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If this is supposed to be a real currency, isn’t it awful for privacy? If your wallet is unique to your person (eyeball) and the public key is ever leaked, everyone can see your account balance and transactions. Would that be the case or am I missing something?
Snowden is assuming that Worldcoin is saving hashes of eyeballs. That is not what Worldcoin is doing. Zero Knowledge proofs allow the system to prove that an eyeball exists without actually tying the biometric hash directly to an ID. From the article: "We use the open-source Semaphore[19] zero-knowledge proof system to transfer the uniqueness of IrisHashes to the uniqueness of user accounts, without linking them." No…
Huh? They’re collecting and saving them, at least up to the point of confirming all new user accounts which happens sometime after they scan irises. I might have missed it but I don’t see anywhere in their docs where it says they discard the hashes even after they’ve minted a unique user account for the new user. They need to store the hashes at least until they’ve registered all possible users - how else will they c…
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Or... What if you had an AI randomly generate unique irises, you then print them on adhesive paper, and paste the cut-outs on the eyes of one of those robo-faces? Unlimited money!
They allegedly do liveness checks with an IR sensor to make sure they are scanning a live eye
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Proof of work, it’s inefficiency, or it’s security implications on transactions more generally are not relevant to your comments on the vulnerability of their coin faucet or the veracity of their claims.
They related these two points by saying that either it’s hackable, or there’s something weird going on under the hood, and that proof of stake alleviates these issues. Idk if I agree or disagree but it seemed straightforward and relevant what they were asserting.
A Sybil attack is a single or a small number of entities counterfeiting multiple peer identities so as to compromise a disproportionate share of the system. The actual network of communicating nodes that have copies of the distributed ledger (whether they be participant wallets, miners, validators, stakers, or any other kind of node), and the append-only list or tree of wallet-to-wallet transactions (i.e. the distributed ledger) are distinct, and may be what's tripping up some.
Within that distributed ledger, proof of work or proof of stake aren't what prevents the Sybils from using your (or others') identities on a cryptocurrency's network without your private key. Transaction signatures alone are the mechanism that prevents impersonation. Sybils can flood a cryptocurrency network with transactions with fake signatures all they want, but the transactions would be invalidated the moment that any node appending to the distributed ledger attempts to verify those transactions against its copy of the blockchain or ledger. In Bitcoin's case, the wallet address is the public key for that wallet, and the transaction signature is easily verified by using the source wallet (the one that has a balance) address as the public key for signature verification. (The wallet address is a hash of the public key, and I'm oversimplifying.)
The function of Proof of Work is to mitigate double spending by the same identity, which is a different concept from a Sybil attack, and is not even a type of Sybil attack. That double spending would otherwise "fork" the distributed ledger, and cause two different parallel versions of the distributed ledger to exist - one in which the destination wallet A has the transacted coin, and another in which the destination wallet B has the transacted coin. The iterated game miners play in PoW makes it computationally infeasible for a single party to double spend without controlling more than 50% of mining (e.g. hashing) power in the communications network of participating nodes. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, spending the same Bitcoin wallet balance twice by signing two different transactions using the same wallet private key. That is not a Sybil attack because the double spend (i.e. both transactions) originate from the same wallet. Double spending by a single identity is irrelevant to TFA, and not what TFA is talking about.
TFA responds to a coin faucet proposal (Worldcoin's "Orb" mechanism) that uses a biometric challenge to verify that coins are distributed to flesh and blood humans only, and exactly once. They're mitigating an identity problem with coin faucets, not an integrity or double spending problem that Proof of Work mitigates. (And in a creepy, biometric privacy destroying way, we'll get to that later.)
Coin faucets can be used to give some value (e.g. a small amount of cryptocurrency) to as large a population as possible to enable, for example, developers to play around with the cryptocurrency and new users to try it out before buying in with their own money. The referenced coin faucet is proposed as a wealth (re?)distribution mechanism. Currently, coin faucets mitigate a single or small number of individuals from consuming all of their cryptocurrency by restricting IP addresses, browser cookies, wallet addresses, and other forms of identification. The "Worldcoin Orb" hardware device for that identification collects biometric information (i.e. facial recognition, eye recognition, etc.) centrally to ensure that only flesh and blood humans receive the initial grant of their cryptocurrency. One of the comments here previously mentioned that you might be able to just spoof the output phashes of these "Orb" devices to perform a Sybil attack on the coin faucet in TFA that uses biometric phashes.
Hopefully this helps explain why this type of Sybil attack is distinct from attacks on the proof of work or proof of stake mechanisms, such as owning 51% of the mining power on a POW network or all the validators on a POS network.
As an aside: An encoded, encrypted, or hashed version of your biometrics that can be used to identify you from those biometrics is still biometrics. As long as it is generated from the source material, and uniquely identifies an individual, it's still biometrics, and still creepy facial recognition, IMO.
Worldcoin issues tokens to people for scanning their retinas. Their magical orb device sends a biometric hash to their network. Here's my take on it: You can possibly replace their biometric device with a random hash generator. * If it works, it means the currency is not fairly distributed, but anyone sending valid hashes to their network is issued tokens, irrespective of whether the eyeballs described by those hashe…
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It seems Sam is going for his wealth before equal distribution of wealth.
Sam has enough money, seems highly unlikely he is doing it to get wealthier. Not for or against Worldcoin with this comment just saying there is likely a different motive.
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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.…
> somehow Monero has implemented just such a system already (the RandomX PoW algorithm).
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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?
"What then? What bad stuff could happen?" I leave that to your imagination. It comes down to individual preference and where you draw the line at privacy. I personally wouldn't trust my biometric data to any FAANG let alone some shit-coin startup that could potentially decide to monetize that data any which way at some point in the future.
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> Bitcoin mining isn't fully at that level of sustainability yet, but it's a solvable problem. No it's not. These sorts of arguments fundamentally misunderstand the Sisyphean design of Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm: difficulty is scaled to absorb any changes in hash power, and expending hash power is rewarded with a chance of minting coins and/or collecting fees. Bitcoin could be made sustainable and clean today…
Difficulty cannot scale downwards to the level you describe because then it ceases to be Bitcoin. It's supposed to be extremely difficult, this is what secures digital scarcity. It doesn't help to speak in simplistic absolutes. Miners can definitely become more green and rapidly so. The massive move from China to the US that took place over the last few months likely has dramatically changed the energy mix to mine Bi…
Bitcoin interprets carbon tax as damage and routes around it
If this is supposed to be a real currency, isn’t it awful for privacy? If your wallet is unique to your person (eyeball) and the public key is ever leaked, everyone can see your account balance and transactions. Would that be the case or am I missing something?
The wallet and iris hash are never linked. The privacy properties of a Worldcoin wallet are identical to an Ethereum wallet (i.e. pseudonymous until you doxx yourself). See https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works#crypto