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Comment by brap | Hacker News Reader

Sam also ran a crypto scam called WorldCoin. Their secret sauce was tricking poor people in Africa.

Runs, I think. WorldCoin is still around, just re-branded as 'World Network'. I didn't spot the usual leadership bios on a quick search.

Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.

Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!

[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.

Signing posts with a hash tied to a thing that might prove you are human instead of a LLM astroturfing might actually be a good value proposition for blockchain.

Why would I trust the entry on the blockchain? I'd rather just trust the government body issuing my ID. Estonia has had it for years, it's amazing that here in USA people send contracts over email and just click a button to "sign" it - Adobe at least allows actual PKI signatures but there's not really a registry to verify it against so useless in most cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Yeah, the US is a backwards economy and clearly isn't successful with all it's rules and that silly Bill Clinton era digital signature law isn't pulling it's weight. It's been solidly eclipsed by Estonian technical superiority.

I would trust a blockchain more than my government. My government has clearly been shown to be vulnerable to a < 51% attack. Blockchains don't change every 4 years and decide habeas corpus no longer applies to me because my skin is the wrong color either.

You don't need a blockchain for that, just cryptographic signatures and PKI. The EU is implementing a system for national IDs that would enable this, and could be done with perfect privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.

Yes, if every government was reliably incorruptible, they could also work together to build a global human verification network.

I predict that Worldcoin will get it done first, and will be more dependable than most countries. But it could turn out otherwise. In the end, services that need humanity verification will have multiple provider options and the market will decide.

Worldcoin is and always will be opt-in.

Government solutions will be opt-out, and only in the most tedious way: Leaving the country, burning your passport and becoming a stateless person. Not recommended.

If there ever was a moat, government has it.

That doesn't really scale to the 3rd world as a form of identity validation. I'm sure there is more than one way to do it, I'm just saying it's a way to do it.

My body does that for me…

Nope, this is the internet. I know you are a cat in a tube. The internet is full of them, like dump trucks.

HN is dead

september is the cruelest month

It’s so much longer than the other months!

Came here to agree.

Initially I thought it's a bloody stupid idea, however at this stage I reckon we need it or a lot of boomers are going to be ones hotted into singing away all their wealth away.

Aaah, now you see the plan clearly.

Yeah same here. My dad has been talking about the End Times and the Mark of the Beast for 40 years now. Now, in addition to all that, it's Q-ANON and MAGA. Fun times. Liberal police are coming for your guns and your Bible, you heard it here first.

Also a plot point in Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day, where his eyeballs get scanned as a matter of course before transporting a VIP, (sign here, eyeballs here please, thank you) and later used to clone him.

John Hagee is very much alive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee

I mean, on the one hand, sure, but on the other hand - the "anointed one" himself, DJT, is pushing AI, so I'm sure it will be fine. Unlike that heathen Joe Biden who attends more church services in a month than DJT in a year. And as I eventually learned (grew up similar to yourself, but german pentecostal in canada, also exvangelical now), if they are against helping people and against welfare/basic human rights/basic income/equality, they're truly christians in the eyes of those telegelicals. I guess somehow the "you will always have the poor among you, me you will not always have" quote from Jesus means that to be "a biblical nation", we have to ensure there are always poor people..

>ran

Nope [1].

1: https://world.org/

How did they trick them by giving them free money?

They are paying 'one worldcoin' (I've read sold about $50) to places that give zero value to their privacy (too difficult to care for privacy when starving to death and the monthly salary is $10). They are targeting poor countries (South America, Africa).

Once they have collected 'enough' faces to use on their AI, they could possibly pull the plug or keep it as a social experiment.

I was thinking, there is no way Russia or China will allow them to operate in their countries, and (combined) they got 1.5bn people.

I can also see them trying that to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other autocratic ..stan places, where the local dictator would only allow this if they got to use the data for their own nefarious purposes.

I signed up in London. It's coming to the US shortly. You give up very little privacy - you don't even have to give your name.

Most people calling it a scam don't know much about it.

You just give up a little freedom for a little security?

I'm not aware of giving up any freedom. Or getting security. I got about $300 in cash equivalent in their cryptocoins and a tech toy - it's basically a combo app and crypto wallet.

Free crypto. There's a difference.

They don't know how but they know it has to be a scam because it's crypto. That's all the thought that's gone into it.

It’s not a scam because it’s a cryptocurrency, it’s a scam because it works like one. This has been covered at length by multiple investigative journalists.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

TINSTAAFL

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