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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#221

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

px43 wrote: post #133
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments already exist. To try and upend them by replacing their system of personhood and currency is in effect the tech-bro version of a mutiny. It may seem ridiculous but that's precisely what crypto is. An attempt to replace central banks and governments. Tech companies have grown very powerful, and they see an opportunity to create a world-wide "private government" and they're going for it. This won't be the l…

Neat, so are all world governments going to band together and implement UBI? Do you really think that waiting for all world governments to come together and figure this out is the right move here? I admire the optimism (I think of myself as a pretty optimistic person too), but you've got to realize that there are reasonable people on this planet who think that waiting for governments to fix this is probably not going…

There won't be UBI. There's work and death. And if AI truly replaces us, it's the latter. I'm not trying to be cynical I'm simply being blunt about how systems work.

You and your environment have to "click together" so you live. In the wild, this means mostly surviving cold, hot, stay dry, find things to eat, and not be eaten.

In society, however, it means being useful to the system somehow, so you get access to other useful things the system makes, like air conditioners, housing, and food, ways to get around etc. If you're not useful to the system, the system may pretend it cares for you, but it doesn't really care for you. This is not up to the morality of the people in charge. It's up to the system. The system elects the people and tells them what to care about. The system is quite resilient. It can withstand certain amounts of welfare, corruption, crime, and so on. But only certain amounts. If you cross those certain amounts, what happened in 2020 with COVID handouts, and the subsequent doubling of prices of food, and so on, happens infinitely and suddenly money is worthless paper. Like Zimbabwe. So if you have somewhere else to run where they're not as stupid as Zimbabwe, you can be useful in that new place and live. If you have nowhere to run, as with a global UBI, you die.

Of course, people won't just lay down and die, they'll just have a revolution like the Bolsheviks did, and speak about how everything will belong to everyone, and of course resources will concentrate to those on top again, instead. With AI however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful. So revolution after revolution, new people will sit on top and promise it'll be different this time, in a smaller and smaller population.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#222

Post by flangola7 »

scrps wrote: post #86
boppo1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.

I would hope both would set off alarm bells but I guess at least one of them inducing trepidation is cause enough these days for guarded optimism.

The regulatory capture conspiracy is myopic, ignorant, and "cope" as the kids say these days. People act as if Altman had never said spoken about AI dangers until ChatGPT took off, when in reality Altman has written about the dangers of AI before OpenAI even existed. The US government already added GPU dual-use export control restrictions a year ago due to their potential for weaponization, so he is not alone in recognizing the inherent dangers.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#223

Post by random_kris »

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.

Any good way to implement global payment network (mobile or not) that is not subject to government whims?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#224

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

littlestymaar wrote: post #216
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

It would come down to devaluation by whom right? If everybody wants the war to end and both sides see you as somebody that is working towards a reasonable plan of ending it, then I expect your tokens would go pretty far.

And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat and your evaluation of their tokens as well. Reciprocal exchange and utility, not market value.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#225

Post by classified »

l33t233372 wrote: post #128
__loam wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including the open-source models by Meta "open-source"

Freely readable and mutable weights doesn’t have the same ring to it.

God forbid we could be accurate with the terms we use.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#226

Post by mcguire »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177
ryandrake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle. Boy, I'm really proud to be working in Tech in 2023...

> making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle Except he's doing neither of these. He's just talking about them while raising money.

That's the beautiful part. No work necessary.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#227

Post by JumpCrisscross »

px43 wrote: post #212
pessimizer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

To the degree Worldcoin is doing anything to UBI, it's in tarnishing its brand. (Identity verification is not what's holding it back.)

If they were serious about this as anything but another crypto pump-and-dump, they'd focus on direct foreign aid.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#228

Post by px43 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #194
px43 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will soon be able to use their iriscodes to reclaim credentials that they sold, and once people start doing that, the market for re-sold credentials will drop to approximately zero.

> People will soon be able to use their iriscodes to reclaim credentials that they sold, and once people start doing that, the market for re-sold credentials will drop to approximately zero. Is the obvious related problem this solution brings forth supposed to go unsaid? (Criminals don't buy something they can steal.)

Okay, so what's the attack scenario here?

Imagine we live in a future where Worldcoin is ubiquitous, all the hardware/software is open source. Several orb operators exist in every city in the world, and operators have a non-trivial amount of WLD tokens staked to ensure good behavior. Misbehaving orbs have their keys and subkeys revoked at the first sign of illicit usage.

Maybe a criminal kidnaps 10 people, then steals an orb, and uses those 10 iriscodes to register 10 new credentials on the network. How much profit would you expect to come to the criminal before their credentials are revoked?

Is there another attack you're thinking of?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#229

Post by JumpCrisscross »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #224
littlestymaar wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It would come down to devaluation by whom right? If everybody wants the war to end and both sides see you as somebody that is working towards a reasonable plan of ending it, then I expect your tokens would go pretty far. And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat a…

> devaluation by whom right

This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. (Ceteris paribus.) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#230

Post by monetus »

hyperfuturism wrote: post #182
monetus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not been paying attention to altman - what did he say about market manipulation? Having trouble searching for it.

The other comment is right, that Sam Altman is not the CEO. The CEO is Alex Blania. And he did say that they were dampening the volatility of the price for WLD (together with the help of market makers, etc. I would guess?).

Thanks, that must be what the op was referencing; and also thanks for affirming the sibling comment. The tools for humanity and the worldcoin foundation sites don't have much info on them from what I can tell. I wonder at how they go about preventing volatility and how they eventually plan on doing that in US. Sounds dodgy if they are avoiding our jurisdiction.
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