Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi • Hacker News Board

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#201

Post by sneak » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

victorbjorklund wrote: post #64

justrealist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but you shouldn't underestimate the popularity of mobile banking/money transfer apps in East Africa. If it's easier and more secure (against literal telecom hacks, we don't need to get into crypto debates) than the alternative it very plausibly can get users.

That is an argument against it. If they already solved the problem with mobile payments adding blockchain to the mix doesnt add any value.

That's up to users to decide, isn't it?

Many people appreciate payments the state cannot arbitrarily censor. Blockchains are good at this.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#202

Post by whyenot » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

modo_ wrote: post #100

ks2048 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

He believes proof of humanity is vital in a world where AI can convincingly pass as human

Can an AI physically go to the DMV and get a REAL-ID? If we reach the point where this seriously is a concern, then we will have other, much larger problems to deal with. WorldCoin feel like a scam. The crypto aspect and then paying people in Africa to gaze into metal orbs and get their irises scanned (with funding from A-Z and Vinod Khosla), ... it's not exactly a confidence builder.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#203

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

Ataraxic wrote: post #162

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the kind of UBI we want though? If it has a single issuer, like the government, then it has a single point of control which can be used to coerce people (i.e. by threatening to take it away). The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI. It ought to be a safety net that makes otherwise impractical growth possible. As a crypto, Ci…

> The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government... Crypto Anarchism is not attractive the vast majority of people. I'll argue the UBI people want involves their government sending them a check, direct deposit, or cash.

Given that we'd have to all conspire to respect the UBI token while we replaced the government, I'd classify it as cryptocommunism, but I take your point.

I just have a hard time imagining a government that both:

- keeps the U in UBI

- is not under some kind if existential threat from its people

You need the latter to have the former. But if you're coordinated to achieve the latter then you don't really need the government to achieve the former anyway.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#204

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

px43 wrote: post #184

kstrauser wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the official numbers for that, compared to the legitimate traffic the IRS handles?

https://www.allstatenewsroom.com/news/tax-and-government-fra... > Tax and Government Fraud Cases Spiked 68% in 2022 > The IRS flagged $5.7 billion in tax fraud in 2022, and there were nearly 8 million reports of suspicious tax-season activities.

That figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/FS-14-01.pdf

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#205

Post by notahacker » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

px43 wrote: post #156

kstrauser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?

You realize that the IRS deals with rampant fraud right? And with emerging technology, the capabilities of criminals to steal identities is only increasing. People file taxes for dead people or people whose identities have been stolen all the time. Recently, to deal with this, the IRS has outsourced their identity verification to a third party company, id.me, who gathers way WAY more information than Worldcoin does,…

Because everyone knows that the trouble with people pretending dead people are still alive to collect their entitlements or obtaining access to other peoples accounts is lack of a VC backed startup that prints its own crypto tokens and scans people's eyeballs...

The actual problems here are both hard and not being solved by WorldCoin

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#206

Post by hippomille1 » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

I was just traveling recently and found a number of iris art shops set up in high traffic tourist areas. These IRis Art shops (places that scan your iris and enlarge it into a picture for you) seem to me to be capable of the same aim as world coin.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#207

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

ks2048 wrote: post #72

Legend2440 wrote: post #36

I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.

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.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#208

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

scottiebarnes wrote: post #178

oaththrowaway wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments tend to

Do you have reference to a nation state in history that warred their way out of a debt spiral?

Countries don't need wars to shoot people. You make laws and issue executive orders, and when they are violated, you send people to hit the violators with sticks until they comply, and if that doesn't work, to shoot them until they stop moving.

Any and all economic policy is ultimately backed by violence. That's what governments are for.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#209

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

whyenot wrote: post #202

modo_ wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He believes proof of humanity is vital in a world where AI can convincingly pass as human

Can an AI physically go to the DMV and get a REAL-ID? If we reach the point where this seriously is a concern, then we will have other, much larger problems to deal with. WorldCoin feel like a scam. The crypto aspect and then paying people in Africa to gaze into metal orbs and get their irises scanned (with funding from A-Z and Vinod Khosla), ... it's not exactly a confidence builder.

> Can an AI physically go to the DMV and get a REAL-ID?

AI can just run the DMV and issue itself a REAL-ID.

Worldcoin doesn’t solve the problem, though, especially with Sam Altman involved.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#210

Post by tromp » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #104

jabradoodle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

Crypto schemes allow a lot of experimentation with the structure of money that no sane government would ever try for fear of crashing their economy in one way or another. Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten t…

> Bitcoin was designed to act like gold

Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.