Even if they have a database, what can they use it for? scanning eyes isn't a simple operation, you can't scan with a smartphone etc. How can it possibly be used or sold to?
Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
351–360 of 379 posts
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support. Followed by > Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective. Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up? If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on s…
> Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up? Yes. (It’s paradoxical because it is, though an unremarkably old paradox at that.) > If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere It does if that war just blockaded the barley! > Better to just value the coins in a nonspecific…
The way I'd do it, each user gets their own type of coin and then they form webs of trust such that tokens flow along paths of transitive trust. In a highly connected part of the web, everybody is treating everybody else's tokens as interchangeable.
Things would differ from traditional currency in cases where users are not well connected. Imagine a newcomer, flush with tokens from a disconnected or distantly connected part of the network. They may not be able to find any locals that will accept their tokens. (This sort of hygiene discourages Sybil accounts and makes difficult the kind of bank-driven shenanigans that were typical of US foreign policy in the 70's). If you want to do remote business you should have to gain the trust of the locals first, and you should have to fear that they'll revoke that trust in response to bad behavior on your part.
The value of a loaf of bread, as expressed in a conventional currency would then be a function of whether the baker had needs that weren't met by the local economy. Communities that are highly dependent on the global economy would have a great need of conventional currency. Self sufficient communities, less so (this is to prevent the formation of the overly complex, and therefore fragile, supply chains that we see today).
So yes, I expect that the structure that you describe would emerge, with densely connected hubs etc. The UBI token would only make sense for use within a hub though. You'd probably use a strictly-scarcity-based currency like USD or whatever for inter-hub commerce.
This is because if the goods are coming or going a great distance then you don't really need all the trust stuff since you're unlikely to be in a position to care about the externalities of their manufacture/use anyway. By contrast, if the goods are coming from your neighbor's back yard then you probably want to be using something besides conventional currency, something that lets you threaten to revoke trust if their operations are poisoning the drinking water or whatever.
Mostly this design is inspired by how CirclesUBI does it, but there's a few tweaks I'd make of I were going to try to build such a thing.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, to me that's one of the most poisonous things about bubbles and gold rushes. A bunch of people make good money doing things that are terrible, ridiculous, or both. They don't learn the lessons they would in a normal environment, and so they may be like that forever, and may continue to do terrible/ridiculous things as long as the money holds out.
“Serial Entrepreneur”
Serial as in killer.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.
Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. You can scare a lot of people by telling them untrue stuff.
Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue.
That is literally what he is doing.
People walk up to an "orb," get their eyeballs scanned, and a unique key goes into a database.
What part of the parent's statement is untrue?
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#355I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.
He was always sketchy, and the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI (the exact opposite of OpenAI's initial mission). And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta. History is always mess…
the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI
To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI.
The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments.
It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backers [0] like a16z [1], Coinbase [2], Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) [3], Three Arrows Capital (3AC) [4], Digital Currency Group (DCG) [5]? [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211021160923/https://worldcoin... [1]: https://twitter.com/KyleSGibson/status/1511065326624063501 [2]: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-102 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Arrest_and_c... [4]: https://www.bloomberg.co…
maybe worldcoin is just another unregistered security offering, launched on dubious exchanges like Binance, to ensure the backers can pump and dump their shitcoins on retail to meet liquidity issues elsewhere?
shhhhhhh
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle. Boy, I'm really proud to be working in Tech in 2023...
> making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle Except he's doing neither of these. He's just talking about them while raising money.
He's just talking about them while raising money.
He's not just talking about them. The whole reason this thread exists is because he is acting on the second one.
There was a more detailed article about the whole scheme, and how far it's gone in the New York Times yesterday.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> emphasizing in some contexts that the hashes on the chain are all that technically HAVE to be retained Even the context of the primary reason they cite for collecting retinal data (to prevent the same person from getting $50 multiple times) requires they keep this data for at least as long as they're paying people to scan their eyeballs.
Why do they need the original to prevent people to get paid multiple times? What good is the hash they're storing if the same person's retinas don't reliably produce the same hash?
I'm talking about retaining the hash, not the original eyeball data. Retaining the hash is nearly as bad as retaining the original data, so I consider them both to be roughly equivalent for this use case.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
There won't be UBI. There's work and death. And if AI truly replaces us, it's the latter. I'm not trying to be cynical I'm simply being blunt about how systems work. You and your environment have to "click together" so you live. In the wild, this means mostly surviving cold, hot, stay dry, find things to eat, and not be eaten. In society, however, it means being useful to the system somehow, so you get access to othe…
> With [_____] however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful. {mechanical looms,mechanized farming,factory mass production,computerized tabulation,AI} This has been the progression of economies since steam power after ~1720. Automation replaces a category of work, everyone decrees the loss of jobs, workers reallocate into new j…
Survivorship bias is an interesting thing "I keep living another day, therefore I'll always live another day, I'm immortal." The grave is full of these immortal people.
And we're not richer today. It used to be one person (usually the man) provided for the family and the other (typically the woman) took care of the home and children. One job per family was enough. You may consider it outdated, but think of why it is. It's suddenly not fashionable to take care of your home and children. It fashionable to have two jobs, and for your spouse to also need two jobs. And you're miserable.
No one "chose" this. If they were offered a choice, no one would pick it. The system picked it for us. And we're too myopic to understand what we're walking into. The current employment figures are a sham. The homeless and the unemployed are on the streets, crime is rampant, and this is still paradise compared to what it'll be in 5 years.
So the last refuge is our intelligence, like during the industrial revolution and computing yes? The good old times. "Machines will do the work, so we have more time to think." But this time, AI is coming for our intelligence. Thinking machines. Education won't save you because your education is outdated before they even give you the diploma. And AI doesn't really need you that much lately. You're just clicking a button. And then your boss notices that. And lays you off. Welcome to the singularity.
Re: Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it. Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in w…
Expanding the comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606 Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, b…
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 distribution problem is like some artist trying to help build a car by offering to find the right shape for the wheels, and then using the fact they offered in promoting themselves. Thanks, but really, you aren't offering much, pretty sure we're already going with "round".
That, in a nutshell, is what I've been trying to express. I think they just attached themselves to UBI as a buzzword to sound better, when really their change of usefully being involved in a real UBI implementation is likely close to zero because it makes no sense for them to be involved in any feasible plan that could move forward.
It's no different than if they said they were going to help enable people to pay taxes (except in negative connotation instead of a positive one). The portion of the problem they'd be helping with is a mostly solved problem, so what are they really offering that's likely to be of use? If it's extremely unlikely they'll be used for whatever reason in the problem space they're advertising themselves in, what's their reason for doing so, to actually advertise their intent or to associate themselves with something?
> This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.
That's a prime difficulty of a cryptocoin, not of a government entity dealing with its citizens. Again, I'll note, in UBI the actual distribution of funds is so simple and solved as to be inconsequential. Who to give money to and how much are the main things to work out on the distribution side, and are entirely policy based, and thus no blockchain product is going to help.