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Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

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Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#111
post #57

I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes). That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually…

Blockchain would not be the right tech if you don't need decentralised trust. Write once media on a server is what you want.

Are there any frameworks/platforms for this?

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

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…

KYC is a thing and apparently crypto exchanges can implement it when asked nicely.

But I think grand parent poster is right on the money, it’s a attempts to take governments roles.

After all nation states are not that old of a concept. Basically Napoleonic wars. Some type of distopian corporate nationality might come to fruition to replace them.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?

[deleted]

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#114
post #57

I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes). That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually…

you forgot the shitcoinery - there is a token, with a premine, unfairly distributed. the VCs that invested (SBF, a16z,etc) will benefit disproportionately.

it’s a scam.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.

What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.

Here is one answer:

> How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#116
post #89

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.

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

Altman is not the ceo of worldcoin…

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually significantly more skeptical of OpenAI after discovering that one of their founders is behind this. The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain. Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???

You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian) [1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruin…

I took a look at RSA and 1) it's not technically UBI but a conditional welfare program (UBI is allocated to all adults, even wealthy ones) and 2) it's exceptionally low - just $514 a month. That's 30% minimum wage and a bit less than half the poverty threshold.

I don't think UBI will really work if it doesn't even have support at the poverty line. Part of the point of UBI is a segment of the population which can't find work due to obsolete skills can at least spend the energy to retrain, or perhaps pursue some endeavor that is difficult to monetize but provides some benefit to society. That's difficult to do when one is destitute. As well, it needs to be effective for large swaths of the population if we are indeed heading into a post-work society over the next 10-20 years.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#119

I'm actually surprised how rapidly this went downhill exactly how people were warning it would.

> surprised how rapidly this went downhill

“The aforesaid entity is not registered as a legal entity in Kenya.” Even for crypto, this is a particularly stupid fuckup.

Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

#120
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?

global north = anglo/scandi nations and the honorary westerners (israel, japan, s-korea, singapore)

global south is everyone else.

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