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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#211

Post by sdenton4 »

kbenson wrote: post #134
sdenton4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But again, as GP noted, isn't that a problem governments have already solved? If you want UBI it's going to be through the government, as that's the entity collecting the funds through taxes that would be distributed, and they already have a unique identifier for people. In the U.S. it's your SSN, which is conveniently also how they track you for income taxes (again, where a large portion of the funds for distributio…

It's 'solved' in the sense that there's a lot of machinery to deal with and remediate fraud and abuse. It's definitely not solved in a technical sense.

It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#212

Post by px43 »

pessimizer wrote: post #168
px43 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think his actual concern here is humans stealing identities and running bots in order to farm any sort of UBI mechanism that gets set up. It's not about humans asserting their humanness over some evil AGI/ASI machine, it's about sybil resistance. Malicious humans pretending to be thousands or millions of other humans.

That sounds like a automation problem. If you have an office dealing with UBI and unemployment in your neighborhood, the government can literally know their customer. The more people unemployed, the easier it will be to staff them. These people are pretending they're fighting fraud, when instead they're trying to reinvent government responsibilities/campaigns as passive income sources for 3rd party rent-seekers. Uber…

That sounds neat. I like the ultra-local approach.

The important thing that I think your argument is missing is that everything here is additive. I'm sure the whole Worldcoin team would love it if governance organizations of all sizes, from tiny villages to billion+ population nation states would run UBI programs to take care of their people. The thing is, today, that's not really happening, so there are a number of people working to make it happen from different angles. Maybe all of them fail, maybe one succeeds, maybe a bunch succeed and any given citizen of the world might be entitled to payments from a handful of UBI sources.

Do you think there are better global scale UBI projects and ideas out there, or do you think we should just stop trying to solve this problem?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#213

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with regulatory capture is it makes everybody look bad The other problem is this isn't how regulatory capture happens. OpenAI was flexing its badass credentials in the halls of Congress while it wrapped up a multibillion-dollar fundraise. There was no path from Altman's testimony to any sort of regulatory apparatus that wouldn't immediately constrain him.

Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder? They get billions in funding which they can use to absorb regulatory overhead, then the regulations come which price out early stage competitors and make it harder for anyone else to raise the kind of funding they've already secured.

> Isn't the usual theory for this that they're pulling up the ladder?

Actual capture involves industry coöpting existing regulators through revolving doors and burdensome rules that reduce the threat of new entrants. It happens quietly. The only times industry proposes new frameworks in public is when they're cornered.

The "regulatory capture" playbook OpenAI purported to follow has zero actual precedent. It is only rhetorically precedented in crypto, where the same nonsense about creating a new regulator that would simultaneously be less-burdensome than the status quo yet also cement incumbents' advantages was pitched to the naïve.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#214

Post by pessimizer »

mistercheph wrote: post #165
ramesh31 wrote: post #42

Taxation and control of the money supply is the single most powerful and fundamental right reserved by a government, and it's backed up by lots and lots of guns. Godspeed with changing that, crypto bros.

Those guns require ammo, toilet paper and food for the men holding them. Modern governments would be wise to study the situation the European aristocracies found themselves in wrt their merchant class financiers 300 years ago.

Governments are not worried about cryptocurrencies inhibiting their ability to procure weapons, because they are not insane.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#215

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #196
__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 in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.

I'm not sure about that. There's more to being a government than preventing people from using media of exchange that you haven't blessed.

Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#216

Post by littlestymaar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #198
dragonwriter wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.

> can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place Which underlines the ridiculousness of the thought experiment. The solution to wars being destructive is...a blockchain?

there's a civil war ongoing but your income is still at its pre-war level (without any devaluation, meaning you keep your pre-war purchasing power) thanks to the magic of the blockchain.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#217

Post by jonathankoren »

Hizonner wrote: post #159
jonathankoren wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally a solution in search of a problem. They’d say it proves you’re an actual human and not a fake profile, but there are existing solutions to that, and it doesn’t solve identity theft at all.

The "existing solutions" all rely on tying every single thing you do to every single other thing you do, which is a very nasty constraint.

no.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#218

Post by kstrauser »

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.

From https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-irs-data-book:

"During Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, the IRS collected more than $4.9 trillion in gross taxes, processed more than 262.8 million tax returns and other forms, and issued more than $641.7 billion in tax refunds."

So 5.7B is about .1% of the IRS's transactions that year.

That's also less than it could possibly cost to deploy and maintain Worldcoin.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#219

Post by iraqmtpizza »

lost_tourist wrote: post #138
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as the money becomes conditional, it's not UBI. If you have to irrevokably sign up to an organ donor list, it's not UBI. UBI is inherently redistributive. Which I happen to think is immoral.

Do you think that public roads and schools are also immoral?

In principle, yes. In practice, one occasionally has to choose the least immoral option. That does not invalidate the principle.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#220

Post by dragonwriter »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #215
dragonwriter wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.

I'm not sure about that. There's more to being a government than preventing people from using media of exchange that you haven't blessed. Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.

> Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.

Yes, it would; neither form of the “U” in UBI includes free of borders in the sense used in the term, and reinterpreting that way and pretending its what the term means is just lazy equivocation.

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