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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

How so? A universal and tamper-proof ID system sounds like a good idea. In my country we have a pretty rock solid digital ID but the problem is that it's national, so the utility is limited.

I want to build global apps where I know every user is real and limited to one account but currently that's impossible. I don't know enough about Worldcoin to know if that's it though.

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So if it's a great idea, and Worldcoin is a US company, why did they not start in the US?

Why instead did they go to some of the least wealthy parts of Africa and ask people to give them their biometrics for sometimes as much as one month's salary? To seed their database? It doesn't really pass the smell test.

To keep things polite - I couldn't give a nanofraction of a fuck what kind of app you want to build, I am not giving my biometric data on such a stupid whim to anybody, not to US for-profit, when US laws selectively considers remaining 95% of humans on Earth subpar.

that's exactly one of the biggest use cases for WC. the internet needs this and will need it 100x more in a few years

Why does the internet "need" this? Anonymity and pseudonymity are features, not bugs of the internet. Eliminating them will supercharge surveillance and government/corporate control.

The short answer is a lot of potentially useful decentralized protocols completely buckle under the weight of Sybil attacks, so if Sybil attacks were impossible, there is a whole lot more that could be built

So how do retinal scans protect against Sybil attacks exactly?

I don't believe that they do, in fact, it is probably trivial to make a fake WorldCoin identity, but people who support WorldCoin largely support it on the assumption that this is not possible.

I think the people who support Worldcoin do so either on the basis of it being another shitcoin they can make money speculating with, or because they're in Sam's personality cult.

It does

claiming to do != do

5 minutes on their website would answer this question.

This is why it's frustrating to discuss WC. WC preserves anonymity and pseudonymity entirely. People assume it doesn't and then it perpetuates the misinformation around it that make people hate it.

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