What I find even more dystopian is that there's already a black market for those digital eyeball credentials:
> 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]
Just a reminder that biometric data (like iris or fingerprint scans) are "usernames", not passwords. If a site's password database is leaked, you can change your password. If a site's iris scan database is leaked, you're out of luck.
I think eventually we’ll have to move to a model where the government issues you private keys via a notary-like biometric verification process. Even if someone steals your biometrics, they can’t fake them to an in-person notary. Rotate your keys by visiting another notary.
What I don't understand about this at all, and it's alluded to in the article mentioning black market orbs, how can some decentralized system with Iris scans prevent fraud?
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.
There are only 8 billion people on earth, so even if every single account were fake that's still a huge improvement over the status quo where someone can spin up 8 billion fake accounts in an hour.
Yea that’s fair but look what happened to BTC when BRC-20 was implemented. Similar problem on ETH L1 chain, the txn fee is very high. Imagine if Visa had those fees, no business in their right mind would use them
I can imagine this being true, but I think supervillain schemes like this don't actually work in real life. Both will just up becoming irrelevant, and the public internet will get a little shittier
Remember when these guys were the young upstarts, disrupting big business and scoring points for the little guy?
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.
This is one of the most blatant MLM token projects. Inviting new marks and getting benefits from the number of people you've brought into the scam, conferences, targeting of the vulnerable populations, all the hallmarks of a typical pyramid scheme.
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?
I have to imagine that movie night at Stanford CS consists of Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and Robocop, followed by a hackathon where they try to build imitations of what they saw.
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.
I guess if you don't have any real ideas, you scan other people's retinas ("World"-Coin), appropriate other people's creations ("Open"-AI), insert yourself in the process and sell everything back to them.
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!
This kind of headline would normally be torn apart by HN for being somewhat uncharitable for its word choice. But in this case, I'm sure the crypto angle will inspire a knee-jerk negative reaction.
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.
Then you will likely end up with your eyes being scanned by a state and profit-seeking corporations — along with your private data. We need methods to identify who is a real person in the internet of the future, and it should be privacy-preserving and independent of the state.
My dude, whether Sam Altman does it or not has zero bearing on that. If you care about privacy and avoiding such a dystopian outcome, vote for common-sense regulations.
This is the fallacy of counting the set of things that don't happen (I don't know if there's a technical term for it). The rivers aren't on fire anymore, the air is clean, the skies are safe - things are just about as good as they've ever been (despite a few outliers). That's all thanks to voting and common-sense regulations.
So to answer your question directly, "pretty much constantly but it's easy to miss since by definition they're successfully being prevented."
In a democracy we're not subjugated to the state, the state is subjugated to us. Sure, they can trick people into licking their boots but the power is with the people. You can't rule over the dead and you can't rule without a head.
If someone's going to force me to do this to use whatever computer service, maybe it's time to throw the computer away, and go live in the woods. Like GP, I'm not willingly going to give that data up to any company or state actor.
The headline doesn't seem uncharitable to me - it's literally true and phrased neutrally. What would an acceptable headline look like to you, short of regurgitating the company's own press release wording?
> 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-...