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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'

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how progress in anything, whether it's increasing complexity in evolution of life or the advance of civilization, has ever worked. We do new things, and figure out how to manage the fallout for the successful things after the fact.

Also when we realize things are bad, we stop.

Not when the thing we're doing has a positive feedback loop. We continue until we overextend, collapse, and then start over. Humans are intelligent, so we usually try to do things differently after the collapse. Sometimes, individuals are smart enough to see the collapse coming and build an ark to ride out the chaos.

There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.

We'll see.

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

#252
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't care about Worldcoin (I think it will fail, because they are solving the problem that does not exist), this post is false in multiple ways. First, retina scanning output hash is deterministic - it is supposed to generate the same result for the same eyeball. So it can't be replaced with random number generation. Second, network does not interpret hashes, except for making sure that single hash is awarde…

No biometric identifier is ever deterministic. Retinal scanning is no different. Your retina doesn't look exactly the same every time, every day, from all possible angles. Eyeballs swell, get infected, can be clouded. Retina signatures can even change over the course of a lifetime in somewhat rare circumstances, usually due to glaucoma or diabetes. Identification is always probabilistic. Actually, the lowest state of…

>I have to wonder why they went with retinal scanning in this case.

They didn't. It's an iris scan. The article just used "retina" and "iris" interchangeably for some reason. https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, they're eventually likely to get it all. Not mine! But WTF, I'm just a paranoid weirdo.

Thing is, you don't matter. If I have access to the data of 95% of people in a society, I have enough to model and predict behavior, and maybe even the hooks to inject information and influence future behavior. The long tail of paranoid weirdos who spend all their time and energy fighting to maintain their privacy are irrelevant to the goal of societal domination.

This is sadly spot on.

I had a conversation that touched on privacy once with a person I met at a bar who works for Big Evil Tech Co. and she basically came out and said this in slightly more diplomatic terms.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also when we realize things are bad, we stop.

Not when the thing we're doing has a positive feedback loop. We continue until we overextend, collapse, and then start over. Humans are intelligent, so we usually try to do things differently after the collapse. Sometimes, individuals are smart enough to see the collapse coming and build an ark to ride out the chaos. There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars…

> There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.

Price is not consensus of goodness, and it's not value. You wouldn't believe what the market cap of heroin is. Market cap is the most recent trade price multiplied by supply. The price is overwhelmingly determined by USDT trading, not USD trading. According to Google Trends fewer people care now than in much of recent memory.

And further, they're quite mistaken about the impending doom. Just as the man with the megaphone yelling about the rapture has been wrong for decades too.

I guess what I'm saying is, it's time for an e-waste tax and a carbon tax.

[edit] You know, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, the official response wasn't "well folks we should probably just keep dumping stuff into the river until we find a new process, nothing to worry about, just wear these brominated swim trunks when you go for a dip to avoid burns" -- it was to create the EPA and tell companies to immediately cease and desist until they found a better way forward.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct but efficacy of this process is pretty much irrelevant for the founders because the whole "fair distribution" is just a marketing gimmick to promote yet another shitcoin. Only losers will provide their real retinas. Smart players will obviously game the system and then dump the shitcoin on yet another group of losers.

Wait until you see the retina mining camps they set up in China.

Anyone who isn’t aware of the value will be taken advantage of. “Here have 50 bucks, just look into my orb”

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

#258
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, peopl…

> This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. That is not the definition of a monetary asset. "A monetary item is an asset or liability carrying a value in dollars that will not change in the future. These items have a fixed numerical value in dollars, and a dollar is always worth a dollar. The numbers do not change even though the purchasing power of a do…

[deleted]

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

#259
Again per Gibson:

"“What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking.

“Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”"

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

#260
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, peopl…

> This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. That is not the definition of a monetary asset. "A monetary item is an asset or liability carrying a value in dollars that will not change in the future. These items have a fixed numerical value in dollars, and a dollar is always worth a dollar. The numbers do not change even though the purchasing power of a do…

I used the phrase “monetary asset” once to mean “an asset which behaves and is treated like money”, but it would have been less ambiguous for me to use the phrase “monetized asset”.

> citation needed

Give me a minute to find a copy of the Official Rules of Economic Epistemology.

If you’d like to put forward any particular theory that assigns “intrinsic value” to objects I could address it specifically.

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