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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#281

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

oh_sigh wrote: post #255
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…

Governments exist, and the current standard of identity verification is a laminated piece of paper with a picture on it. If you're giving away free money you might want to have a standard slightly higher than that.

The laminated "paper" has microchip in it in most places and codes which can be checked against a central database. It's a good enough standard. In fact better than crypto-chaos.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#282

Post by 93po »

tristor wrote: post #37
gowld wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iris is scanned on an airplane? If so, it's not being disclosed to me.

They're probably referring to the optional facial recognition based boarding systems that many airports in the US are rolling out, primarily for international flights. It uses facial recognition to match you to your passport photo based on the documents verified during check-in, to ensure the person boarding the flight is the same person who checked-in when their documents were manually verified and recorded in the c…

Last time I flew into the US, if I remember correctly, I was required to submit to a facial scan to through customs. I am American.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#283

Post by 93po »

choppaface wrote: post #272
93po wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Orbs will be open sourced and audited. Long-term they aren't storing anything other than the iris hash.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#284

Post by JumpCrisscross »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #250
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity. I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.

> that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.

It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.

> you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed

How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Keep in mind, you are in a war zone, which means no guarantee of safe imports or exports. (Also, whose tokens?)

Managing an economy on a war footing is old business. There is nothing Worldcoin does to even remotely approach giving a semblance of an indication that anyone on their team has actually thought about this, like, once.

> that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal

This is, in a nutshell, the problem with anything that purports to maintain its value over long durations of time. Value keeping takes work. We can't meaningfully convert ancient currencies to modern ones because it makes no sense to ask how many days' labour a Roman peasant would trade for an iPhone. These problems are fundamental to the notions of value. They don't have a technical solution. Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#285

Post by dopidopHN »

93po wrote: post #283
choppaface wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Orbs will be open sourced and audited. Long-term they aren't storing anything other than the iris hash.

You can opt in for storage of the iris image itself to ensure that further modification of the hash algorithm do not force you to re-scan you eye.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#286

Post by FormerBandmate »

kbenson wrote: post #103
scrps wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of them is easy to include in thrilling action movies that allows the idea and risk to enter public consciousness, and the other is something that economics wonks and people interested in how business works at high levels look at. Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?" Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!" Protagonist 1: "Shit, o…

Regulatory capture becomes much easier to understand when you exaggerate it and say they’re trying to hijack and take over the government to make money. It isn’t that, but it’s close enough

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#287

Post by archibaldJ »

> In Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, Kenya scored 32 on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"). When ranked by score, Kenya ranked 123rd among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector.

> Despite market reforms, several business surveys reveal that business corruption is still widespread and that companies frequently encounter demands for bribes and informal payments to 'get things done' in Kenya, a trend that has contributed to an increased cost of doing business in Kenya. The country ranks 56 among 190 economies globally on World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index 2019.

> The public procurement sector in Kenya suffers widespread corruption and is the leading form of graft in the public service and always at the centre of all major corruption scandals. The use of agents to facilitate business operations and transactions in Kenya is widespread and poses a risk for companies, particularly at the market entry and business start-up stage.

It's cute on HN everyone is bashing Worldcoin while there is not a single discourse in regards to gov regulation and the business environment in Kenya and how it may (or may not) be relevant in this case(?)

I knew a few kenyans personally many years back (who were working in Mainland China and Hong Kong) and they were clearly not big fans of the kenyan gov. I wonder if there are improvement in the recent years.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#288

Post by kemotep »

93po wrote: post #266
kemotep wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 weeks after launch and a government is already able to disrupt their operations? Liz Truss lasted as Prime Minister for longer than that.

They've been deploying orbs and scanning for more than half a year.

Officially they launched 2 weeks ago. You wouldn’t count the time from 2010 to 2022 where Liz Truss was in Parliament as part of her premiership.

From what I understand, until the end of July when they launched, WLD was not yet available to people.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#289

Post by fatfingerd »

oh_sigh wrote: post #255
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…

Governments exist, and the current standard of identity verification is a laminated piece of paper with a picture on it. If you're giving away free money you might want to have a standard slightly higher than that.

Sure, but maybe that payment power is going to have a lot of side effects that are worse than limiting/filtering gifts through potentially corrupt governments that can also prevent other situations.

For example, the resource curse implies there will be great reasons for companies to risk gifts of small amounts of money to lots of people in a country about to vote on whether to protect collective assets from corporate theft..

All the weird action committees of US corruption haven't even had the logistics to directly bribe voters of a low population state to piss in the pot. Should they get iris wallet addresses for everyone correlated to scan locations? Is anything the US would do about this beyond the capabilities of Kenya?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#290

Post by Terr_ »

capableweb wrote: post #244
Raed667 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinitely more open than the ones from "Open"-Ai

I don't think Open Source is a gradient, it's a boolean. Either something is Open Source or it's not. Neither Llama nor OpenAI is Open Source.

I disagree, it's functionally a gradient because the label encompasses different assumptions when different people say it. (It's even more vague than the US' "freedom of speech", since it lacks a bunch of case-law precedent.)

You're saying clear-cut objective lines exist--where exactly do you believe they are placed?

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