Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

capitalfm.co.ke

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–379 of 379 posts

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#371

Post by kbenson »

sdenton4 wrote: post #370
kbenson wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distribution portion of UBI is the least interesting from a theoretical and technical standpoint. Giving money to people is easy, and a solved problem, which is basically what I've been saying. Funding that money is the hard part, and the portion that basically requires a government because it's likely to be taxation that does it. Some crypto company trying to help enable UBI by solving the identifiability and di…

OTOH, the impossibility of getting UBI on the government side is actually motivating adoption: sure, you've got a central identity repository, etc, but it will never happen in our lifetime (in the US) if you need 60 senators to vote for it... This is, IMO, basically insurmountable - we've seen governments toying with UBI but I seriously doubt we'll see any government pull the trigger in any reasonable timeframe.

I don't disagree that it's extremely unlikely that certain governments will adopt it, at least not without lots of other governments to point to as success cases at least.

I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less[1], but I don't recall the outcome).

Maybe, possibly, a religious organization such as one of the various Morman churches that strongly encourage tithing could do so, but it would probably be cast more as charity than UBI. That's also ignoring all the other problematic aspects of something like that.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#372

Post by 93po »

tristor wrote: post #326
93po wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are not. There are three different programs by which you can accelerate entry/re-entry to the US and all three rely on facial recognition. All are optional. There is no facial recognition in the normal re-entry line (and all these processes are before customs as part of border control). Foreigner entry may now require facial recognition, I’m a US citizen so don’t experience the process foreigners go through.

Fair - I don't have the best memory. Thanks!

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#373

Post by sdenton4 »

kbenson wrote: post #371
sdenton4 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, the impossibility of getting UBI on the government side is actually motivating adoption: sure, you've got a central identity repository, etc, but it will never happen in our lifetime (in the US) if you need 60 senators to vote for it... This is, IMO, basically insurmountable - we've seen governments toying with UBI but I seriously doubt we'll see any government pull the trigger in any reasonable timeframe.

I don't disagree that it's extremely unlikely that certain governments will adopt it, at least not without lots of other governments to point to as success cases at least. I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less…

The other innovation of cryptocurrencies is bootstrapping 'value' for scarce digital tokens; in this sense, UBI based on a cryptocurrency can be self-funding.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#374

Post by kbenson »

sdenton4 wrote: post #373
kbenson wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that it's extremely unlikely that certain governments will adopt it, at least not without lots of other governments to point to as success cases at least. I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less…

The other innovation of cryptocurrencies is bootstrapping 'value' for scarce digital tokens; in this sense, UBI based on a cryptocurrency can be self-funding.

That only works because of investment and speculation. You would specifically not want that for UBI IMO, because speculation could crash your currency leaving people that rely on it unable to purchase anything with it. I'm pretty sure you would need to tie it to a stable real world currency for it to function for its intended purpose as a basic income.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#376

Post by Hizonner »

rwiggum wrote: post #337
Hizonner wrote: post #141

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…

This is actually what they're building. They publish ZK proofs over the biometric data instead of publishing the biometric data itself.

Their critical error is that there's a single, central authority that certifies that a person with a given set of biometrics exists. They didn't bite off the hard, but necessary, part where you figure out how walk an attestation graph and come up with a confidence level.

And they only do irisis.

And they're doing the ZK at the wrong point in the chain. Publishing the actual, raw, unhashed biometrics wouldn't be a problem as long as they didn't tie them to anything but a key. And that future-proofs you.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#377

Post by [deleted] »

remcob wrote: post #265
night-rider wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD? https://coinmill.com/WDC_calculator.html

> The exchange rate for the WorldCoin was last updated on October 21, 2019. This is a different token. And I wouldn't trust a site with such outdated rates.

[deleted]

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#378

Post by afiori »

tim333 wrote: post #344
BLanen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biometrics as private keys are an absolutely horrible idea as it is. Proposing to use that private key as your one true interface to the digital financial world is ever more insane. The idea that proprietary technology and information(the scanners, software and everything that the organization owns) can somehow make this safe and secure is evil.

They don't do that "private keys are randomly generated, completely independent of any biometric information, and each other." from their docs

but aren't they using biometrics as passwords to access those private keys? or at least to manage them (create new ones and/or revoke older ones)?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#379

Post by afiori »

nhinck2 wrote: post #321
astrange wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with saying an LLM is "just a parrot" is that we don't know how parrots work, so this doesn't mean anything.

You know a parrot isnt going to impart new knowledge to the world.

You can feed new data into it quite easily.

a lot of the dismissive takedown of LLM's intelligence uses their spurious knowledge of the world, but it is quite easy to have them 1. search the internet 2. search research articles 3. read books and have them work to iteratively improve something.

Right now they cannot do much reliably but calling them a parrot is miopic how little we understand how humans are intelligent and to how LLMs today are more intelligent than a non negligible chunk of the population.

Post reply on HN