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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'

#281

Post by csee »

thruway516 wrote: post #246
xrd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally would align with Snowden, but Worldcoin using ZK-proofs is an important discussion to have. It is going to take a while for the world to understand the benefits that zero knowledge proofs offer in terms of privacy, but they are starting to be found everywhere, and privacy advocates (of which I consider myself one) need to understand what they offer to the consumer in exchange for some real benefits that we…

Zk proofs have nothing to do with Snowden’s criticism. They’re collecting and storing iris hashes regardless of whether they’re using Zk proofs downstream in their tech stack.

Why is this problematic?

The risks as I see it are authoritarian governments figuring out the tech and using it. Or compelling Worldcoin to do their bidding.

Storing hashes in itself doesn't seem like it can be abused. Suppose Worldcoin has a database of a billion hashes, then an authoritarian government decides to compel Worldcoin for some nefarious purposes. What then? What bad stuff could happen?

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

#282

Post by csee »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #130
booleandilemma wrote: post #117

“A new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.” Let’s ignore the fuzzy utopia talk and pretend that this is just a creepy plot to get a hash of every single person’s eyeballs. What’s Sam’s next move? What do you do when you have the hash of everyone’s eyes?

> What do you do when you have the hash of everyone’s eyes? The same thing you do with everyone's Amazon purchase habits, porn watching habits, and their social media behaviour: sell it! The only real question is to what end, and to be honest one need only look at the dystopia the CCP are creating with their survielence model in Xianjing to see how pernicious this all is when it's in the wrong hands. You have entitie…

Why would the hashes be useful to anyone? The iris scanning tech, yes absolutely. But the hashes would be useless.

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

#283

Post by lowkey_ »

astoor wrote: post #218
lowkey_ wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which version of the OED includes the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" in the definition of "fairness"? The one I have access to, oed.com (OED Third Edition, December 2013; most recently modified version published online September 2021) doesn't include the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" - its full definition of "fairness" (meaning 6) is "Honesty; impartiality, equitableness, justness; fa…

> Which version of the OED includes the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" in the definition of "fairness"?

It sounds like your definition is more of a list of synonyms — I was using the current Oxford dictionary available on iOS and Google.

> I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.

Yes, exactly that, and that's what your comment above was doing, no? You reframed fairness as meaning equality of outcome, and framed equality as meaning equality of opportunity. (Equality of outcome = same end-height, equality of opportunity = same ladder height)

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

#284

Post by wyager »

arcticbull wrote: post #262
wyager wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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”. Real estate is a productive asset and gold is a commodity. I'm not sure in what way they "behave like money" - their prices float with respect to a currency and have roughly zero of the attributes of money [1] - but monetization just me…

> Economic intrinsic value is an independent mathematical derivation of the market value of an asset - based on its qualities and attributes - divorced from the price at which it trades

This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it.

> their prices float with respect to a currency

So does EUR with respect to USD

> and have roughly zero of the attributes of money

Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?

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

#285

Post by Traster »

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.

You don't need to invert it, if the hash is used to issue a token on a centralized system you can ping the centralized system. At minimum you can establish whether someone has an existing account, and at maximum you could identify that account.

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

#286

Post by arcticbull »

wyager wrote: post #284
arcticbull wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”. Real estate is a productive asset and gold is a commodity. I'm not sure in what way they "behave like money" - their prices float with respect to a currency and have roughly zero of the attributes of money [1] - but monetization just me…

> Economic intrinsic value is an independent mathematical derivation of the market value of an asset - based on its qualities and attributes - divorced from the price at which it trades This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it. > their prices float with respect to a currency So does EUR with respect to…

> This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it.

No, it exists in math, with addition and subtraction. Like I said, a publicly traded bank account like a SPAC has an intrinsic value equal to its cash on hand. This is the economic definition of intrinsic value, and you're trying to once again substitute your epistemological definition. Same word, different meanings in different contexts, and it's disingenuous to try and substitute your definition as though it's the commonly accepted one in this context.

> So does EUR with respect to USD

This does not follow. Money isn't an asset, it's a currency, and a foreign exchange trade is a pair trade on the relative domestic purchasing power of the two. Currencies do not float with respect to other currencies because they are not priced in terms of each other.

> Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?

Ok let's talk about real estate. It's not fungible, each house is different. It's not liquid, in fact, sales take a substantial period of time. It's not necessarily durable, it decays without constant upkeep. It's totally not portable. And it's not broadly accepted as money. That's 0. Try bringing your deed to the Apple store to buy a MacBook. How is that 4.5 out of 5?

Gold of course isn't broadly accepted either, so that's a critical one. Try bringing a gold brick to the Apple store and see if you can buy an iPhone. Yes it could be money, it was at some point, but we replaced it because it was bad at being money, and these days it definitely is not.

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

#287

Post by lhh »

I really don't understand all the outrage in most of the comments here. Seems to me like they're just trying to launch a new cryptocurrency, they're trying to find a reasonably equitable way to distribute the initial tokens to bootstrap it, and iris-scanning is the best non-centralized, technically and logistically feasible way to identify new unique human entrants that they came up with. The principle of it sounds great to me!

Does the specific mechanism they're attempting to employ raise some concerns? Sure. Instead of the vitriol though, how about some suggestions for a better mechanism?

Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion. What does that say about you?

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

#288

Post by clpm4j »

patrec wrote: post #48
victor22 wrote: post #17

RIP Sam Altman's reputation

Genuine question: what is Sam Altman's reputation based on? I'm aware that Paul Graham had a serious mancrush on him, and that he somehow managed to turn a failed startup into a $40M acquihire, which is nothing to scoff at -- but is his success mostly based on his genius of selling himself and whatever he's involved in, or has he actually said or done anything that shows some deeper form of insight or ability?

It seems like he spoke and acted as he does now (at 36yrs old) when he was a 19yr old kid at Stanford, so he was the hotshot whizkid that SV fetishizes. Then he joined the first batch of YC and hit it off with pg. He basically cemented a reputation as a smart kid who speaks well and socializes with the right people, and has seemingly ridden that wave really well for the past 15 years. Kudos to him.

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

#290

Post by censormenow »

dang wrote: post #244
censormenow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The admins rate limit and flag (ban and censor) anyone talking negatively about Apple products, Google products, or Worldcoin. This is my third account of the week.

Plenty of users criticize all those things without getting banned. You're banned for posting flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines, as well as for creating a long string of accounts to troll HN with. That's not cool. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. We're always happy to unban peo…

I get it's not personal, but the comments I'm posting aren't flamewar. I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it. But that's a huge benefit of forums like this I think, learning when you're wrong. And very often I am and I want to know why. Also, who is flagging the comments and rate limiting users? It's not you, you can't possibly be reading all this. It's users past a karma score, many having an agenda of promoting or defending their companies product. New users can't even downvote. So think about this, users with a high karma can hide, flag, and rate limit newer users. You want to give them the license of free speech only so long as they don't dare use it. You can see this censorship at work if you compare the Twitter response to Worldcoin vs the HN comments. I couldn't find any criticism at all on HN. I'm not going to email and beg for my freedom of speech. Your system lacks an enforcement mechanism, I can make account after account and so happens I have a million proxies to hand. I'll never pass the karma threshold so it's a simple fix.
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