> Meanwhile, a black market emerged on Chinese social media and ecommerce sites. Sellers were offering KYC verifications for the World App, which offers wallet and ID services. The credentials often come from developing countries like Cambodia and Kenya, according to social media posts. [1]
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...
"Worldcoin has a unique opportunity to establish and scale a new privacy-preserving primitive for the Internet...", etc.
I'm not going to quote the rest because everyone here is tired of corporate-speak.
Translation from corporate-speak:
"We're high as a kite on the vision of managing identification credentials for everyone everywhere."
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PS. Let me add: I believe Sam and his team genuinely have good intentions. But good intentions do not guarantee a good outcome.
Can't someone just get their hands on one of these orbs and start uploading fake unique ids to their network? Surely it can't be impossible to generate a fake iris scan.
The only way to make sure nobody is abusing this would be to have trusted employees verify you're a real person, in which case why don't just start a non-profit in Switzerland or wherever that just runs a database of scans, what do you need this coin for?
> One reason is that they can’t credible commit to the fact that they won’t also sell it to someone else (can’t prove that you deleted ur local key) or nullify the world ID by re-scanning.
What a nightmare this Sam Altman dude is
They eschew the need for intermediaries, like the numerous banks that recently imploded and locked depositors' funds away for who knows how long.
They eschew credit risk. Creditors cannot take your funds on an L1, even if they maliciously try.
This is a complete grifting double hedging scam.
How bravely they have transitioned into collecting our eyeball scans and courageously hoarding billions of dollars while the planet withers away. Technology has changed the world.
We should read how they plan to increase the supply only for births and retire coins for deaths. And if you don't have a clear cornea, no goodies for you.
Meanwhile, from the article:
> Blania told CoinDesk that Worldcoin has partnered with a “very big international manufacturer” with a plant in Germany, which will pump out about 50,000 Orbs per year. Though Blania declined to name the company or say where the company was from, when CoinDesk asked if the manufacturer was Chinese, Blania responded: “Definitely not, for many reasons, and one of them is actually security. The Orb itself has private keys and signs every message it sends so we know it’s actually a real Orb. And that means we need to lock this whole supply chain totally up so we know it’s not compromised,” Blania said.
And how do you know that I didn't claim this is a real Orb, and just steal your retina print?
It's good to have screenwriters on staff to flesh out consequences of your decisions. Plus maybe a Wall Street trader or two to figure out all the ways to game the system.
In the end, you will have created nothing of value. A single Renoir painting is worth more than all this nonsense.
I wonder how the world worked in the 1990s without such luminaries. The answer is: better!
Instead, here are a few links for the curious, which explain how the techniques Worldcoin employs may be one of the only viable methods to generate a totally privacy-preserving form of internet native identification and Sybil resistance.
The result is that no images of irises ever need to be saved, unlike CLEAR or other surveillance state friendly techniques that create dangerous repositories of private information.
1. Humanness in the Age of AI: https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...
This piece explains other techniques to identify personhood and why they've fallen short.
2. Proof of Personhood and Why It's Needed: https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/proof-of-personhood-wha...
And outline of the general motivation.
3. Privacy at Worldcoin: https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive
Some of the extreme lengths they've gone to make it impossible to reconstruct who is behind the unique identifier.
"Worldcoin is not a dystopian nightmare."
Only in SV would someone pay $115M for new tech only to have to defend it with statements like this.
I thought Stefan Brands solved this over 20 years ago without scanning people's eyes.
is that a good place to start?
