Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

https://blockworks.co/news/worldcoin-privacy-concerns

by hammock • 3 years ago

478 320 3 years ago

blockworks.co

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

I am seeing a pattern here and I am starting to believe that Sam Altman is an Accelerationist:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

A lot of his actions, investments and marketing strategy seem to point in that direction.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

Interesting. I wonder how he would characterize his belief system.

I personally have a very dim view of him, mostly because of Worldcoin (which is how he came onto my radar). His work with OpenAI confirms my unease with his efforts and makes me wonder what his goals actually are.

idlewords2• 3 years ago

Altman is proof that there is no IQ cap on human stupidity.

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

Altman's belief system is "I deserve more money and power", that simple. There's no generous interpretation of building a 25% pre-mine shitcoin, and hawking it to third world countries through sketchy contractors who are explicitly incentivized to collect biometrics from anyone they can, where the claimed purpose of said shitcoin isn't even a little bit implemented, especially all of this in light of your friend and business partner runs fucking Palentir

hiatus• 3 years ago

Could you elaborate on which actions, investments, and marketing strategies led you to that belief?

morkalork• 3 years ago

I think he's just out of touch. Here's another example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9y5n/the-people-building-a...

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

There is a certain degree of that for sure. These people really see themselves as “destroyers of worlds” when in fact they are becoming a but amusing in how they try to inflate their importance on the scene.

But the sense of urgency cause by the supposed incoming terror, destitution, and despair seem to indicate these people would almost enjoy seeing it happen. Notice how their marketing doesnt focus as much on the benefits as it does on the drawbacks. It’s as if they _want_ the negatives to come to fruition and some sort of radical change to happen as a result of it.

Maybe i am reading too much into it and giving sam and the other folks at openai too much credit, but the idea that they might be accelerationists is so crazy that it might actually be fact.

Why else would you go above and beyond to build products that you yourself claim can be extremely harmful, they require radical change, other than you wanting for that negative outcome to happen so that you can achieve said change?

Didnt the person say or write somewhere that he wants to solve inequality? And since ai would drastically increase inequality by extracting work from the masses and selling it for the profits of the few at massive scale doesnt it is logical to believe that he’a aiming to prove a point. Speeding things up, cause social upheaval, that leads to social change. The definition of that ideology.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

That's hilarious, thanks for linking.

capableweb• 3 years ago

Andrej Karpathy, another OpenAI employee [...] “My hope going into Oppenheimer was that it would be a kind of true story ‘Avengers of Science,’” he said in a tweet. “It's still a good movie with lots of gems but the focus was elsewhere.”

These are the type of people building and running OpenAI? We're in a fun ride, seems they're more out of touch than I could have imagined.

nkozyra• 3 years ago

It's curious to frame this as an intentional act rather than an inevitable, natural stage of capitalism.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

I get that, but it’s almost if someone’s trying to prove the point you just made.

amelius• 3 years ago

This is like saying that anything that can be hacked, should be hacked (instead of fixed).

nemo44x6• 3 years ago

That's the main idea behind accelerationism from a Landian perspective. That capitalism is just getting started and that it's unstoppable and that it won't transition into socialisim like Marx predicted but rather will encompass more and more of everything and be the vehicle for the next evolution into a cybernetic species. It's the evolution of evolution and it's unstoppable. So get on with it and learn to love it.

Quotes like "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" and Mark Fisher's (CCNU and Nick Land, etc)ideas around capitalism realism sort of sum it up.

maxwell3• 3 years ago

He's just "hack[ing] something to [his] advantage."

And pg was his enthusiastic Palpatine. Egging on and fawning over sama was already uncomfortable back in 2010.

http://paulgraham.com/founders.html

HellDunkel2• 3 years ago

Luckily, YC is experiencing a cultural shift. The likes of PG and Marc Andrewessen, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel were not frowned upon in 2010, not to mention Elon Musk or Zuckerberg.

floydianspiral• 3 years ago

It's weird how much of that wiki article (and others I just looked up) trends towards right/alt-right extremism as I have never thought of accelerationism as something fascists would take to. My original understanding of it was that ai/tech will become so advanced that it will take over a lot of the production and labor we currently do to feed, build, and supply the world with resources and when that part is automated, humans would hopefully be freed up to do more with their life. This would have to involve restructuring money, society and how governments and resources are allocated. Ties to UBI and how much people get will have to be solved in a different way since we no longer need to do all the menial work. The time span between ai starting to be able to do all of this (maybe starting soon) and when we finally figure out we don't need to work for money is the terrible part where loss of jobs would eventually cause an upheaval and rethinking of how society needs to be structured and the acceleration that people talk about is trying to speed through this bad part as fast as possible to get to the other side as possible. I guess my idea of it is not at all what others seem to think though? I'm pretty pessimistic the "other side" will actually be a utopia but that would be up to the collective to figure out but it seems like a worthwhile concept on the surface.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

Of course, one of the problems with the idea is that it endorses throwing innocent others under the economic bus. It's nice that they want to "speed through" that part -- but it still boils down to advocating harming people who aren't consenting in exchange for the possibility (not guarantee) of something better for later generations.

dundarious• 3 years ago

It's not weird at all if you're familiar with the history of the term, and the currents in mass politics of the 20th century. Everything from the German SDP's (left wing) acceptance of Hitler's rise to power with their quasi-accelerationist "first Hitler, then us" strategy, to the (right wing) OSS/CIA/fascist Strategy of Tension in Italy, to (right wing) boogaloo boys trying to incite race war, to (right wing) evangelical millenarianism around sparking war in Jerusalem to prompt coming of the antichrist.

It does have its beginnings as a concept in Marxist writings. In a way, Marx himself was the first accelerationist (but he seems to have mostly abandoned that thinking towards the end of his life).

wahnfrieden6• 3 years ago

One of the popular strains of it is literally called Kali Yuga Accelerationism, or kali/acc. Which is Nazi mysticism. You should also look into Nick Land. These reactionary freaks love accelerationism

jacquesm• 3 years ago

There are some pretty scary possible solutions that cover all of climate change, overpopulation, labor and resource scarcity in one fell swoop given AI and a lot of money.

m-i-l• 3 years ago

I hope that the tech billionaires are simply blundering towards the destruction of society, rather than intentionally trying to do so with something like Effective Accelerationism. That would certainly fit with Hanlon's Razor.

I have a simple theory that tech billionaires are at least partly influenced by the sci-fi of their youth. While some of the older tech billionaires were brought up on utopian sci-fi like Star Trek, with wonderful ideas like the post-scarcity economy, some of the younger tech billionaires were brought up on the dystopian sci-fi of the 1980s. Unfortunately what seems to be happening is that they may have mistaken dystopia as a blueprint for what to build rather as a warning of what to avoid.

latexr3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately what seems to be happening is that they may have mistaken dystopia as a blueprint for what to build rather as a warning of what to avoid.

Also known as the Torment Nexus.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

I have felt this too. Young SV valley tech bros seem to be trying to build whatever they saw at the movies. This includes some movies with very bad outcomes unfortunately.

arcticbull4• 3 years ago

Like any other non-coin crypto tech, Worldcoin doesn't do what it set out to do because it doesn't solve the oracle problem. If you trust their orb, it generates a wallet for you - but anyone, human or otherwise - can use that wallet. There's a black market in China for these identities already [1] and of course the response from Worldcoin was there's nothing they can do - because there's nothing they can do.

So this is just any other coin with extra steps, and the extra layer of trusting Sam Altman with your eyeballs to generate secret keys?

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...

meowface• 3 years ago

I understand your point, but why the separation of coin vs. non-coin tech? Meaning that the only real guarantee of cryptocurrency is prevention of double-spend rather than a confirmed unique identity?

arcticbull4• 3 years ago

Blockchains can extend the guarantees of the blockchain only to concepts that can be completely represented on-chain, which basically meant just coins. They don't have to interface with the real world so aren't subject issues at the boundary. At least that's one way of looking at it. As soon as you start trying to represent things that actually exist in the real world authoritatively, it breaks down - because the authoritative representation is actually off chain, i.e reality. In this case your identity is the authoritative representation, not the key you present.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

I often see in software dev this idea of solving a problem by just offloading the problem onto another team/customer.

I guess crypto is fundamentally that. Trust, fraud, identity, insurance, are all very complex things that require massive institutions to manage successfully. But these crypto organizations are always just, shrug "yeah that's not our problem. Whatcha gonna do?"

I guess that is the core principle to begin with. But it's interesting to watch it in action. "Oh that big ball of wax? We don't address it. Not our problem."

dotnet00• 3 years ago

With most crypto projects it's actively worse because they tell their users that "trust, fraud, identity etc don't matter because we have a blockchain!".

The rare few which are pretty upfront in saying that in exchange for their strong privacy guarantees the user is fully responsible for everything, are the only ones with any real utility (eg Monero).

Alex39172• 3 years ago

anyone, human or otherwise - can use that wallet.

But there are only 8 billion people, which is literally an infinite improvement over the status quo.

arcticbull4• 3 years ago

Yes, but it also assumes that the orb is perfect, and never hacked or reverse-engineered to generate completely arbitrary quantities of these keys. You're putting an awful lot of trust in this for a 'trustless' system.

arketyp• 3 years ago

It's funny how, in the end, the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world. Sort of how the ultimate decentralized currency is encompassed in the global market of rising and falling economic powers. The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles. There is only the test of time. Or something along that line.

brnt• 3 years ago

People still don't understand the 'this is not a pipe' painting...

lerpgame• 3 years ago

reputation based

confoundcofound2• 3 years ago

Exactly, tech is hellbent on preserving our humanity while discarding the embodied world that makes us human. It's a schizoid's fantasy.

sorokod• 3 years ago

Almost by definition, everything else is a low resolution replica which is inevitably open to be exploited.

EthanHeilman• 3 years ago

the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world

I buy this.

Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem[0]. I believe this approach of identities withstanding "the test of time" solves the oracle problem but at the cost of a delayed solution. Initially you have lots and lots of bots and Sybil attacks are common. Then after a while, identities/nyms that exist and interact with the world increase in trustworthiness. Trustworthy identities will eventually be stolen or sold to bad actors, but like fake identities today they will be expensive.

My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

For instance Islamic State terrorists were buying counterfeit passports allowing them to enter the EU for 15,000 USD [1].

The major downside of such a system is that isolated people or people with few resources would be at a major disadvantage and we would essentially be replicating much of inequality of the credit score system.

[0]: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality, Daniel Suarez, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS5i1S8FXno

[1]: "One such network, run by an Uzbek with extremist links living in Turkey, is now selling high-quality fake passports for up to $15,000 (£11,132) purporting to be from various countries. In at least 10 cases the Guardian is aware of, people who illegally crossed the Syrian border into Turkey have used his products to depart through Istanbul airport.", https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/revealed-how-f...

pcwelder• 3 years ago

The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles

To expand on this and correct your first statement, physical engagement can't be a proof of personhood either.

There can never be a proof of personhood, or if someone is a human or not, or if someone is conscious, etc.

It's more practically applicable than it sounds. Think conjoined twins (sharing a brain), disabled people, people in coma, long memory loss and all other edge cases.

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

What an interesting thought. Maybe the increasing amount of entities I get to interact with that do less and less to bring that prove goes to show how relatively unimportant being human will be.

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world.

Not even. People have been having double-lives for a lot longer than we've had the Internet. The difference is that in physical space it's a lot harder to do so, because you can only be in one place at one time and you have to move from place to place rather than teleporting. So if you want to catch someone in the act of, say, voting twice, you just need to trace their movements.

That being said, there are also plenty of situations in which we consider having multiple identities online to be a good thing. Facebook's "real name" policy - forcing everyone to tie themselves to a government issued legal name instead of just a consistent one - was and is cancer. The whole industry of V-Tubers literally runs on talent living a double life and a healthy dose of kayfabe. And we don't yell at character actors because Robert Downey Jr. is also Iron Man.

Anonymity is considered a vital bedrock of liberal values. But so is voting, and this is where being able to create additional identities becomes a problem very quickly.

Wikipedia has an interesting problem of "ripened socks" where people will register multiple accounts and keep them in reserve, specifically to defeat accusations of sock puppeting. This can be detected, but it's murky - are you actually a sock puppet, or do you just lurk Wikipedia a lot[0]? You could probably even go further and split your editing history across multiple sock puppets. Statistical analysis might be able to reveal that, say, two accounts tend to edit the same set of articles, but that would also have a high false positive rate and disenfranchise other editors.

The underlying base assumptions of the crypto crowd is a sort of extreme para-identitarianism. Anti-identitarianism in its extreme would be something like Japanese-style imageboards[1], with their obsession over anonymous posting. Identitarianism would be Facebook's real name policy. Paraidentitarianism instead wants identity to be a side effect of resource scarcity. An identity like a signing key is non-scarce, I can just make more keys, so you cannot hold elections by simply counting the signing keys. But the money in your Bitcoin wallet is a paraidentity: it is provable scarcity, and thus can be bent into a sort of identity, at the expense of disenfranchising everyone who has not bought into the system. In fact, crypto hucksters explicitly threaten people who do not buy their coins of being left out of their future utopia.

[0] I am in this situation

[1] 2channel, Futaba, 4chan, etc

PurpleRamen2• 3 years ago

Wait, the biometric information are only used for the creation of the wallet, not the later usage? Then isn't this scam? What is the actual value of using biometric for this?

cguess• 3 years ago

It's crypto, and it's Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, but definition it's a scam.

brian_cloutier13• 3 years ago

Why does that make it a scam? "Scam" implies some kind of fraud or lie, I don't believe worldcoin has ever claimed biometrics were required for later usage.

The value of the biometric is in ensuring a ~ more fair ~ airdrop. With bitcoin the people who discovered it first and who were able to run miners received an outsized reward, and consequently the distribution of bitcoin is extremely unequal. The usage of biometrics doesn't _completely_ solve this problem, there is still a pool of insiders who have an outsized amount of wld, but a very large number of people will be able to walk up to an orb to claim some wld and they will all receive roughly equal amounts. The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.

HWR_14• 3 years ago

I assume, since Peter Thiel is involved, it somehow gets the biometrics to Planitir.

lazzlazzlazz• 3 years ago

You generate the secret keys beforehand in your wallet, and then only link them (in zero knowledge) with the iris hash.[1] , [2]

If we're going to be critical, let's at least understand how it works first.

[1] https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1684939802083282944

[2] https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

brian_cloutier13• 3 years ago

Most criticisms of worldcoin completely misunderstand/misrepresent how it works but this one does not. The GP is correctly pointing out that the iris hash is only necessary for receiving some of the initial airdrop. It is completely true that once a wallet is generated (and you don't even need to visit an orb to create a wallet) anyone who possesses the private key, human or robot, can send transactions using that wallet. Receiving some of the initial airdrop really does require trusting worldcoin that they are telling the truth and not saving images of your iris.

vsareto• 3 years ago

TBH it's hard to blame anyone for considering starting new cryptocurrencies. BTC/ETH have stuck around despite everything and remained at non-trivial prices. The "identity verification" step really just turns it into a club to join and that's still marketable in the world of cryptocurrency.

hayd• 3 years ago

Instead of trusting Uncle Sam... trust Sam Altman.

no_wizard• 3 years ago

What’s the “Oracle Problem”? Google gives me conflicting results

ineptech8• 3 years ago

The problem of moving information about the real world (stock prices, weather report, did the Knicks win last night) into a crypto ledger so that it can be speculated upon (e.g. a smart contract that only pays out if the Knicks win).

brian_cloutier13• 3 years ago

Try to imagine using a computer without any internet access to book an airline ticket. It doesn't really matter how many or which operations your computer can perform, it is not able to book an airline ticket unless there is another computer which can accept that booking and which your computer can talk to. The internet is next to useless for booking ryan air flights until ryan air puts one of their computers onto the internet and gives it authority to issue bookings.

Blockchains are like virtual computers. It is absolutely possible to imagine ryan air deploying a smart contract to ethereum and giving it sufficient authority to issue bookings but until that happens ethereum is next to useless for booking ryan air flights. This is the oracle problem.

Here I've focused on the write-path but "the oracle problem" usually refers to the read-path. Say you have some prediction market where participants can place bets on who the next US president will be. How do you resolve that market? When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will. But for now blockchains have to make do with various hacks which allow them to imperfectly track what is happening in the outside world.

Nursie5• 3 years ago

Moving data about within a blockchain is trustless - you don’t need to trust the network to move money. You can set up smart contracts to move money under certain conditions (usually other transactions)

When you want to interface with the real world, say trigger a smart contract on a stock price move - who do you trust to get that data? You’ve reintroduced a trusted authority.

This is the oracle problem. Now, if like me you don’t give a crap and are happy to trust middlemen in your day to day life because I trust banks over random merchants a million times… big whoop. But if you’re a cryptocurrency fetishist it becomes a big deal.

charlie0• 3 years ago

In a nutshell, the oracle problem is, where do you get data to make automated decisions and do you trust that data.

highwaylights• 3 years ago

I mean technically the system is proof-of-eyeball rather than proof-of-identity, so you also need to trust any opportunistic criminals in your zip code that have access to spoons.

brian_cloutier13• 3 years ago

It looks like the airdrop gives you something like 25 WLD, or $50. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems to be around this order of magnitude. Your hypothetical spoon-wielding lunatic would be risking serious consequences in order to earn $50; that doesn't seem like a particularly strong incentive.

93po18• 3 years ago

Yes but you’re missing the point that it’s a relatively easy and solved problem to ban accounts and have circles of trust for banned accounts. Because these buyers are constrained in how many accounts they can buy it’s relatively effortless to ban bad actors compared to literally limitless fake personas today.

woile• 3 years ago

To me the problem should be modelled similar to what we have now: Some institutions (private or public) giving an ok or not ok on the keys. And platforms choosing which institutions to trust. At some point we may have platform choosing all governments+trustworthy institutions

You could make things like a "smart contract" returns your money (or triggers an investigation) if after 48 hours you report an issue with your account or transaction. Of course this would mean some change on the blockchains themselves

px433• 3 years ago

it doesn't solve the oracle problem

That was never the goal.

There's a black market in China for these identities already

It is built such that eventually, Worldcoin identities can be trivially reclaimed by the iris owner, so the market for these identities will drop to zero once people realize they can just sell their same Worldcoin cred over and over again and some sucker is going to buy it.

Their only goal here is to create an identity registration system where..

1. people don't need money to register

2. people don't need to have special friends to register

This is a sybil resistance mechanism, and no other system today does this. Also, the registration is basically fully anonymous. There is no way for anyone to enumerate everyone who has registered, and there is no way to link a registrant with the wallet activity of a credential holder. Say what you will, but IMO these are some pretty useful mechanics, and there are quite a few applications of this technology that can't be done without something like this.

piva00• 3 years ago

Also, the registration is basically fully anonymous.

You are uploading your iris scan into a black box, how can that be considered anonymous?

gmerc• 3 years ago

And they want to do nothing. That’s a silicon valley thing all along. The negative externalities of these massive scale business models are pushed to society.

The scale and lack of security design is the cause of them. The mass scams on marketplace, the payment fraud, the harassment, the swatting, etc.

If we forced these companies to meet sane standards (especially visible in fintech) and customer service, oh no, they couldn’t do so many stock buybacks anymore, what a tragedy.

adamc• 3 years ago

PT Barnum would be proud.

unicornfork• 3 years ago

On a general plane why do we even care to identify a (non) person?

We should care whether the peer has some "skin in the game". For example a Bitcoin wallet with some Satoshis locked in a multi-signature smart contract would probably insure that. This approach would automatically ensure a free and robust digital identity and secure communication via secret/public key of that wallet.

If some rules need to be imposed - they could be managed through the smart contract plus some type of an oracle - here I second your thought. Though in this approach (with bitcoin wallet as identity) it is easy to fund the proper process in a transparent and balanced way because the funds are there already.

ilyt• 3 years ago

Well, there is no lack of supply of idiots to fall for it.

simonsarris• 3 years ago

I think you should instead just read what Worldcoin wrote. It's quite short, and I think easy to consider false.

https://worldcoin.org/cofounder-letter

There are a few words about economic opportunity but little explanation, so you can discount that part. They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as any distribution today[1]

Their main sell:

scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy
Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID)
You can now download World App... After visiting an Orb ... you will receive a World ID. This lets you prove you are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private.

This seems to be the sole feature but "distinguish" and "privacy" are fundamentally at odds. Always! If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private. They may be private for a little while, but as soon as User12345 is outed to be Taylor Swift, there's no going back. There's no worldcoin re-roll. Twitter accounts are more anonymous than that - at least if your anon twitter account is unveiled, you can make a new one! In that way uniqueness is anti-privacy. It has to be.

[1] For example worldcoin has a plan to confirm that people exist. It does not have a plan to confirm that people are dead. https://japantoday.com/category/crime/man-says-he-kept-paren...

arcticbull4• 3 years ago

They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as distribution today

Especially since UBI distribution aren't built in any meaningful way on this blockchain. They have some vague notion of one day wanting to use it to provide UBI, but they don't have any idea of what that actually looks like, or when, etc.

They are vaguely gesturing towards the concept of UBI.

wahnfrieden6• 3 years ago

It’s the same as any shitcoin roadmap with vague exciting prospects that will be figured out later on but meanwhile promoted as coming soon

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID.

Literally everything about this is a huge nope for me.

echelon• 3 years ago

In the evangelical setting of the 90's, where TV preachers were openly broadcast over the airwaves, they routinely claimed everything was "the mark of the beast".

Credit cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, "new world orders", the United Nations. All of these things were tools of the devil, marking your soul for eternal damnation.

I get the sense they would have had a field day with Worldcoin.

I can hear it now. "The Antichrist is taking control of the global finance system. When you choose to scan your eyes and participate in his world instead of the kingdom of heaven, you surrender your soul to the devil. And that's a place where even Jesus Christ himself cannot save you. Choosing to scan your eyes - that God himself gave you - is swearing allegiance to Lucifer and his armies on this earth. Choosing Worldcoin is making a personal choice of eternal damnation."

asynchronous• 3 years ago

I actually don’t understand _who_ is advocating for this.

Worldcoin seems like the peak of a top-down push to have perfect digital control over every human being.

wmf5• 3 years ago

If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private.

This is not necessarily applicable. There's cryptography from 20 years ago (e.g. the work of Stefan Brands) that can show that someone has a World ID without revealing which ID it is. If no "username" is ever revealed then it can't be linked to anything.

omeid2• 3 years ago

If the idea is to make "World ID" universal, in that everyone is going to have one, what does attesting that someone has one means? Nothing. Virtually nothing. Everyone either has one or can get one, to attest that they do means nothing of value.

93po18• 3 years ago

You’re misunderstanding how worldcoin works just like basically everyone who tries to criticize it. There’s no way to tie World IDs together between platforms. A unique ID is generated per platform from your wallet.

paulryanrogers5• 3 years ago

If they're all derived from a single source then isn't it possible it could be reversed? Or at least a relationship deduced? Given enough per-platform IDs

jesuspiece• 3 years ago

It's honestly the craziest thing I've heard in a while. Talk about solving problems that dont exist

scottmsul• 3 years ago

I'd be curious to see if someone could use generative AI to make fake irises and scam the handout mechanism

93po18• 3 years ago

They’re actively developing to prevent this, though already it would require a compromised orb and orb operator, which would get blocked from the chain and all irises scanned since compromise removed from the chain. The bigger hurdle is the scanning of people who are dead or unconscious or animals trying to pass as human

mouzogu• 3 years ago

"mostly harvested from poor people"

use a crypto token to exploit poor people. a real web3 VC douchebag move there

wasn't that VC who was recently murdered in SF also involved in this project (unrelated murder).

in any case mr altman can kiss my hairy yellow a$$ before getting my retina data

yreg6• 3 years ago

I don't think Worldcoin is the solution, but I'm interested in hearing what the rest of you think the solution to the bots-indistiguishable-to-humans problem could look like? Or should we just accept that the times of interacting over internet with strangers you can believe to be humans is over?

The only idea I see is for some certificates handed out by government to citizens and I absolutely hate it even in a democracy.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

I haven't heard of, and can't think of, a solution to this problem that doesn't introduce much larger problems. Big picture, I don't think the problem of distinguishing humans from bots online is a big enough deal that we should take hits in other areas to solve it.

The least-harm solution, as far as I can see right now, is to just accept that the internet cannot be made trustworthy in this way. The only way to know for sure the nature of who you're dealing with will be to deal with them in person. Much like it has always been.

sebzim45005• 3 years ago

What if the person you are dealing with is on the other side of the world?

I don't think that really works, you need some kind of trust system. I hope it doesn't turn out that worldcoin is the best solution.

fvdessen• 3 years ago

In Europe there's eIDAS. You install an app on your phone that can be used to identify yourself. This is used to sign documents, payments, single sign on to other apps / websites, etc. During onboarding you will need to verify your identity with the help of the government, banks, or other recognised authorities. Afterwards it's just the app. It works very well.

bjelkeman-again• 3 years ago

The thing is that in some cultures people are strongly against ID cards. In the UK for example, for a long time there was a fight against a national identity card. Even though you have to get one (a passport) to travel abroad. Instead they would use electricity bills to prove things like you actually live somewhere. Or the driver license was a pice of paper, with no photo. With fraud as a result.

I think it is based on that in some countries there is less trust in the government than in other countries.

Where I live, Sweden, it is very hard to live without an ID card/passport and starting to get hard without a digital ID.

However, the privacy laws and prevention against abuse is fairly good. Not perfect I am sure but pretty good, compared with the US or even the UK (both places I have lived).

confoundcofound2• 3 years ago

I have bad news: it may be time to go back to the real world

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

Why did we believe that we could build an algorithm that provided trust? We can provide "trust", which is when we narrow the definition to verifying whether mathematical objects have been tampered with, or whether they can be observed without secret keys, but we could always make safes.

Trusting a safe isn't like trusting a person.

yreg6• 3 years ago

I don't find this helpful.

Captchas have solved a real problem. They did work.

scohesc• 3 years ago

I think your idea of certificates handed out by government is horrifying, but I agree it seems to be the only way to guarantee that you are who you say you are - even though it comes with several potential avenues for abuse.

I think we'll see two "tiers" of internet.

One tier will be for day to day usage for "normal" users - banking, social media, news, etc. A tier that you digital ID will be used to verify you are who you are, and others can be assured that they're talking to the person they say they are - though there are flaws in that system if someone can get a hold of another persons' certificate.

The other tier would be the unverified internet - things like boilerplate/startup communities, activities you don't want your digital ID tied to, something to still allow people to remain semi-anonymous on the internet if choosing to.

Not sure if this will be what actually happens or if governments just slowly decide to force people to use only the verified internet while trying to access the "outernet" (or whatever buzzword they'd use) would be met with scrutiny and potentially criminal charges.

yreg6• 3 years ago

Well hopefully the system could be semi-anonymous. So reddit doesn't get your identity, they are just able to prevent you from making another account (or perhaps limit it to a few accounts per real person). If they are nice, they don't even need to track which accounts belong to the same person.

Of course there is a lot of space for abuse. And it would unfairly lock many/most people out, because services can only accept certificates from the governments they trusts.

pavlov• 3 years ago

There isn't a single solution to be had because there isn't a single way you interact with strangers online.

Verifying identity is necessarily completely different if you're sending someone an item in exchange for money, or looking to date them for a while, or going into long-term business with them, or maybe just having a discussion where you want to validate that they work where they claim.

We don't need blanket verification of people's identities online. If a bot is posting on a service and is indistinguishable from an interesting human, why shouldn't it stay? "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" used to be the Web 1.0 motto.

ineptech8• 3 years ago

The only idea I see is for some certificates handed out by government to citizens and I absolutely hate it even in a democracy.

I think this is the answer. Governments already have the infrastructure to verify identities in person, and no other organization is going to build it.

NoGravitas• 3 years ago

Or should we just accept that the times of interacting over internet with strangers you can believe to be humans is over?

IMO, you can end that sentence after "internet".

yreg6• 3 years ago

Why, I will be able to call my friends.

93po18• 3 years ago

A certificate from the government that gets revoked when you commit a crime. Or are accused of a crime. That can track every single thing you so online. All of your speech online, which is most of everyone’s speech, is permanently stored and analyzed.

yreg6• 3 years ago

The government doesn't need to know which services you use and which accounts are yours. The service doesn't need to know who you are, only that you are a unique human.

But yes, as I said, I hate the idea. Was asking for other solutions.

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

The post office should have a centralized public key registry for people with a US mailing address.

unboxingelf2• 3 years ago

Worldcoin is simply another pre-mined, VC backed shitcoin - albeit worst because they’re building a biometrics database.

- VCs dump money in (SBF, a16z, etc)

- 25% of the coins are kept for the founders + investors

How many times do people have to get burned on these scams?

Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.

jcpham2• 3 years ago

This comment is accurate and should be at the top

lern_too_spel2• 3 years ago

Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.

He got around US regulations by not making it available in the US. No street cred required.

jondwillis• 3 years ago

There are iris scanning stations across the US and there is no way to geographically limit who and what holds WLD. What does not available mean here? Not available on centralized US-based exchanges?

foobiekr• 3 years ago

If they didn't seem so stupid, you'd think the biometrics collection thing was the point, but I actually think they're just so dumb it's not even that sophisticated a scam.

jprete2• 3 years ago

It’s possible the biometrics are to give the impression that it’s more strongly tied to you individually, even when they state things that make that impossible.

I.e. the fine print says “the key is the only proof of ownership” but the buzz says “digital wallet secured by spy movie tech”.

tjrgergw• 3 years ago

The point is obviously not the biometrics.

The point is A) buy low (at zero) and B) sell high.

Everything else is just a marketing ploy to get to B.

araes• 3 years ago

The tinfoil hat part of me says its like the "identify the stoplights" challenges.

We'll introduce this idea that sounds really tech, and hype. Maybe imply its so difficult that computers could never compete with humans.

We'll say its about improving security, and most humans will get a vague comforting feeling from the idea that there's some security feature, even if they find it kind of annoying to interact with.

Five years later, we say "surprise, it was really about training an eyeball recognition database that we can sell. Just like the image recognition datasets."

I do not even kind of believe these people are dumb.

93po18• 3 years ago

WC isn’t doing any of the traditional shitcoin behavior. They ban discussion about price speculation. There’s no pre-sales. There’s no sales at all until the coin actually launches. One of the major premises of worldcoin is UBI - literally giving money away. I genuinely believe Sam Altman started WC with others for altruistic reasons

rideontime2• 3 years ago

Not giving money away, giving "worldcoin" away, whatever the hell that is.

unboxingelf2• 3 years ago

It’s a privately minted coin where the founders control the issuance and hold a large majority. It runs on a proof of stake network. The private company has complete control over the coin.

This is absolutely a traditional shitcoin.

curiousllama• 3 years ago

Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.

Quite the opposite. Congress usually doesn’t give a shit until something is actually relevant to politics. They don’t care about weird VC grifts

jrflowers• 3 years ago

Might as well call him Sam Altcoin

idlewords2• 3 years ago

Nothing wrong with incentivizing AI to steal people's eyes.

uLogMicheal• 3 years ago

Literal eyeball bounties.

ineptech8• 3 years ago

I don't get how anyone can call something with an eternally-fixed quantity a currency. What's the plan for when it starts appreciating and people stop spending it and start hoarding it?

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

Sell.

sparkie• 3 years ago

Prices drop.

ineptech8• 3 years ago

Why? If any currency is appreciating, people are incentivized to hold it, which has the effect of decreasing supply, and decreasing supply makes the price of something go up, not down.

rollupid• 3 years ago

There are better ways to achieve the same goals as Worldcoin.

https://rollup.id/blog/rollup-id-the-open-source-privacy-fir...

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

A critical part of Worldcoin is its association with AI hype:

https://news.google.com/search?q=Worldcoin%20ai&hl=en-US&gl=...

Investors are recognizing the opportunities presented by AI-based projects that leverage blockchain technology.

...Of course, this is total nonsense. But perception is everything for crypto IPOs.

wmf5• 3 years ago

It's worse than that: Sam Altman is selling a solution to a problem he created.

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

He didn't really create the problem, and Worldcoin is not a solution.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

But when it comes to sensitive information, promises aren’t enough. And the very people who insist that you trust them are the ones who should command the most suspicion.

It's the age-old rule of thumb: never trust anyone who says "trust me".

outside1234• 3 years ago

Scam Altman strikes again

hdivider• 3 years ago

Imagine sama had put all this energy, capital, and relationship capital into fusion power, instead of WorldCoin. Beyond Helion.

It would be easier to accept him as someone who is genuinely altruistic. Instead, he turns out to be just another self-serving 'tech' bro.

I write 'tech' because clearly this guy does not actually care about pushing technology forwards for human good -- which is the cause, in my view, of all real technologists. It's about himself, just as it is with the great Technoking.

dmead• 3 years ago

sam altman is a snake. has an opportunity to testify in front of congress and capitalizes on the event by trying to pull the ladder up behind him. gross sam.

latchkey9• 3 years ago

This is the Eye of Sauron.

I'm very much into the crypto world and I'm so tired of all of these dumb scams. Even worse that it is backed by yet another scammer named 'Sam'.

I really wish we could focus on things that actually provided value to people. What a waste of time/money/effort. I hope this one dies a quick death. So far, it looks like it will, which is great.

zer8k• 3 years ago

Honest question, is there any cryptocurrency that provides actual value to people? The blockchain can be trivially deanonymized from my understanding. It's difficult to get coins without at any point revealing your identity. So, if you're not in a circle of people who will physically trade coin for cash (or vis-versa) there seems to be no privacy argument.

I just fail to see crypto as anything but a scam - period. It's like physical gold and silver but worse at everything they do. How can one even derive value from a coin like bitcoin where the swings are often worse than the bolivar.

latchkey9• 3 years ago

I made this comment the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36885902

If you want to go back a bit further in time, I'd like to point out someone else's comment that I thought was pretty spot on as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

Hopefully that opens some discussion/thought points that we can focus on.

Update: thinking a bit further on your points. My personal concern isn't privacy, my concern is more with decentralization. I don't agree with other people telling me what I can and cannot do with my own funds. It is relatively simple things... If I travel to another country, being limited to carrying $10k cash on a plane, is absurd (why would I need to carry cash anyway?). If I'm in another country, getting access to my funds is often extremely difficult. These are the things that I'd like to see people work on.

philwelch5• 3 years ago

I’ve been told you can use Monero to buy drugs.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

is there any cryptocurrency that provides actual value to people?

It allows people to bypass laws and regulations around currency exchange. This can be a good thing -- bypassing repressive regimes, making it easier to send funds over national borders, etc. It can also be a bad thing -- evading consumer protections, reducing the ability of nations to manage their economies, etc.

tourmalinetaco2• 3 years ago

Monero has not be deanonymized from my understanding. Most coins are shitcoins, yes, including Bitcoin, but Monero is at least decent (assuming you actually own your crypto via a hardware wallet).

austhrow743• 3 years ago

When I was using darknet markets there were people you could mail cash to and then they would send you crypto.

My understanding is Monero is private. So you could also just buy it from a regular exchange. Maybe it has replaced the whole mail people cash thing. Never looked in to it or used it though.

93po18• 3 years ago

This is a really tired take. Please provide some substance as to why you think this is a bad project instead of just shitting in it without justification

latchkey9• 3 years ago

Worldcoin was just released, it can't be tired already! The only thing tiring here are the repeat grifting VC scams.

OnlineGladiator2• 3 years ago

Assuming new cryptocurrencies aren't scams is a really tired take. Please provide some substance as to why you think this is a good project instead of just defending it without justification.

tamimio5• 3 years ago

What a waste of time/money/effort.

They won’t, in one side you have those “state sponsored” scams that will milk people’s money and trust, and on the other side you have a happy government because those at very least will keep people from trusting anything than the traditional centralized banks.

I am in the bitcoin world since mid 2010, it was that concept that any freedom and open source enthusiast will love, and it kept going that way until around 2016, gradually getting worse till 2020, then going downhill from there with these scams and Ponzi schemes, dozens of fraudulent coins and business models built around the fact how to scam people and cash out, or used for other means like this meme worldcoin one. Still, I like that you can have a truly decentralized way of funding other than traditional banks, and with some coins providing anonymity is a plus too respecting the user’s privacy.

bratgpttamer2• 3 years ago

When this first launched, I thought it was some kind of performance art, or a clever attempt to establish a precedent against building such things.

Then, I realized he was serious.

93po18• 3 years ago

Any actual criticisms?

bratgpttamer2• 3 years ago

[criticize(p) for p in worldcoin.properties]

rngname22• 3 years ago

Pre-mines are all just neofeudalism.

throwaway104782• 3 years ago

All cryptocurrency is terrible. Some are just more terrible than others.

alexpotato• 3 years ago

I think it's interesting to describe the process to establish your identity in the United States if you lost ALL of your identification documents (e.g. in a house fire).

It essentially boils down to:

- Get a bunch of people you know who can verify that you are indeed who you claim to be

- Have them sign legally binding documents that attest that, yes, you are you

- Start building your paper documents all over again

We never really talk about any of this given that it's pretty rare for this to happen to someone but I think it's interesting to point out that it eventually boils down to your IRL social network.

icecream_so_gud• 3 years ago

I wish a similar system also existed for account recovery instead of being stonewalled by customer service I might be able to recover some years old accounts

notShabu• 3 years ago

No state can manage identities without the consent of the individual because individuals have to actively protect and manage their identities and not sell them.

E.g. we protect our social security numbers against identity theft because the economic benefits of having one outweigh selling it. But when there isn't a benefit, then the identity can just be sold.

Solving the identity problem and solving the "good governance" problem are likely the same problem.

raffraffraff• 3 years ago

I don't know what this is and I'm not even going to read the take-down article. If you slap "coin" onto the name of anything, I'll run a mile from it. I just dropped in to say that. bb.

93po18• 3 years ago

This is valid criticism and it’s unfortunate that they chose this name for sure. It results in knee jerk reactions from people that don’t understand it and make assumptions

mint2• 3 years ago

“Worldcoin” sounds ridiculously cringy and pompous like it came from an 80s young adult novel for boys.

It’s kind like how the terrible grammar/spelling in email scams has the side effect of pre-selecting desperate or out of it enough people that ignore red flags.

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

Any decentralized system that uses biometrics for authentication rather than just identification is doomed to fail spectacularly.

Biometrics are like a username NOT like a password.

When a piece of wolrdcoin is inevitably compromised, people have no means of rolling a new iris. The whole thing will come crashing down.

There are so many stupid decisions this team is making. Like, users can opt into the orbs retaining their iris scan for network quality assurance purposes. Would any sane person ever opt into an ATM storing their PIN number for quality assurance? It is an implicit bounty for hacking the orb. And the fact that they seem to need further quality assurance points to the fact that they aren't confident people will have continuous access to their accounts. Best case, I'd imagine anyone who has a catastrophic eye injury would also permanently lose access to their accounts - but I suspect the reality is much worse.

__alexs2• 3 years ago

As much as I think Worldcoin is dumb they do get this part right in that they only use the iris scan as a unique identifier to prevent multiple sign ups from the same physical bag of meat^H^H^H^H^H person.

tamimio5• 3 years ago

unique identifier to prevent multiple sign up

Yet there’s already a black market where you can buy multiple accounts with real iris.

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

Huh, I don't understand the intended security benefit of the iris scans at all then.

If the system has value inside of it, inevitably people will figure out how to make synthetic irises that fool the orb, nullifying the sybil attack prevention benefit. Surely someone could get a handful of real iris scans (using the same open source hardware) and generate a huge number of plausible synthetic iris datas.

Is the idea that in the current moment of the tech arms race, if someone steals an iris scan, the capability to synthesize an artificial iris that encodes that scan has not yet been developed?

Have they published a 'solution' to what happens if you are holding worldcoin in an iris-associated account and then:

- your scan data is stolen, ex. fake orb scans you and publishes your iris data on the internet for anyone to use

- someone throws acid in your face, your irises don't scan the same anymore. how does this affect the user's ability to access their wallet?

(is there additional private key management needed to use worldcoin securely? is the iris scanning thing really nothing more than a temporary sybil countermeasure..?)

theboywho• 3 years ago

I don't get all the comments, from the worldcoin website:

Your biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb and then permanently deleted. The only data that remains is your IrisCode. This IrisCode is a set of numbers generated by the Orb and is not linked to your wallet or any of your personal information. As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.
Since you are not required to provide personal information like your name, email address, physical address or phone number, this means that you can easily sign up without us ever knowing anything about you.

If Worldcoin is building a biometric database, that must be the most useless database in the world.

wahnfrieden6• 3 years ago

is there evidence this is accurate? it's marketing copy

there's tremendous leeway in "eventual deletion" and it looks like the full device won't be open

93po18• 3 years ago

They are making the orb hardware and software open source last I heard.

wmf5• 3 years ago

You can't beat disgust with better tech.

tamimio5• 3 years ago

dude, trust us!!

Yeah, no.

btouellette• 3 years ago

If I understand correctly this is what they want to do eventually (delete the info used to create the iris hash) but isn't actually what they are doing. The impression is that once they have their algorithm "perfect" and never need to retest on source data they'll go back and delete all the data they have stored but who really trusts that will happen?

danpalmer• 3 years ago

Panopticoin

RyanAdamas• 3 years ago

We just need to ban crypto in the USA through cutting off their access to dollar transfers and pulling exchange charters. The SEC should have never made it an asset. People who have crypto can still get their money out from overseas institutions and platforms, if not simply use it for what it was originally designed to be - peer to peer; not this "code for dough" paradigm it has become. Crypto had its time and we didn't replace the banks with it, so its true potential is gone now that the financial system has control of it.

In addition, the USA needs to create a single Civilian Social Platform just like we did the highway system. We need to validate people based upon their citizenship, and label people based upon their relative status to actual stakeholders in the nation.

stevekemp• 3 years ago

The only thing I know about worldcoin is that I've received about ten spam emails mentioning it in their subject over the past week.

That alone is enough to make me lose any interest in hearing more.

sergiotapia• 3 years ago

VC shitcoin. Bitcoin is the only real, legitimate cryptocurrency because it's not owned by anyone. People getting into worldcoin are just people trying to get their free $ like a free Temu counpon code.

tamimio5• 3 years ago

Bitcoin is the only real,

I will add Monero to that list

tamimio5• 3 years ago

Not sure which one is worse, the ones who gave their biometrics for $20, or the ones that pays to give their DNA..

seydor• 3 years ago

I wonder if the statistics of the iris are connected to genetics?

sebzim45005• 3 years ago

Probably but that correlation will disappear once you hash it, which they claim they are doing.

arisAlexis• 3 years ago

Author doesn't get that there is no "eyeball database", only a database of hashes.

JohnFen18• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to call the database of hashes an "eyeball database".

victor22• 3 years ago

I'm grateful for worldcoin as it shows the True face of the dystopian ruthless capitalism of Silicon Valley, AÍ companies and all this bullshit that focuses on profit while completely forgets and did regada human wellbeing.

account-5• 3 years ago

Everytime I hear of worldcoin I immediately think of onecoin. I wonder if onecoin wouldn't be the name of worldcoin if it weren't for the controversy. Onecoin is a good name though.

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

So maybe I shouldn't have peeped into that "Free Porn Kinetoscope Parlor" that appeared on the street corner down town recently?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope#/media/File:Kineto...

Cypher• 3 years ago

I get a sense it's like a digital ID that enslaves everyone

mplewis2• 3 years ago

OK, so I gaze into the orb, it generates me a private key, and assigns me a wallet. Now what happens when I leak that private key? Is it all over for me and my money? I obviously can't get another one – you get one World ID per human.

derangedHorse• 3 years ago

If I recall correctly, the whitepaper talks about using the iris code (generated from your iris image) to associate your private key to your world id. I think one of the purported selling points is that you can recover your identity using an orb and your iris.

seandoe• 3 years ago

I thought keybase was really on to something. It's ashame they sold out. I'm surprised nothing has picked up where it left off in relation to identity declaration/proof.

paganel• 3 years ago

Altman has to be a 3-letter front-man at this point, can’t be any other way.

boredumb• 3 years ago

I'm glad that while hollywood seems to be completely out of entertaining ideas, real life is producing scenarios where millionaires are having their eyes removed by international criminal organizations to cash in on a one world centrally governed currency. Oh boy.

blackle• 3 years ago

What if you don't have eyes?

I've been scrolling this thread for ten minutes and also read through the worldcoin website. Nobody seems to have asked this. If they want this to be a true proof of personhood it needs to work for every person.

pangolinja• 3 years ago

careful guys, Creepy creeper Sam is definitely reading this comment thread over breakfast, while suckling on a teenage adrenal gland.

jengland• 3 years ago

In my opinion Vitalik's post[0] about it was much more thoughtful and interesting.

[0] https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

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