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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#271

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?

Great Britain actually did this regularly. For hundreds of years they would war all over europe until they ran out of money, make up some scheme to refill the coffers (including eventually inventing the central bank and other shenanigans with the "South Sea" bubble), and then go back to war in europe.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#272
post #261

This project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.

It doesn't create or track identities. It creates a unique hash of your iris and can only use it to determine if your iris has been scanned before. Nothing else.

And Loopt was originally about just sharing your location privately and then oops that got sold for low income credit card targeting so that sama could cash out https://allthingsd.com/20120309/green-dot-buys-location-app-...

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#273

Interesting, especially in conjunction with an apparent global outage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/segunolakoyenikan/2023/08/07/sa...

The outage was only specific information in the app, and only for the first 24 hours after launch. Everything else operated fine.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#274

charitable interpretation: this project is trying to address the problem of distributed and anonymized KYC. Because the current setup where you upload your passport to Coinbase turned out to be a cruel joke on the original idea of a cryptocurrency: it's the exact opposite of anonymous/pseudonymous, and the exact opposite of distributed. By this point Coinbase is really no different than a bank (with one "improvement"…

This is pretty off based on my understanding of Worldcoin. They want the opposite: they don't want to know who you are. They only thing they are interested in is are you a verified unique human, or operating the account of someone is a verified unique human (less than ideal but will happen).

The biggest use cases for this are to establish a finite limit of online accounts to combat inauthentic online behavior, to provide a robust way to vote, and to provide robust way to evenly distribute UBI.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2.04 per token at the moment: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/worldcoin/usd You get 25 WLD for getting scanned, hence the huge queue in a developing country.

Is it easy to cash out once you have your WLD?

Yes but there are incentives to not do so

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#276

Worldcoin does the whole thing wrong. What they SHOULD do is to-- 1. Scan biometrics. They should not restrict themselves to just irises, because not everybody has irises or eyes . But they should only scan things that you can get surreptitiously without too much work... meaning things that everybody gives away anyway just by walking down the street. 2. Bind the biometrics to keys generated only for that purpose, and…

1. For now they do collect biometrics with opt-in, because it's valuable data for refining the ability to scan only irises and determine if they're legitimate

2. I can see this being a good idea

3. They don't

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#277
post #47

Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that's market scrutiny from the SEC/etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers. Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It'll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the "and find out" phase.

Worldcoin specifically excludes US citizens from holding the token, presumably to escape some legal or regulatory issues. https://blockworks.co/news/worldcoin-not-in-us#

They're not escaping, it's just poorly defined in the US. So they're waiting for clarification.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#278
post #12

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

> the global south Care to elaborate what you mean by "the global south"? EDIT: Downvoted for asking a question? Did all the StackOverflow mods come to HN?

(Note that it's the StackOverflow users voting on questions - the same ones that you are soliciting answers from. Mods have actual moderation tasks to deal with.)

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#279
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kenya is a reasonable choice to launch a project like this. Among African nations, Kenya is very connected to USA and UBI. Altman already had OpenAI work in Kenya. It has both a stable government/economy and also high poverty and rural population. It has ~5% of Africa's population, so if you just picked a random place with a lot of people to operate, it's unsurprising to land in Kenya. https://www.givedirectly.org st…

OpenAI work there because labour is really cheap. I don't think this is at all about UBI, if anything "competing" with Give Directly (who are doing truly excellent) would require more work and justification of Worldcoin's approach. I do suspect the real reason is much more exploitative.

There is a lot of fraud with current methods of charity in developing countries. Worldcoin is working to address that.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#280
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation requested re: Altman saying current offerings are AGI. When I search, I see things like “there may be a path to AGI”.

the current 'normie' understanding of ChatGPT and other current LLMs like Bard is not that they are stochastic parrots that can complete sentences by probabilities, it's that they are 'stupid AGI.' And if we give them more funding and more training, eventually they will become 'smart AGI.' OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot)…

I'm not sure I get what you're saying here. ChatGPT and GPT-4 absolutely can write code and poetry. GPT-4 arguably does both better than I do.
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