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

blockworks.co

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

#211

Post by px43 »

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…

> it doesn't solve the oracle problem

That was never the goal.

> There's a black market in China for these identities already

It is built such that eventually, Worldcoin identities can be trivially reclaimed by the iris owner, so the market for these identities will drop to zero once people realize they can just sell their same Worldcoin cred over and over again and some sucker is going to buy it.

Their only goal here is to create an identity registration system where..

1. people don't need money to register

2. people don't need to have special friends to register

This is a sybil resistance mechanism, and no other system today does this. Also, the registration is basically fully anonymous. There is no way for anyone to enumerate everyone who has registered, and there is no way to link a registrant with the wallet activity of a credential holder. Say what you will, but IMO these are some pretty useful mechanics, and there are quite a few applications of this technology that can't be done without something like this.

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

#212

Post by science4sail »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #106
brian_cloutier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the airdrop gives you something like 25 WLD, or $50. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems to be around this order of magnitude. Your hypothetical spoon-wielding lunatic would be risking serious consequences in order to earn $50; that doesn't seem like a particularly strong incentive.

cripple beggars in calcutta, for example, earn approx 30 cents per day and organized criminals maim and manage them in order to extract this amount. you're confident they wouldn't use a spoon to take 160 days worth of income? and comparing to non-cripple beggars, it's about a full year of income. that sounds like substantial incentive to me.

Even more ghastly, it seems like the criminals could use the spoons to convert non-cripple beggars into cripple beggars. That way they both get a one-time payment and a source of recurring revenue.

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

#214

Post by kemotep »

93po wrote: post #139
arcticbull wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it also assumes that the orb is perfect, and never hacked or reverse-engineered to generate completely arbitrary quantities of these keys. You're putting an awful lot of trust in this for a 'trustless' system.

There are ways to track which orb originated identities and it would be easy to mass remove a known compromised orb. It would result in some people needing to be rescanned but it would ultimately make this extremely high effort attack vector not very fruitful. Additionally any stolen orb would be immediately remotely blocked so this would take coordination with an orb operator who would also be banned for life

If there are ways to track whose id came from what orb it is completely possible to deanonymize people’s world ids.

And if worldid was ever used for a voting system, wiping out the votes of people who come from a specific area would be incredibly valuable. Attacking people’s identities even for only a few dollars each is a multibillion scam industry today.

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

#215

Post by gmerc »

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…

And they want to do nothing. That’s a silicon valley thing all along. The negative externalities of these massive scale business models are pushed to society.

The scale and lack of security design is the cause of them. The mass scams on marketplace, the payment fraud, the harassment, the swatting, etc.

If we forced these companies to meet sane standards (especially visible in fintech) and customer service, oh no, they couldn’t do so many stock buybacks anymore, what a tragedy.

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

#216

Post by paulryanrogers »

actionfromafar wrote: post #141
echelon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except eternal damnation, allegiance with a supernatural being, lakes of fire, etc.

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

#218

Post by JohnFen »

floydianspiral wrote: post #81
gumballindie wrote: post #2

I am seeing a pattern here and I am starting to believe that Sam Altman is an Accelerationist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism A lot of his actions, investments and marketing strategy seem to point in that direction.

It's weird how much of that wiki article (and others I just looked up) trends towards right/alt-right extremism as I have never thought of accelerationism as something fascists would take to. My original understanding of it was that ai/tech will become so advanced that it will take over a lot of the production and labor we currently do to feed, build, and supply the world with resources and when that part is automate…

Of course, one of the problems with the idea is that it endorses throwing innocent others under the economic bus. It's nice that they want to "speed through" that part -- but it still boils down to advocating harming people who aren't consenting in exchange for the possibility (not guarantee) of something better for later generations.

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

#219

Post by timmytokyo »

93po wrote: post #167
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #46

[flagged]

Yeah it’s pretty disappointing and really highlights for me that there isn’t anything special about the HN crowd versus other online platforms.

If there's anything special about HN participants, it's that many of them are slower than most at recognizing crypto scams. How many blow-ups does one need before adjusting one's priors on the legitimacy and utility of crypto? FTX, Celsius, 3arrows, TerraLuna, Binance, MtGox, etc. The list goes ever on.

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

#220

Post by jstummbillig »

arketyp wrote: post #21
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…

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.

What an interesting thought. Maybe the increasing amount of entities I get to interact with that do less and less to bring that prove goes to show how relatively unimportant being human will be.
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