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

Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

blockworks.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 370 posts

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#141

Post by actionfromafar »

echelon wrote: post #47
JohnFen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID. Literally everything about this is a huge nope for me.

In the evangelical setting of the 90's, where TV preachers were openly broadcast over the airwaves, they routinely claimed everything was "the mark of the beast". Credit cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, "new world orders", the United Nations. All of these things were tools of the devil, marking your soul for eternal damnation. I get the sense they would have had a field day with Worldcoin. I can hear it now. "Th…

The thing is though, each such “mark of the beast”, gets incrementally closer to what the evangelicals warn about.

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#142

Post by anileated »

pcwelder wrote: post #114
arketyp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how, in the end, the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world. Sort of how the ultimate decentralized currency is encompassed in the global market of rising and falling economic powers. The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles. There is only the test of time. Or something along that line.

> The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles To expand on this and correct your first statement, physical engagement can't be a proof of personhood either. There can never be a proof of personhood, or if someone is a human or not, or if someone is conscious, etc. It's more practically applicable than it sounds. Think conjoined twins (sharing a brain), disabled people, people in coma, long memory los…

The proof of humanhood is being made of meat, and that is what Sam Altman went after.

The mistake he made is adding blockchain and crypto to that physical verification.

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#143

Post by 93po »

arcticbull wrote: post #5

Like any other non-coin crypto tech, Worldcoin doesn't do what it set out to do because it doesn't solve the oracle problem. If you trust their orb, it generates a wallet for you - but anyone, human or otherwise - can use that wallet. There's a black market in China for these identities already [1] and of course the response from Worldcoin was there's nothing they can do - because there's nothing they can do. So this…

Yes but you’re missing the point that it’s a relatively easy and solved problem to ban accounts and have circles of trust for banned accounts. Because these buyers are constrained in how many accounts they can buy it’s relatively effortless to ban bad actors compared to literally limitless fake personas today.

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#144

Post by latchkey »

philwelch wrote: post #89
zer8k wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, is there any cryptocurrency that provides actual value to people? The blockchain can be trivially deanonymized from my understanding. It's difficult to get coins without at any point revealing your identity. So, if you're not in a circle of people who will physically trade coin for cash (or vis-versa) there seems to be no privacy argument. I just fail to see crypto as anything but a scam - period. It…

I’ve been told you can use Monero to buy drugs.

I've been told I can use USD to buy drugs too. In fact, USD is the number one currency on the planet for nefarious purposes, by an absurd amount.

Monero has a 24h buy/sell volume of only $110m. What do you think the global volume is for drug/nefarious trade?

Using crypto for "bad things" is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

Given that Mastercard just stopped allowing debit card usage at Cannabis stores (which makes sense, it is a source of fraud with cashbacks), it seems like there should be a way that people can buy things without having to take on risk by carrying cash into a store.

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#145

Post by drngdds »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #131
Finnucane wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, the promises they claim are different from the actual results, and they know this as they are saying them. It is a con, like everything crypto.

What is the thing they are claiming which is different from the actual results and which they know is different from the actual results?

That it actually freakin' works at doing the thing it's trying to do (providing a currency with a guarantee that each account is controlled by one person)

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#146

Post by __alexs »

cwkoss wrote: post #120

Any decentralized system that uses biometrics for authentication rather than just identification is doomed to fail spectacularly. Biometrics are like a username NOT like a password. When a piece of wolrdcoin is inevitably compromised, people have no means of rolling a new iris. The whole thing will come crashing down. There are so many stupid decisions this team is making. Like, users can opt into the orbs retaining…

As much as I think Worldcoin is dumb they do get this part right in that they only use the iris scan as a unique identifier to prevent multiple sign ups from the same physical bag of meat^H^H^H^H^H person.

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#148

Post by 93po »

unboxingelf wrote: post #22

Worldcoin is simply another pre-mined, VC backed shitcoin - albeit worst because they’re building a biometrics database. - VCs dump money in (SBF, a16z, etc) - 25% of the coins are kept for the founders + investors How many times do people have to get burned on these scams? Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.

WC isn’t doing any of the traditional shitcoin behavior. They ban discussion about price speculation. There’s no pre-sales. There’s no sales at all until the coin actually launches. One of the major premises of worldcoin is UBI - literally giving money away. I genuinely believe Sam Altman started WC with others for altruistic reasons

Re: Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse

#150

Post by gonehome »

w4termelon wrote: post #87
gonehome wrote: post #7

[flagged]

> The goal is how do you verify humanity in a world where bots are indistinguishable from humans. You don't. Crypto evangelists, as usual, are trying to put their square blockchain peg in a round hole. They need to stop and check their premises.

There are things you can do to verify humanity.

Make a human go to a place for example (though even this has difficulties with fraud). I'm not making any specific claims about world coin other than the goal they're trying to solve makes sense as a goal in a world where bots are increasingly capable of mimicking humans successfully, we want to know when something is human and when it isn't.

Attempting to solve that problem now before it becomes critical makes sense, not every attempt will be good.

A better article than this one would have dug into that problem.

Post reply on HN