This project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.
It doesn't create or track identities. It creates a unique hash of your iris and can only use it to determine if your iris has been scanned before. Nothing else.
Biometrics as private keys are an absolutely horrible idea as it is.
Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane.
The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.
> Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me.
You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
Pretty sad. They don't care about regulation that would potentially have a profound impact for everybody, but they care about people voluntarily doing something for a silly crypto token?
He was always sketchy, and the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI (the exact opposite of OpenAI's initial mission).
And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta.
History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.
the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI
To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI.
The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments.
It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian)
[1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle? I don't get it. (I think he or his supporters would say Worldcoin is something necessary for the future-AI world, but I don't buy it).
> It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle?
Promotional statements by corporate executives aren’t necessary reflective of their beliefs, but rather what they believe it is useful for other people to believe they believe, and Worldcoin isn’t a side hustle.
Its just a game to a lot of executives/investors. What they say publicly is curated and often reflects their best intentions or hopes, regardless of how far they are from reality or true intentions.
Considering I've had a lot of laser treatments (micro-veins) and am getting eye (retina) surgery before long, it makes me wonder how reliable such a system is, and how well it will tollerate change/variance of one's eye-prints. I mean, theoretically, if you lose your eye in an accident, does that mean you lose your life savings in such a scheme?
It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.
iirc you go to a place that can verify your identity through other means, and they'll update your iris scan or give you a yubikey you can use instead or something.
Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.
Governments already exist. To try and upend them by replacing their system of personhood and currency is in effect the tech-bro version of a mutiny. It may seem ridiculous but that's precisely what crypto is. An attempt to replace central banks and governments. Tech companies have grown very powerful, and they see an opportunity to create a world-wide "private government" and they're going for it. This won't be the last attempt. Governments will eventually wake up. Or if not. That's it for them.
I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes).
That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it.
The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...
Or even a signed hash against a confirmed/known/distributed public key.
Blockchain is only useful in a decentralized + adversarial context where there is a need to remove one-another's ability to game a given system. And even then, it doesn't imply a perfect security around it. Since it won't stop theft, breach, scams or other vectors.
you forgot the shitcoinery - there is a token, with a premine, unfairly distributed. the VCs that invested (SBF, a16z,etc) will benefit disproportionately.
I cannot argue with bad token, premine - I have not researched but I believe it. "VC coins" in general have these issues it seems. Just trying to say that not every shitcoin is trying to get people to give them their biometrics, that is a separate issue in my opinion.
There are legitimate reasons to premine, and creating a token with the intention of using it as a channel for UBI (literally giving money away) doesn't really scream "scam" to me considering the people backing it
Yeah, my take is that during the rise of the internet and mobile, tech earned a lot of social credit. But since then tech companies both large and small have been burning through that at a prodigious rate, especially social media, monopoly-seekers, and the trash fire that is crypto. If I had to sum up the new attitude of European regulators toward tech, it would be, "We're tired of your bullshit."
I'm glad to see it. Maybe with some better policing, the tech sector will again turn into something I can be unambiguously proud about working in.
Tech hasn’t “burned through social capital”. The media has shifted from being positive/neutral regarding tech to actively hostile, mainly because tech has been increasingly approaching their turf.
Regulators follow public opinion, public opinion follows the media.
We are still going to have to work with people who had no qualms about working for five different breeds of charlatan. Some of them two or three breeds at once.
I once was contract to hire at a place that was skeevy. The management team was horrible and abusive, the most senior developer was defensive and cagey.
I said no because of the management situation, but I also wasn't happy that the putative lead had a side hustle that involved driving around the city looking for cell towers that would let him get away with sending spam SMS messages.
My current job, he and another person from that company were working for someone in the same building as us. They didn't seem to recognize me, and I wasn't going to remind them who I was.
What hurt the worst though was that I was replacing someone from the local community who I had a lot of respect for who recommended me for this role. He basically created a giant goodwill bonfire and lit up the night sky.
That's not what he said. He said people that won't trust any platform [regardless of the reassurances, auditing, open source nature, etc] are welcome to not sign up. I assume the somewhat pointed subtext of what Sam said is also that if you're going to be a hater no matter what, he doesn't seem the point in engaging with you.
As much as the whole worldcoin thing is bizarre and dystopian, I do sort of enjoy the nouveau nihilistic take that you can’t trust or believe anything anyone says anyways, so if trust matters to you, you might want to stay away from the digital future.
A huge amount of the value of big tech companies comes from outrunning regulators (AirBnB, Uber) and/or existing in a state of exception (section 230). Congrats to Kenya for calling BS in short order.
I bet there's a really well understood data store that contains minimal data and meets various anonymity proofs.
And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.
Molly White points out [0] that they seem to have gotten awfully vague about what they store, emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained (and encouraging the assumption that those themselves are rigorously impossible to extrapolate personal information from)— but also insinuating to people at en-Orb-ment that they need to opt in to letting the company store full imagery of their iris scans in case the company decides to change the hash algorithm someday.
Readit News
And he did say that they were dampening the volatility of the price for WLD (together with the help of market makers, etc. I would guess?).
Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane.
The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.
Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.
If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.
You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
it really changes the flavor of it from cambridge analytica to dr evil.
And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta.
History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.
To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI.
The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments.
It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
"open-source"
The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain.
Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???
[1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
Promotional statements by corporate executives aren’t necessary reflective of their beliefs, but rather what they believe it is useful for other people to believe they believe, and Worldcoin isn’t a side hustle.
Now he can't really back out, and can't say bad about it anymore, but you bet he doesn't want any association with it anymore.
It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.
Dead Comment
That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it.
The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...
Write once media on a server is what you want.
Blockchain is only useful in a decentralized + adversarial context where there is a need to remove one-another's ability to game a given system. And even then, it doesn't imply a perfect security around it. Since it won't stop theft, breach, scams or other vectors.
How does that solve this problem:
>[company will] go out of business and take down the servers with it
Like publishing merkle tree hash in a few daily newspapers.
it’s a scam.
I'm glad to see it. Maybe with some better policing, the tech sector will again turn into something I can be unambiguously proud about working in.
Regulators follow public opinion, public opinion follows the media.
I once was contract to hire at a place that was skeevy. The management team was horrible and abusive, the most senior developer was defensive and cagey.
I said no because of the management situation, but I also wasn't happy that the putative lead had a side hustle that involved driving around the city looking for cell towers that would let him get away with sending spam SMS messages.
My current job, he and another person from that company were working for someone in the same building as us. They didn't seem to recognize me, and I wasn't going to remind them who I was.
What hurt the worst though was that I was replacing someone from the local community who I had a lot of respect for who recommended me for this role. He basically created a giant goodwill bonfire and lit up the night sky.
“The aforesaid entity is not registered as a legal entity in Kenya.” Even for crypto, this is a particularly stupid fuckup.
https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3186
What does this even mean?
CIA as a Service
It seems more about having the world's largest financial network.
Why does it feel like they probably keep WAY more data than they need instead of just the hash?
Glad they’ve been shut down at least.
And then a tag-manager implementation with MixPanel, Intercom, Amplitude, Heap, FullStory, and Segment, all receiving every interaction with a full JSON object describing the current state of the application and user.
[0] https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/worldcoin-a-solution-in-...
https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/orb-faqs