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Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

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Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#221

Post by quadrangle »

lowkey_ wrote: post #190
astoor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. Fairness and equality are different. Imagine 2 people of different heights who can't see over a wall - equality is giving them both a ladder of exactly the same height even if that means just the tallest person can now see over the wall, while fairness is giving them each potentially different height ladders so they can both see over the wall…

Regarding your first paragraph, from Oxford Dictionary, "fairness" means "impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination." The above poster was right — it's fair if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. I've seen this whole ladder analogy commonly used in radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts, used to reframe discrimination in a positive light.

> "impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination."

That doesn't imply simplistically equal treatment. If the definition was "equal treatment" that's what it would say instead of "impartial and just".

Impartial and just and no favoritism or discrimination isn't meant to literally complain "hey, you're discriminating in favor of car crash survivors getting physical therapy, that's not fair, everyone should get the same physical therapy".

The definition probably would be better to use the term "prejudice" instead of "discrimination". There's no reality in which people see fairness in absolute lack of discrimination. It's fair to discriminate based on something like medical diagnosis or any other sort of fair judgment of situations.

The false dichotomy of opportunity vs outcomes is stupid. We can't make true equality of either, and we can care about both. And just saying that you see extremists use an analogy is not a reason to reject an analogy. Extremists also wear pants or sleep at night. Anyway, an absolutist no-discrimination view is about as extreme as we can find.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#222

Post by javert »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #198
jl6 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One CPU, one vote" doesn't imply decentralization either - if you have lots of money, just buy lots of CPUs.

Sure, but that doesn't give you the disproportional advantage bitcoin miners get with their specialized hardware. With two CPUs you get two votes. Bitcoin miners get god knows how many.

Like the other guy said, it doesn't matter. It's always spend $X to get Y% of the network. That's just how reality is.

By the way, bitcoin miners do not vote. It's not a democracy. Proof of work is not voting. That's important. Democracy would be a terrible system for governing money. Bitcoin is not a democracy. (Some of the proof of stake coins are, and that's bad.)

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#223

Post by quadrangle »

Kranar wrote: post #152
wikfwikf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equal opportunity not equal outcomes is a huge red herring when talking about equality. Most public places used to have bathrooms which anyone could walk into but no one could easily roll into on a wheelchair. That was equal opportunity. Nowadays many places have been mandated to have bathrooms such that anyone who uses the space can access a bathroom without difficulty. That is an enforced equal outcome. Which is th…

When it comes to bathrooms I think most people agree with wanting equal outcomes. That does not mean wanting equal outcomes for all other aspects of life.

Sure, but it's a good way to frame the question. We don't want anyone to be unable to use toilets. Surely there's no clear line where this logic stops. It's fuzzy. Is there anything wrong with wanting everyone to be supremely happy and compassionate and wealthy and thriving? Of course not. The only question is whether efforts in that direction are counterproductive in practice.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#224

Post by 8note »

throw10920 wrote: post #200
wikfwikf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equal opportunity not equal outcomes is a huge red herring when talking about equality. Most public places used to have bathrooms which anyone could walk into but no one could easily roll into on a wheelchair. That was equal opportunity. Nowadays many places have been mandated to have bathrooms such that anyone who uses the space can access a bathroom without difficulty. That is an enforced equal outcome. Which is th…

> Equal opportunity not equal outcomes is a huge red herring when talking about equality. No, it's an extremely relevant debate because a certain political faction has been trying to redefine "equality" from its original definition of "equal opportunity" to a completely different one of "equal outcomes". > Which is the correct approach? This is a false dichotomy. You can want equal opportunity in most places, and equ…

If you're going for implausible comparisons, I'll go with the tens of millions, since in the first case, you piss off the handicapped version of Hitler, and he goes on a killing spree that ends with hundreds of millions dead, or more likely deadly disease spreads due to a lack of hand washing. That's at quite a lot of millions now, and people have stopped caring

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#225

Post by ryanisnan »

csee wrote: post #203
Traster wrote: post #107

I thought I'd look at the actual company after hearing about this. I'm just not a silicon valley person. Here's their how it works page - https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works . It includes a projection graph that has a scale in 500m user increments and 2 years. Then you have the real data: over 6 months they've signed up 120k users. Or to put it another way - their real data doesn't even appear on the scale that their…

I don't think they can leak biometric data. Even if they figure out the hashing algo that doesn't mean they can invert someone's hash.

I don't think that's the rub. The issue is that with a hash and the algorithm, you can reproduce the hash. I think opponents to this are advising against having the retinal hashes in the first place, to eliminate their abuse in the future.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#226

Post by deegles »

I wish I could see the pitch from the hardware people who told Sam Altman that the orbs were not going to be cracked... the whole project will fall apart as soon as (if) Worldcoins have significant value and an orb falls in a moderately-skilled hacker's hands. Or someone will just do it for the lolz.

That or orb-owners will just set up a booth in poor areas of the world and give people cash for a scan, pocketing the distributions forever.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#227

Post by wyager »

arcticbull wrote: post #195
wyager wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common misunderstanding of how monetization works. The actual value of Bitcoin comes from demonetizing other currently monetary assets (dollars, gold, real estate, etc.), plus some additional (partially externalized) value from increased efficiency as a monetary mechanism. People who are long those assets and not adequately hedged with Bitcoin are losing money to people who are long Bitcoin (assuming B…

Well it dramatically decreases the efficiency of the monetary system (requiring 60 days of electricity and 1 iPad of e-waste to scribble a few bytes into the ledger every 10 minutes), and only one of the other assets you pointed out create value, the others are unproductive. Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset - because people need a place to live and you can either live in a house yourself o…

This post is riddled with misconceptions, but I’m just going to focus on these because they’re probably the most productive places for you to start:

> Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset… Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset.

This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. When the primary medium of exchange is inflationary, people will use whatever non-inflationary value stores they can find with sufficient liquidity. Most of the value of gold, and much of the value of real estate, lie in their capacity as a wealth storage mechanism. They are monetized. Bitcoin does a better job of this and will likely subsume their monetization value.

> It has no intrinsic value

Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#228

Post by anonporridge »

jl6 wrote: post #219
anonporridge wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't matter to the game theory of the system. If bitcoin somehow managed to create a system in which general CPUs were the only thing that can be used to mine, it would just mean that we'd have CPU shortages as the people with wealth and power would buy them all up. Or at least, they'd buy up all the best ones and the plebs would get the low clock speed units that can only hash at a fraction of the rate.…

Indeed. Fiat currencies issued by central banks are in many ways more democratic than Bitcoin, because at least every citizen has a chance (albeit an indirect one) of influencing their policy via traditional voting, using the desired “one person, one vote” basis, which is common in countries whose currency you might want to use. Any form of computing power, whether CPU-based or GPU-based or ASIC-based or memory-based…

I don't think it follows that fiat is more democratic.

Mining is not (and cannot be) a perfectly private thing that the wealthy and powerful have full control over. Ultimately, they operate at the pleasure of governments. They are subject to political whims. A nation state could theoretically nationalize all miners in the country if the political capital to do so existed.

What makes bitcoin unique to fiat currencies, is that it is democratic on a global scale between organizations and entities that control energy production and the technological capacity to produce efficient computation. And how these organizations use their voting power is still ultimately driven by the politics within, whether that's democratic or otherwise. It's not "one person, one vote", it's "one hash, one vote". The distribution of voting power across the globe is a constantly evolving thing that depends on how much electricity and computational efficiency different localities can muster.

This is why I personally think bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency. It automatically gives proportional voting power to countries based on how effectively they can summon computation, rather than how effectively they can summon violence and destruction.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#229

Post by anonporridge »

ganzuul wrote: post #100
astoor wrote: post #46

This is just so wrong in so many different ways, it actually fills me with despair to think that there are people somewhere who actually think this is in some ways a good idea. To the point of wondering if there is some way of organising more direct action to stop this kind of disaster from befalling the human race.

At some point one needs to assume it is no longer a matter of ignorance, but instead one of malice. Not sure if this is near that point. Perhaps this guy is simply a fluff bunny who has never seen any evil in this world.

Maybe it's not quite malice.

Is there a word for knowingly becoming the villain because you've decided that the force of Moloch in civilization is unstoppable and if it's not you who uses your power to take control of something vulnerable and weak, someone else eventually will, and they might actually be malicious.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#230

Post by arcticbull »

anonporridge wrote: post #217
arcticbull wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything everyone else said plus e-waste. My lord, Bitcoin produces as much e-waste as the entirety of the Netherlands to scribble a few bytes into a ledger once every 10 minutes lol. 97% of all mining devices will never successfully mine a single block. Each transaction produces as much e-waste as throwing out an iPad. That's on top of the power demand. You cannot make that sustainable. It's grey goo.

We're going to need to figure out how to recycle e-waste at massive scale irregardless of bitcoin. Silicon brains are the spice of civilization. The only limit on who much e-waste we produce is how fast we can churn them out.

Cool and when we do we can revisit Bitcoin.
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