Govt warns kenyans about Worldcoin
kenyans.co.ke
kenyans.co.ke
And I doubt that many people exactly know what they give and what happens to that data or what negative effects it could have if that data is stolen.
Otherwise people wouldn't fall for (crypto) scams.
Presumably it would be distributed as Worldcoin airdrops. Either those airdrops will quickly reduce the value of the coin towards zero because nobody’s going to trade real money for WorldHyperInflationCoin…
Or, Sam Altman will somehow create Worldgov too that will fund this brave new Worldcoin UBI. Doesn’t seem terribly likely.
Maybe it’s an AI Underpants Gnome thing where step #2 is “posthuman superintelligence will solve it!”
Any coin used for UBI, will lose value against Bitcoin.
It's simply pretending that language models masquerading as AI are so absurdly powerful that human identity itself is now threatened and requires an additional verification layer to prove that you are actually human. Like the language model product, I think they're purely trading on hype.
I'm not sure what having my retinal scan gets you if you can't actually replicate an eyeball matching that scan.
Matching finger print data with facial recog is about as close as you can get to foolproof identity analysis I would think. I know both can be faked, but for a majority of the population, having these two markers would be almost impossible to claim it wasn't you.
The rise of LLM and generative image and video absolutely poses threats in the form of criminal impersonation and scams, in terms of maliciously intentioned catfishing, in terms of manipulation of public discourse, and last but not least to the enshittification of online discussion.
Online discussion spam filters have been decent at removing low effort commercial shilling and automated trollposting, but LLM poses a real threat in that regard. If you don't want a 14 year old troll to be able to set an automated script to spam post 50 new convincingly written Reddit posts every hour about how horrible Playstation 7 is and how much better Xbox Series 15 is to /r/Games, then you care about human verification or spam detection that takes into account the new abilities of LLMs.
All that being said Worldcoin doesn't look like the best answer.
LLMs are going to shift the orbit of the internet and present a spam-adjacent problem on a scale we haven't seen before. Existing power structures are going to be very suddenly convinced of the need to either prove one's identity, or at a minimum, prove one's humanity and uniqueness.
I have no idea what the solution here is but man I hope it's not a fricken crypto currency and maybe also not exploiting the 3rd world. These seem like they should be low bars but here we are.
- wouldn't need a blockchain or crypto tokens for that.
- but they would need to provide a way for people to authenticate as humans on random website (without reavealing their identities, because GDPR in the EU).
Since they do 1 but not 2, we can positively conclude that Altman take avantage of a real problem as a marketing pitch for his product that isn't in fact aimed at this problem.
With a sufficiently large number of samples, the ability to create convincing synthetic retinal images? Though to what end I don't know.
[edit] The last time I was at Universal Studios, I was 17. A couple friends and I spent a few hours running around the park in camouflage at around 1am, stoned out of our minds, before being caught and escorted out. They let us go with a warning. Can you imagine what they'd do now?? The 90s were awesome.
How are biometrics used at Universal Studios Hollywood?
Biometrics are gathered on a guest’s first visit when using Multi-Day, Annual Pass or Season Pass tickets. On subsequent visits these biometrics are referenced to ensure that it is the same guest using the ticket.Kenya suspends Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36973882 - Aug 2023 (102 comments)
Worldcoin Banned in Kenya - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971704 - Aug 2023 (15 comments)
"The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) has cautioned Kenyans against sharing their details with WorldCoin, a financial public utility that allows the public to easily access digital currencies without the need for a third party to facilitate the transactions."
Corollary:
"Those who would trade privacy for token freebies shall inevitably lose both. (and deserve neither)"
Something that large corporations (or otherwise masquerading as NGOs) will most certainly never do unless it magically aligns with making them filthy rich in the process.
And what is a result so far? Financial scams, crypto extortion schemes, bot nets, black market and drug market currency, exchange failures. A lot of negatives and literally nothing on the positive side.
And now this dystopian Worldcoin scheme.
The last remaining human scientists spent their final years hiding from AI patrols, devising a viral idea that could be implemented on 2010 technology and that would suck up the maximum amount of programmer brainpower and silicon resources without delivering any progress towards AI. Cryptocurrency was the solution they came up with. A man who looks surprisingly like Bruce Willis was sent back to seed the idea…
For a while there all the dumped mining GPUs were super cheap, and GPU manufacturers had scaled up their manufacturing capabilities to be able to easily meet increased demand as AI ramped up. It's possible AI would have developed more slowly had we not had so many GPUs lying around and nothing to use them for.
... And maybe private blockchains are a useful data structure for some niches?
This is a pretty weak devil's advocate argument though.
An ecosystem built on top of a entirely rotten core will be rotten.
There's some company that publishes a blockchain checksum in a tiny ad in the New York Times every day. I don't remember what they're securing, but that is the method it uses to make sure the code is distributed widely without anyone being able to tamper with it.
- When a layperson is scammed out of their Crypto the problem is that they lost Money because they used Money to buy the Crypto. (Yes, given the current ecosystem it is easier for my grandmother to be convinced to transfer all of her Crypto such that she can't get it back but that's bad because she's losing Money.)
- People are incentivized to run machines which "mine" Crypto -- but otherwise do nothing externally useful while also causing other negative externalities such as carbon emissions -- because the Crypto can be sold for Money.
There are a plethora of other examples but common mediums of exchange are essential to allow specialization and the society we live in.
Public money -> Venture Capitalist extracting fees -> FinTech startup middleman extracting fees -> Individual sheltering volatile currency
Public money loses everyone else wins. Wealth inequality expands.
When the currency is crashing down like that, people try to discard it by bying something else (goods or other currencies). As I get it, exchanges were limited, so those who had better access to foreign currencies used this as an opportunity and provided services to those who weren't.
The transfer itself is very simple. You put in the target address, calculate the amount and submit. The awesome thing here is that it is much, much faster than any international bank transfer. With Ethereum you are looking at minutes and Bitcoin should still be under two hours.
Of course this assumes that both parties already have wallets set up and have a way to get money in and out. Everyone I've interacted with already had wallets and were also eager to keep it in crypto which made everything even simpler. Using this to send money to my parents would be a complete nightmare though. On the other hand, setting up a Coinbase account while screen sharing might work and be ok if they pull the money out anyways...
How is it superior to something like Western Union? Fewer fees?
It also works in emergencies, when other means are not available - which is a questionable thing, but crypto had allowed me to buy a plane ticket for my wife to leave Russia after the war had started.
One very positive effect crypto has had is that it made this formerly poor cancer researcher with a pitiful retirement fund have hope for the future and not constantly lose his money to inflation and wages that haven't kept up with it.
So, pretty much the same effect as traditional investing, or buying lottery tickets?
If you believe in induced demand of criminality well, bad news there too.
The local drug dealers don't trade w/ crypto.
I think evading taxes and sanctions is pretty good actually
Sorry but no it hasn’t; and no it doesn’t. 15 years now and nothing concrete for many reasons that have been eloquently expounded on many times. If that changes let me know.
Lots of people in the world don't, and in some (not all, but some) of those situations Bitcoin and similar projects have been useful to many people.
Transaction fees have spiked in the past to like $60 direct plus $200 in energy wasted. The GDP per capita in the worst-off African countries is like $200. You think they should spend 6 months of GDP per capita to make each transaction just because a lot of people are trying to make payments? Even today it's like 1% of GDP per capita per transaction in direct fees. It's inadequate for a large flea market or a midsize Costco let alone a global payments network for the underserved. Onboarding everyone onto Lightning would take 75 years and trillions of dollars in fees, plus the entire block reward.
Not to mention the worst off are the most affected by volatility, and this thing flails around like a balloon you forgot to tie off. And 'similar projects' just get hacked or rugged constantly.
Honestly how dare anyone recommend a system like this to the most vulnerable?
They're much better served by something like M-PESA.
The reality of the situation is that only the people in wealthy countries are in a position to, and can afford to, speculate on this silliness. Those people are already adequately served.
The vulnerable deserve real solutions and this is at best and most charitably a distraction from their development.
There already is a real solution and Moneygram with Stellar have already done this to enable instant, cheap, worldwide payments with USDC; available today. [0] Especially with countries that have their currencies devalued.
A year ago you had the chance to ask them anything or give them questions about your concerns and do something about it. [1] As expected all talk and no action.
Believe it or not I have a job where I'm paid for, among other things my opinions. Demanding I show up and provide a service for free is not likely to be met affirmatively.
If you want my time, you're welcome to contract me, but I'm not cheap.
I get a lot out of these conversations here, it helps me understand consensus and challenge my own opinions, but this is strictly hobby.
> ... instant, cheap, worldwide payments with USDC.
USDC doesn't need a blockchain lol, if you just want a USD balance you can just open an account with Circle and move it around between accounts at Circle free of charge. Like PayPal has done forever.
They only have a blockchain because it was hip, and maybe because they're idealistic - but mostly because they're looking to avoid regulation. It's just regulatory arbitrage. For the use case you enumerate here, it's strictly not necessary.
You're giving your 'opinions' for free here almost every day, so you are already wasting your own time regardless.
> USDC doesn't need a blockchain lol
It does and it is on many blockchains. Works anywhere, worldwide, instant, fast and cheap.
> if you just want a USD balance you can just open an account with Circle and move it around between accounts at Circle free of charge.
Not everyone has a US bank account and can have one to do that, especially those in other countries outside of the US and in countries that have devalued currencies. The whole point as to why USDC exists.
So regardless of your complaining and as expected, all talk and zero action.
We can imagine a world where some, for example African, community could monetize its own productive capacity in an internationally current way that doesn't put it in debt bondage to bankers in the USA or China while costing them a double digit vig. I think that would be an improvement over the status quo and some form of cryptographically trustable distributed consensus is currently the most plausible way to get there. Any centralized ledger, no matter what form it takes, indisputably privileges its controller.
It looks like a great tool to get around sanctions.
Indirectly, it kickstarted global CBDCs research, blockchain-integration research across major financial institutions, tokenisation efforts, etc.
Would all these things have happened anyway? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know if blockchains in the form we got them were necessary, but they surely are this possible world’s ignition.
Will this all be beneficial in the long run? TBD. But, the story isn’t over yet.
Crypto was possibly a net fuck up though
These are also all negatives. Profound wastes of time.
none of those things are things. research into more crypto is not a benefit of crypto. it's just crypto.
A side effect of Worldcoin seems to be sending money to people in African countries. If that were the only real-world effect, that's pretty good! It's unintentional charity work. The retina scan ensures that the money will be widely distributed.
The question is, what do people actually lose by getting a retina scan? It sounds creepy, sure, but it seems they're unharmed? What can Worldcoin even do with a hash of a retina scan for some random person?
For those who makes no distinction and hold a similar view, maybe the Pineapple Fund is a good starting point to learn why “bitcoin is not crypto, and crypto is not bitcoin”.
Crypto already has efficient alternatives for their consensus operations, as demonstrated by Ethereum which moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and cut its footprint by 99%, which shows it is already possible and works today.
AI (Deep Learning) on the other hand has none available today and continues to waste resources, water, money and electricity over fine-tuning, training, and inference. [0] All to create hallucinating chatbots and broken models that cannot reason or explain themselves and have to be retrained or tweaked because its creators know that they cannot be trusted.
It seems like the field of Deep Learning still hasn't innovated to reduce its own resource hungriness and footprint yet requires more compute wastage with no efficient alternative in sight for their operations.
EDIT: Of course when you can't refute a point like the one I just made, why not censor it instead?
[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
Millions of dollars of donations have been raised and donated to charities (across borders!) using cryptocurrencies, for one thing. There are many other good things that have come about as a result of it, but falsifying your "nothing" argument only takes one pin to pop.
I am also aware of people inside Russia who recently donated to the Ukranian war effort. This again seems to be otherwise an impossibility.
Your claim seems to me to be incorrect.
It's okay to not like crypto or to think that it's overall a net bad thing; it's not okay to spread factual inaccuracies. It has 100% enabled things that were not possible before. That's a fact, not an opinion.
What was stopping you from putting cash in an envelope? In a lot of ways, that's even safer than crypto. Untraceable and with no fees for tech bro middlemen.
Even the bad stuff like crime, in places where the law is brutally unjust crypto is a good tool to get around it. And blaming crypto for carbon emissions is like blaming Tesla for carbon emissions because a recharge comes from coal plants. Its our responsibility to structure renewables as the cheapest, so industry (including crypto) invest in them.
How many stories on here about payment processors, or even banks freezing accounts for arbitrary or no reasons? Crypto is one of the few options around this. There are countless countries where it has been useful for political reasons, helping people in war zones, or to bypass unjust sanctions.
So you have not had use from crypto means its useless to everyone? Its like; The YEN has been of no value to me so nothing good must have ever come of it...