Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lazzlazzlazz 1119 days ago
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.

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.

5 comments

I can't stress how much I'm not going to scan my eyeballs for magic beans that live in my computer. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
You're not, which is why they've had to set up shop in the poorest countries in the world to recruit willing guinea pigs.
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.
How many times has “just go vote” prevented things you didn’t want
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.
Have you been away for the past three years?
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.
Or not have your eyes scanned at all with government regulations.
I'm not going to tear it apart. They have done a good job doing it themselves:

"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.

Next week on the A16z blog: "Adam Neumann is not a fraud"
methods to generate a totally privacy-preserving form of internet native identification and Sybil resistance

I thought Stefan Brands solved this over 20 years ago without scanning people's eyes.

Stefan Brands, Frédéric Légaré: Digital Identity Management based on Digital Credentials. GI Jahrestagung 2002: 120-126

is that a good place to start?

I don't know. I have his book (which regrettably I have not actually opened).
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?
Please stop trying to justify a dystopian ponzi scheme.