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

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

#261

Post by omeid2 »

wmf wrote: post #63
simonsarris wrote: post #8

I think you should instead just read what Worldcoin wrote. It's quite short, and I think easy to consider false. https://worldcoin.org/cofounder-letter There are a few words about economic opportunity but little explanation, so you can discount that part. They don't seem to believe it beyond UBI distribution, which has the same problems as any distribution today[1] Their main sell: > scale a reliable solution for dis…

If you can identify a person, in any way, they are no longer private. This is not necessarily applicable. There's cryptography from 20 years ago (e.g. the work of Stefan Brands) that can show that someone has a World ID without revealing which ID it is. If no "username" is ever revealed then it can't be linked to anything.

If the idea is to make "World ID" universal, in that everyone is going to have one, what does attesting that someone has one means? Nothing. Virtually nothing. Everyone either has one or can get one, to attest that they do means nothing of value.

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

#262

Post by aleph_minus_one »

JohnFen wrote: post #79
wongarsu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing finance system is largely reputation based, with a light side of contract enforcement and a heavy dose of middlemen. It mostly works, but one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.

> one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust. I don't think it does that, though, at least when used as a currency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.

> The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.

The cypherpunk answer to this dilemma is that revertability of transactions under some circumstances is a service that, if it is desired (for quite some applications of cryptocurrencies, it is), should be build in a layer above the "bare-metal" blockchain.

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

#263

Post by capableweb »

morkalork wrote: post #17
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.

I think he's just out of touch. Here's another example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9y5n/the-people-building-a...

> Andrej Karpathy, another OpenAI employee [...] “My hope going into Oppenheimer was that it would be a kind of true story ‘Avengers of Science,’” he said in a tweet. “It's still a good movie with lots of gems but the focus was elsewhere.”

These are the type of people building and running OpenAI? We're in a fun ride, seems they're more out of touch than I could have imagined.

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

#264

Post by nemo44x »

Nursie wrote: post #250
nemo44x wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the main idea behind accelerationism from a Landian perspective. That capitalism is just getting started and that it's unstoppable and that it won't transition into socialisim like Marx predicted but rather will encompass more and more of everything and be the vehicle for the next evolution into a cybernetic species. It's the evolution of evolution and it's unstoppable. So get on with it and learn to love it.…

I mean, it’s pretty easy to imagine capitalism precipitating the end of the world …

I don't see that per-se. I think it's more likely that capitalism continues to rapidly advance technology to the point where we truly do evolve evolution. So a certain part of the global population will have access to DNA synthesizers and other biotech and AI and can reproduce a master race of post-humans that will dominate and eventually annihilate Homosapiens. After a few generations of rapid improvement (a singularity where post-humans and AI merge into a single entity) they'll view the rest of the world as we view other primates today and won't have much use for them. If not through intentional genocide then just being unable to compete for ecosystem, etc. Homosapiens will fade away as Neanderthals did.

Capitalism is a system (much more than just an economic system) that allows for selection like this. In a sense a type of market driven Darwinism which chooses how energy is spent developing the tools that allow humans to evolve rapidly into the next thing. That it's natural that Capitalism started with the industrial revolution which marks the beginning of humans evolving tech rapidly. It's almost as if it was inevitable once we reached that stage. To be against it is futile as it's as natural as gravity. And we just keep getting better at it.

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

#265

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JohnFen wrote: post #79
wongarsu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing finance system is largely reputation based, with a light side of contract enforcement and a heavy dose of middlemen. It mostly works, but one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.

> one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust. I don't think it does that, though, at least when used as a currency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.

When people say "trust" in the context of Bitcoin, it's about not having to trust a middle man, e.g. PayPal, who are notorious for capriciously locking you out of your account and stealing your money, or denying service to marginalized populations.

It doesn't mean you can't get ripped off by the party you're transacting with directly, but neither does cash, unless you pay for some kind of insurance. Which you can also do with cryptocurrency.

Credit cards come with a form insurance built in, but that doesn't mean you're not paying for it (they charge fees), including when you trust your counterparty and don't want to pay extra for insurance on a low-risk transaction.

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

#266

Post by sneak »

audunw wrote: post #111
wongarsu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing finance system is largely reputation based, with a light side of contract enforcement and a heavy dose of middlemen. It mostly works, but one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.

> is removing the need for reputation and trust Except it doesn’t. That’s exactly what we’ve learned over the last decade. It never did either of those things. What it did is that it clouded reputation and trust just about enough to trick people into the illusion of a “trustless” system. There is no such thing. In the end you trust the coders trusted by the people who use the apps implementing the blockchain. There’s…

Controlling the commercial web is not the same as controlling the web.

Holding a bunch of bitcoin or mining a bunch of blocks does not allow you or anyone else to redefine bitcoin's fundamental rules.

These are incorrect statements.

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

#267

Post by ineptech »

gonehome wrote: post #158
EthanHeilman wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world I buy this. Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem[0]. I believe this approach of identities withstanding "the test of time" solves the oracle problem but at the cost of a delayed solution. Initially you have lots and lots of bots and Sybil attacks are common. Then after a while, i…

Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle. I think you can get there with something like Urbit IDs that are easy to ban. If IDs are not infinite you can some protection against abuse - pairing that with some proof-of-humanity and you can get closer, but there are still issues of someone doing the proof and then selling thei…

> Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think something like this could've worked, which is why I was so sad over its demise. I think Keybase (like the MIT PGP keyring, which it is sort of a fancier version of) was predicated on the idea that it's much easier to build a centralized keyring and then decentralize it once it's widely adopted than to build a decentralized keyring from the ground up.

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

#268

Post by Nursie »

nemo44x wrote: post #264
Nursie wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s pretty easy to imagine capitalism precipitating the end of the world …

I don't see that per-se. I think it's more likely that capitalism continues to rapidly advance technology to the point where we truly do evolve evolution. So a certain part of the global population will have access to DNA synthesizers and other biotech and AI and can reproduce a master race of post-humans that will dominate and eventually annihilate Homosapiens. After a few generations of rapid improvement (a singula…

Or capitalism will fuck the environment so thoroughly before we get there that the above can’t transpire.

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

#269

Post by Alex3917 »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #100
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 ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world I buy this. Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem[0]. I believe this approach of identities withstanding "the test of time" solves the oracle problem but at the cost of a delayed solution. Initially you have lots and lots of bots and Sybil attacks are common. Then after a while, i…

> Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem

I also wrote about almost the exact same thing as what Worldcoin is doing back in 2006:

https://www.alexkrupp.com/fourwebs.html

As proof of the original publication date, not only is it in the Wayback Machine, but it's also cited in several academic papers and books. It's great that someone is actually doing it, but I'm also kind of ticked they didn't cite this essay as prior art in their patent application.

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

#270

Post by greiskul »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #197
ineptech wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will. The Oracle problem isn't the fact that this doesn't happen today, it's that it can never happen in a way that is trustable. When Congress (or anyone else) does decide to publish the election results to a blockchain, every dollar bet on the outcome will be a prize to be won by anyone who can sub…

That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq. You're _never_ sure that your counter-party to some communication is who you think they are. The definition of the oracle problem you propose applies to almost the entirety of the modern world and would come up in conversation all the time. TLS and other measures make me _very_ sure google.com is reso…

All the existing systems we have to solve this area are trust based systems. You trust your browser and OS to choose the correct CAs to trust, and they are the ones that validate to you that google.com is Google. Whole schtick of crypto folks is about reating trustless systems. It is trivial to add real world information to a blockchain if you have an authority that you trust, the oracle problem is how to do that when you don't.

Even the Congress example for who is president, we literally had a bunch of people certify fake election results last election and try to overthrow the US goverment. No matter how much you scream that one day the blockchain will be the reality, that goes agaisnt every single judicial and political system we have in the world, and if you disagree with it, I hope someday somebody doesn't hack your house away from you, cause then you will learn why all proper property systems have judicial systems with actual human beings running on human logic with power to do fixes.

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