bet on a trend towards zero.
This is a different token. And I wouldn't trust a site with such outdated rates.
You get 25 WLD for getting scanned, hence the huge queue in a developing country.
Worst case scenario, WLD seems to be a Ethereum token, so you can the very least trade it for Ether, which is accepted pretty much anywhere cryptocurrency at all is accepted.
Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"?
EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?
global south is everyone else.
I would bet sama is just an asset, and is not literally planning (or perhaps even aware of) this.
Stop bending over backwards to excuse bad behavior from bad people.
You could offer me a million dollars and I wouldn't hesitate sith my "no", and I'm far from wealthy.
I'm also a happy WorldCoin user. I think a lot of people who want it shut down are kind of miseries that don't like seeing other stuff being successful.
What they SHOULD do is to--
1. Scan biometrics. They should not restrict themselves to just irises, because not everybody has irises or eyes. But they should only scan things that you can get surreptitiously without too much work... meaning things that everybody gives away anyway just by walking down the street.
2. Bind the biometrics to keys generated only for that purpose, and never used for anything but attesting to other keys... in zero-knowledge so that you can't associate different sub-keys attested by a given master key.
3. NOT bind the biometrics to names or any other information about the person.
4. Go right ahead and publish the biometrics themselves, together with the associated public master keys. Because again, they are not things anybody should be thinking of as secret... and pretending you can keep them secret is foolish even if you don't put them in a database.
5. Stop centralizing the system that attests to the bindings given in (4); do the work to eliminate trust from that. Or at LEAST don't go out of your way to RELY on a centtral authority.
Once you have that, you have all you need for Sybil resistance, which gives you the global uniqueness they need. Then go build your crypto system on top of it.
2. I can see this being a good idea
3. They don't
And they only do irisis.
And they're doing the ZK at the wrong point in the chain. Publishing the actual, raw, unhashed biometrics wouldn't be a problem as long as they didn't tie them to anything but a key. And that future-proofs you.
They’d say it proves you’re an actual human and not a fake profile, but there are existing solutions to that, and it doesn’t solve identity theft at all.
No Kenyan ever: Yeah I want a crypto currency that scans my eyeball, that'd sure make my life better!
It was rather prescient on this point
Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.
Iris scanning is already widely used in the U.S. and hasn't received much scrutiny. It's in the news all the time, e.g. with the owners of Madison Square Garden using it to keep their political enemies from going to concerts. You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already. Even LinkedIn uses CLEAR to power their verified profiles.
You can still hand your passport and boarding pass to the gate agent, it's not required to do facial recognition boarding if you don't want to, and at any rate it's not doing an iris scan, it's using a standard facial dotmap to match to a photo. It's not even doing 3D mapping, because it's source material is a standard passport photo.
There is no facial recognition in the normal re-entry line (and all these processes are before customs as part of border control). Foreigner entry may now require facial recognition, I’m a US citizen so don’t experience the process foreigners go through.
False. More importantly, however, this is an example of the "you're already doing it so it's not a big deal" fallacy.
I'm not saying it's not a big deal, I'm saying it hasn't gotten much scrutiny, at least relative to comparable innovations in the past. E.g. when airports introduced body scanners, Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this called The Naked Crowd. Where's the equivalent scrutiny for iris scanners?
https://www.givedirectly.org started there.
I don't think this is at all about UBI, if anything "competing" with Give Directly (who are doing truly excellent) would require more work and justification of Worldcoin's approach.
I do suspect the real reason is much more exploitative.
It feels as though the only people into it in SV in 2023 are the people shilling it, which are not that profitable of a cohort after all.
Godspeed with changing that, crypto bros.
All power on earth emanates from the barrel of a gun. We abstract that fact away in modern polite society, but it is the base level truth of our existence.
So yes, when it comes down to it, governments can, will, (and have) used guns to solve this.
Any and all economic policy is ultimately backed by violence. That's what governments are for.
See: 600 years of Roman history.
But for a modern example, just look at Bretton-Woods.
Why do you think it's like that?
You can find all three of those in much worse forms embedded within crypto.
There's this recurring refrain that the US is threatened by losing its reserve currency powers to bitcoin, Bitcoin can't be a reserve currency. The great depression was caused by double digit deflation, Bitcoin experiences double digit deflation and inflation every few months.
Limited partners (pension funds) are paying for this aspirational idea (less any funds from selling tokens perhaps) while a16z will pocket a Venture Capital fee.
Lots of money sitting around might as well roll the dice.