Worldcoin gives off really similar vibes. The footer of their website reads:
> Worldcoin tokens are not intended to be available to people or companies who are residents of, or are located, incorporated or have a registered agent in, the United States or other restricted territories.
That doesn't sound very good! And then there's this critical review of Worldcoin's operations in Indonesia https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
I really don't get good vibes from this whole thing...
Trust your instincts here. This thing is hardly a democratic technology -- it seems like it's by the Silicon Valley Elite, of the Silicon Valley Elite, for the Silicon Valley Elite.
But also Emil Cioran: "What makes bad [technologists] worse is that they [are steeped only in tech-centric thought] (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched [and gain a sensible sense of ethics] only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant."
An absolutely beautiful truth there.
>Since you did not want to quote the whole thing, I will do it for you: >The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
>And I will point out the obvious thing: yes, she's jewish. Most of the things against the so-called "white race" come from jewish people. Don't trust me, just verify this: every time you see something about "white people blah blah", check the author. 9 out of 10 times it's a jewish person and/or has jewish background. I won't elaborate on the causes, you're free to research yourself.
>Then on one side there are no races because we all are the human race. On the other side, there may be races, but we're all equal - well, except if we talk about the "white race", then we can say all kinds of truly trashy things because it's about whites and therefore it's all good.
>I wish this would stop already.
Hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of white nationalists and neo-Nazis react this way to such things. I'm not going to respond to it myself (it's total bullshit in many different ways), but just know that there are a lot of people out there who think this way. (And, of course, you don't want to know what this poster is writing on places like 4chan compared to the PR-friendly thing they wrote here.)
So Sam Altman first creates the situation that we can no longer distinguish humans from bots, then asks everyone to trust him with even more biometric data to get around the problem he created.
Either way he wins at everyone else’s expense. I urge you to not take this at face value, Sam has already shown with Worldcoin that he is not trustworthy.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
I was tricked by a machine yesterday. I had to call up the bank because their online banking website had booted me out.
After only a couple of rings, and no hold music, I was straight through to a person! This is unprecedented. The call was something like:
"Hi, you're through to foobank. How can I help you today?"
"Hi, your online banking has locked me out and said I need to call this number to get my account re-enabled."
"No problem. What message do you get when you try to login?"
"Oh, I haven't actually tried to login again, I can try if you want. It just kicked me out and said my account was locked and I need to call to get it re-enabled".
"No problem. If you click the 'reset my password' button under the login form, you'll be able to reset your password."
"I'm not sure that's going to work, but I'll give it a try. It definitely said my account was locked and I need to call to get it re-enabled."
"No problem. If you click the 'reset my password' button under the login form, you'll be able to reset your password."
"...are you a machine?"
"I'm Ava (edit: maybe Ada[0]?), a virtual assistant. Would you like me to put you through to a member of staff?"
"Yes please".
And only then did I get to spend 10 minutes listening to hold music and ads, before a member of staff actually unlocked my account.
I felt stupid and deceived.
I'm not bothered by the fact that my servants aren't people, it cheers me up. It's not a good job for a person, it is a very bad job with very bad pay.
Can't decide if this is a nice touch or just really creepy. Might be both.
I just watched Ex Machina last night.
Any time human communication is mediated by technology there’s the chance that the communication is not really what it seems to be. Are we watching live events on TV or a recording of live events or a reenactment of actual events or complete fiction?
In some sense, on the internet everything is already a bot, it’s just that right now the majority of the bots are directed by humans in real time. I fully expect the majority of bots will be semi or fully autonomous in the coming years. (Maybe we’ll stop staring at screens all day.)
For instance, many of us are already offloading memories onto our phones, Johnny Mnemonic-style, wirelessly. Just because it doesn't look the way it does in science-fiction doesn't mean it isn't happening.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/05/1022041...
But theoretically, you could implement the protocol in a privacy-preserving manner where the only thing that needs to be saved, is the hash of the biometric data, not the biometric data itself.
So lets say that your face + fingerprint + iris each outputs a value. Concat those and hash them, and you have a unique value that can be reproduced elsewhere, without having to store anything else but the actual hash of the input.
Again, I'm not sure if this is what they are doing, but if that's how it works, they wouldn't actually need to gather any biometric data, after creating the hash it can be thrown away.
If someone MITMs your password, you can rotate it. A bit harder to do that with your iris.
Of course, true for fingerprint scanning too which has been around for a while, but iris kind of takes that to a new minority report level for many.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam...
Online discussion is already largely broken, and will get much more broken in the coming years without something similar to Worldcoin.
In broad strokes, this is how World ID works.
- User gets their World ID in a compatible wallet (e.g. the World App).
- User receives credentials in their World ID. The flagship credential is biometric verification, currently available by using the Orb. The user can also verify their phone number to obtain the respective credential.
- Project integrates with World ID.
- User connects their World ID to authenticate, and optionally prove they are a unique human doing something only once. The user's wallet will generate a Zero-Knowledge Proof to accomplish this.
- Project verifies the Zero-knowledge Proof, either by using the API or by verifying on-chain.
Interestingly: Tamper detection system not disclosed For obvious reasons, these files do not including the PCBs and sensors related to the Orb's tamper detection system.
More likely, they want to become the central identity provider for the whole planet and collect as much biometric data as possible.
UBI plans may also start out as UBI, but will degrade soon: "Hey, we know that it is supposed to be unconditional, but we are running into financial difficulties. Would you mind plucking some cotton to shore up your income?"
WorldCoin - A for-profit, limited liability US-based company (soon only available in the US)
Seems on brand :)
In biology, the more successful a species is, the more parasites, predators, and pathogens adapt to attack it. This means that over time a species has to change in order to survive, or die off by massive and continued attrition.
Technology, I think, evolves in the same way. It isn't static, it responds to markets, new techniques, and new threats. It can be exploited both technically and socially. And of course, the bigger the target in terms of both users and codebase, the more valuable and vulnerable it becomes.
This is a rough way of saying: I don't believe a world scale system like this could ever marshal enough continuous investment to respond to the enormousness of the capital that will be spent breaking it by criminals, spies, and probably advertisers.
The question of establishing trust in the world has always been hard, even before computers. It is harder now, and the odds are against us.
It claims to both identify humans and be zero knowledge.
What’s to stop me registering a bunch of times then letting my bot use my identities?
The answer is implied to be my iris scan. But then it isn’t zero knowledge for some entity is it? Unless it is relying on the Orb never being hacked?
Any good third party write ups on it? The WorldCoin page is a bit long and doesn’t quickly explain how it works at a basic level.
This iris hash should then be stored in some decentralised database like a blockchain or something.
With that particular implementation, if you spam on one account on one platform, people can block you across all accounts and all platforms. And I'm sure something like community maintained lists we have for adblockers will emerge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8&ab_channel=ETHGl...
This whole thing gives me the heeby jebies...
Then it's also great to see that they seem to be pretty open about stuff, [including their hardware](https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-insi... ).
That said.. it's hard to see terms like "coin", "wallet", "Web3", "NFT", etc., without a bit of concern -- even if, admittedly, such terms might be appropriate and justifiable in this sort of application.
Is there a page that shows their overall economic model, perhaps with flow-charts and such? This is, where are the cash/token/hardware/etc. in-flows and out-flows?
And is there an early-adopter incentive? And if so, is it significant, or is the system designed to be fair to folks whenever they might join?
Asking in part because the classic pyramid-scam thing, where early-adopters end up collecting huge rewards at the expense of late-adopters, seems like a major hallmark of dubious projects. Projects without such asymmetries would seem more credible, both in terms of not being yet another pyramid-scam and long-term viability.
Yet their actual ethics are pretty abysmal. Worldcoin is a known scam. Notably, it’s also by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
In what way is it a scam? For example, is it a pyramid-scheme, pump-and-dump, pretext to trick people into downloading malware, etc.?
[That story (2022-04-06)](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... ) did offer one major concern:
> Others took issue with the company’s purported focus on fairness given that 20% of the coins had already been allocated: 10% to Worldcoin’s full-time employees, and another 10% to investors, like Andreessen Horowitz.
20% of coins being in the hands of a few does sound potentially pretty corrupting -- at least, if it's a system like Bitcoin, where there's a cap on the total such that, if mass-adopted, that small group of people would end up controlling 20% of the total wealth. But does it work like that?
Beyond that, it sounds like the article's suggesting that it's a scam to get iris-scans:
> Meanwhile, those who fear that the whole thing may have been a scam want to know what they’ve lost. “50 KS is not enough to give an eyeball away,” says Okach, the university student in Nairobi that spent a weekend recruiting others to Worldcoin. “That’s manipulation, taking advantage of students without clear clarification about what it is they are doing or what they want.”
But the idea of a scam to get folks' iris-scans, especially iris-scans of people in less-developed areas, sounds a bit strange.
I mean, if someone has a database of folks' pictures, DNA, or fingerprints, then that database might help track folks without their knowledge or consent -- plus DNA might also reveal things about a person that they'd rather have kept private.
But what might scammers do with iris-scans that might potentially justify the trouble of collecting them like that?
Why look for a market when you can make one?
Nice move!
This is just another crypto scam coin.
No, it'll get rid of bots worth less than the account fee to run, except for people who can do payment fraud.
It won't get rid of fake identities because you have to do identity verification for that; otherwise you can impersonate a corporation.
These social media will probably die when people realize that they are wasting their time answering bots, but these bots will take over soon or later.
https://twitter.com/marcfawzi/status/1636115903959158785
Obviously, it's a no-brainer idea at a high level. The devil is in the details.
I am absolutely relieved to see this. This is exactly what I've been saying we all need endlessly online for years now. And especially because the internet is about to be overrun with AI generated garbage.
Yes - we need to be cynical with any implementation of this. We need to find flaws and criticize every aspect of it. But we absolutely 100% need this technology if we want online discourse to continue. Reddit is already a hellhole of bots and generated content, and has been getting progressively worse for years.
In fairness, identity is hard, and the idea put forward is ambitious, but the scheme is unlikely to achieve what it purports to. Identity is a social, not biological construct.
In the prison system, for instance, prisoners are often present under assumed names. In some circumstances it is hard for courts to prove who someone is, even if it is nailed on what they did. Some markers (tattoos, scars, etc) help but approaches to identity often miss the innately situational nature of the thing.
> (2) preventing the dissemination of AI-generated content
This is not preventing it, since humans can also disemminate such content. Real humans are behind the "bot networks" that some authoritarian countries use on facebook.
But sure, let's first verify that you are a genuine human. Insert coin to play again, please.
New mechanical turk-alike in 3, 2, 1. Really though. This would barely dent the budgets of disinformation campaigns.
