Worldcoin has a new Orb and is now just World

> It soon stopped being about that

I submit that it could never have actually been about that. It may have been out of the states control but it was far to technocratic and dependent on first movers so it was always going to leave behind the class of people you hoped it would most benefit.

> the original spirit of Bitcoin

Is effectively "you don't need permission." That's _it_. People projected quite a bit onto that.

I'm glad you came around, yes the correct solution is to eat Sam Altman and not to let him invent his own private currency.

I don't want to be the wet blanket... but this is just another "crypto bro" peddling yet another scam, err... "ICO". Only this time the elite's behind the project will have everyone's biometric data too.

> with the working class taking power for themselves

This is exactly the opposite of that. Sam has a rocky history with conflicts-of-interest and self-promotion. I don't see any reason we should trust him or his organization with this attempted consolidation of economic and identity powers.

FTA:

> Last year, Kenya suspended World while it investigated its practices surrounding data collection (it has since dropped its investigation). Hong Kong asked World to stop all operations in the country over privacy risks, while both Portugal and Spain have also taken action against the project.

>It soon stopped being about that

It's because everyone forgot about Chesterton's Fence. Stuff like the emergence of exchanges and the story of Magic The Gathering Online Exchange in particular are the result of people realizing those fences were necessary.

There are very good reasons that the currencies we trust are managed and regulated by reputable banks and countries.

> And ‘access’ isn’t even a thing people want

They will want to access orb if orb is needed to maintain daily live in some dystopian version of the future:)

In London they had two Orbs and they seemed to run out of people to scan after a month or so. I'm not sure more Orbs will fix that.

It actually uses a lot of modern cryptography (zero knowledge proofs, multiparty computation, decentralized consensus, etc) to avoid exactly that.

I feel like the former could probably be avoided if they use an ORWL-PC-like thing to ensure that an on-device generated private key can’t be extracted, and use some kind of like, video recording from multiple cameras to demonstrate that the construction of the device didn’t differ from the standard, and showing the public key it produced, and had such footage signed by trusted parties, as part of the like, certificate for the public key that the device uses?

Of course,

1) I doubt they did this

2) This still kicks the can down to “why do you trust the authorities who signed the alleged footage showing the construction of the device”. (You can kick the can further by having the cameras also have such infeasible-to-extract private keys, but encounter the same problem)

You stand in front of the Orb. The Orb scans your biometric data and stores it in Sam's Database (Sam says he doesn't own the database, something something blockchain good of humanity - but Sam doesn't "own" OpenAI either).

Once the Orb gathers enough people's biometrics, the Orb will become the gatekeeper for transactions. The Orb will verify your identity and humanity. Sam's Database will be more precise than your social security number, more secure than your bank login, internationally transcendent, and secured by the rigid and infallible laws of cryptocurrency. The history of crypto has shown us that ownership of tokens is a good and safe way to verify people's identities and uniqueness, and that fraud is basically impossible with these systems.

National governments will use Sam's Database to assign Universal Basic Income as AGI decimates the need for labor, shortly before they collapse and give way to the AI world government. Sam's database will contain the unique identifiers of every human, giving our benevolent AI overlord a head start on getting to know us all and making our lives richer and more wonderful than we could possibly dream, by [unspecified].

Prostrate yourself before the Orb. Give it your most ineffable data. Invest your money in Sam's database. He is a responsible steward.

Well, kind of. It's also a physical thing that you stand in front of to give up a bunch of biometric information to go in some database somewhere for...some reason that is unspecified. The fact that they're doing it "for free" suggests to me that there is some purpose to it that makes it profitable in spite of the costs. Given how much everyone's data is actually worth, I suspect that the reason it's free is because the biometric data has a bunch of intrinsic value such that it's worth building a bunch of hardware and giving away monopoly money.

Bond villains only answer questions when you're safely strapped in to their brain-drilling chair.

It was in the developed world too. I think the sign up bonus was about $30 which may be a lot in some parts of the world?

A human can have multiple Apple accounts but (theoretically) only one World account.

Playing devil's advocate: why is it important? Why do we need to know if an agent on the internet is human or robot?

Generally what we actually need to know is if a given agent is engaging in manipulative behavior, illegal activities, or otherwise causing harm to us or our customers. Those behaviors are often correlated with robot agents, which has allowed us to use "is this a robot" as an imperfect proxy for "is this agent up to no good". But for most use cases the humanity isn't actually what we're interested in, it's whether the agent is abusive.

In a world where we can't verify humanity as easily, maybe we just need to find different proxies for abuse detection?

If Ticketmaster wants to know I'm not a bot, I guess I would be OK signing a challenge with my government issued identity card [0] - for message boards that need to avoid spam and griefers, IMO an invite only system with revokable access to everyone a bad actor handed an invite code could be sufficient

Also scanning my eyeballs to have a private corporation give the thumbs up or thumbs down on whether I can access a particular service isnt merely distasteful but dystopian in a "we already lost" kind of way

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

I think this is a totally valid question. My answer would probably be to have people actually pay for more things. I think a huge proponent of something like World is advertisers, who want to make sure that real human eyeballs are seeing your ads. But if you pay me money, I don't care if you're a rogue AI botnet running amok, I'm happy to serve your request.

no need to reverse-engineer anything, both hardware[1] and software[2] are up on GitHub

[1]: https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-hardware [2]: https://github.com/worldcoin/orb-software

<< What is a solution that people can live with?

Dropping a good portion of digital life seems like a good start.

This is a solution I could put up with as long as it wasn't being run by a company (and especially not an SV-type company, and doubly so with Worldcoin specifically). That requires me to have a ton more trust in them than I can summon.

If we have to have something like this, I want it to be run by governments instead. Governments already have our identity information anyway, so I wouldn't be leaking any data to a new entity, and if the government is remotely democratic in nature, the citizenry has more say in how things are done than they do with companies.

Agreed, the internet is already in desperate need of a way to authenticate real humans, and we'll need it even more in 5-10 years. But it can't simply be verification via government-issued ID. The solution needs to be private, and ideally as decentralised as possible.

A real solution is to create privacy-preserving proofs regarding the state of a timestamped cryptographic feedback loop in projector-camera systems.

It's trivial to add incoming image hashes and timestamps to a Merkle tree and to derive the output hashes of projector emissions as they come, while providing an output hash to one's interlocutor (or BFT network) periodically. This proves the beginning time, end time, and sequentiality of all emissions.

Correspondence between emissions and recordings is proven by training autoencoders on concatenated projection images and returned camera images. These autoencoders are transformed using privacy preservation techniques.

Thus, human relationships and trust can be modeled and secured.

> Sam the snake

Please edit personal attacks out of your HN comments, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not owe people whom you call snakes better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

This applies regardless of who the person in question is, because it's not about them, it's about us, i.e. the group you belong to.

> > verify [that you are human] on the internet

IMO it's crucial that we keep in mind the policy/engineering differences between:

1. Prove you're a human and share your global permanent ID.

2. Prove you're probably human.

3. Prove that if you're a bot you're at least the high-quality kind that isn't part of an army and whose operators are likely to follow the rules.

In many cases #1 is overkill, difficult to engineer, has reams of nasty privacy implications, and requires a massive amount of bureaucracy for edge-cases.

Most websites are happy with #2 or even #3.

[Edit: Some prior musings in comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714245 , where someone also mentions Worldcoin.]

> Something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning that you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not. I think that's certainly going to happen with the progress in AI.

No thanks. I would prefer to just opt out.

>Something like World ID will eventually exist

It's called a national ID with an eID feature and I've been using it to verify my age when I order booze online for like a decade. It cost 5 bucks extra when I renewed my id the last time. What do I need an eyeball scanning orb and a crypto coin for something that every developed or for that matter half developed government invented in like 2010?

World(coin) was always private with monetization plans. They are VC funded by a16z and the like. Though how exactly they'll monetize or not remains to be seen. You can already make payments through the app.

If we’re dealing with an all-powerful Skynet intelligence, or even a WOPR or Wintermute, won’t it just figure out how to bypass the verification system?

It is genuinely kinda fascinating, because, lets face it, based on what we are seeing now, short of omega swan event ( black swan events seem too common lately ), it will actually be a problem that will need to be solved. I am just mildly annoyed that solution to prove I am human is to effectively give last parts of me that are.

The market for fake eyes made on resin and plastic seems to have a brilliant future. Soon most of all 'certified 100% humans' talking on internet will be animatronic heads without a brain. Same as today

I guess he’s going for the “FBI fingerprinting” market?

The new one is also called a 'Deep Face,' Eye-Scanning Orb. Not at all freaky sounding.