Think having your eyeball scanned by "The Orb" to prove you're human is too dystopian? Just squat over The Block and pinch a loaf to mint a block on the Fecalcoin blockchain that is tied to your unique fecal biome.
Then take your steaming fresh Fecalcoin over to Fecalcoin's NFT marketplace, OpenGutter, and invest in whatever bullshit tickles your colon.
>Think having your eyeball scanned by "The Orb" to prove you're human is too dystopian? Just squat over The Block and pinch a loaf to mint a block on the Fecalcoin blockchain that is tied to your unique fecal biome.
Why is it even matter if you are human or not if you are able to input computational power to PoW coin in order to mine then trade coins or use them to trade goods. Imagine AI bot which is programmed to mine PoW coin then trade and make you profit while you input computational power and electricity as the energy resource.
I'm skeptical to say we've reached peak bullshit only because I remember confidently thinking the same a handful of times in the past few years and coin launches have gotten more and more absurd
It's more than "not open to general use" -- Apple's ID solutions are explicitly designed so that they only work for on-device authentication, and cannot be used to, as a random example that I'm sure no one will ever try to actually build, create a centralized database of biometric signatures for every individual on earth.
Lots of other replies about how Apple software doesn't give the granular data, but another reason you can't register on your own hardware is that they can't trust your device (since fake registrations could create free money for one person). The 'how it works' page here https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works specifies that they are doing integrity checking of the orb software.
The Aadhaar project faced the same issue, and learnt this lesson over a decade (ending up with trusted hardware, on-device signing, and rooting out untrusted operators).
Unfortunately, Worldcoin plans to deploy it in untrusted environments, which sounds like the biggest "hack me for free money" sign ever.
Apparently, animal irises are in their threat model, but with the incentives for operators aligned the way they are - expect them to find a good matching animal quite soon.
Looking at their website (https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works) their commitment to user privacy is very location-specific: the pictures taken in France have non-participants' faces blurred out. The photos taken everywhere else show everyone's faces.
Building that out into a larger idea, it feels like the operators are trying to make this appealing to people in less-well-off areas that don't have so many regulations. One might even call it exploitative.
People in these poorer areas could benefit more from such a biocryptocurrency. There is no need for a physical wallet anymore. I am not defending the idea but there may be upsides those creators have thought about.
Did you read it through? You need a physical wallet attached to your phone. The irisScan gives you a QR that links to the keys on your phone (via some privacy preserving magic crypto).
I'm unsure about what happens if you lose your phone, since you lose your keys. Do you get a new wallet? Do you get recovery keys to your old one? That seems very scary, if any Orb can sign recovery keys for any wallet for eg.
aside that scanning your eyeball for something called Worldcoin sounds like an Illuminati plot from the Deus Ex franchise, why does this need to be a cryptocurrency or how is a worldwide UBI even a business
Assuming this takes off, they'd only be holding 10% of the world's money, with their investors holding another 10%. It's downright altruistic by new blockchain standards.
I wish I were joking, but a quick search yielded the “Save Planet Earth Crypto Token” — what a no bullshit name — that’s basically tied to planting trees somehow someway. Apparently the roadmap to saving planet earth includes “Development/Release of v1 SavePlanetEarth Android/iOS App”, “Development of revolutionary v2 SavePlanetEarth Android/iOS App”, “SavePlanetEarth Merch”, etc.
There actually are projects that could have a more tangible impact on the environment, if anyone is curious. KlimaDAO is essentially connecting carbon offset and credit markets directly to crypto and forming a black hole of buy pressure. In places where such schemes are law, it could make emissions much more expensive over time.
This is creating a black hole of buy-side pressure for any and all carbon offsets that they work with(see their documentation for which). Broadening the carbon offset market is a good thing.
While this out of touch YC tech bro project will go nowhere, there are more sincere and less dystopic projects aiming to prove human uniqueness for the purposes of sybil resistance in web3:
> Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s,(A) and to God what is God’s.”
Matthew 22:19-21
> It also forced all people, great and small,(A) rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,(B) 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark,(C) which is the name of the beast or the number of its name
Under 'Christian Democratic' / Communitarian principles, I think that 'money' probably just be a responsibly managed currency, just a tool, like any other thing. So - above board, transparent, regulated, and where central bank policy would not be oriented just to capital holders but rather everyone in the community. Like everything else in life we want to work well - a bit boring, mundane, consistent, dependable.
Reading this has destroyed my faith in technology and hope for the future as well. How can we, as sane and rational beings, try to stop this sort of dystopia from devouring the human race?
playing it forward, what are the unintended consequences this incentivizes? Assuming a bad actor can get their hands on an orb, then they just need a supply of human eyeballs?
Privacy issues are paramount. The other being you can't create value out of thin air by issuing people magic numbers and expecting that to be useful in any way to people.
Assuming all money were uniformly distributed, do you think it would tay that way for long? Fixing systemic inequality requires more than initial conditions. The “dynamics matrix” governing money flow also needs to change, otherwise we’ll just find the same local minimum we’re currently at.
"Giving a free share to every person is exactly how a new global currency should be launched, no?"
No, that's not how currency works at all.
A currency is just a means of exchange, it itself is not wealth.
A 'global currency' for example, might be something backed by assets. So anyone with assets can trade those in for some currency. (Which would be hard because it's hard to value those assets, but you see the point.) You'd need a regulator to try to control how much currency exists at any given time, if you're trying to keep it stable with respect to other currencies. (Or not if you don't want to that.)
In order for the Orb scheme to have any use use, you'd have to start everyone off with quite a bit of 'new currency', but because it's issued arbitrarily, it's unlikely that anyone would value it. For example, why would the surgeon accept a currency at face value when the same amount of currency was given to his 17 year old kid who played video games all year?
Imagine if we did this with regular, paper bills.
Imagine if you printed high quality physical currency, called 'World Bucks' and gave everyone on planet earth 100 000 each of 'World Bucks'. Would that catch on as a currency? It might in some niches for some things, but pragmatically no, it would not. It would be treated about as valuable as Monopoly money.
You can't print value out of thin air.
Crypto has a way of distracting people from the reality of what's going on, especially those without any financial background might tend to believe that if you just printed a piece of paper and called it money, that you could finance an economy that way.
If SV want to help poor people, then they can probably help the most by helping to root out corruption, by investing, setting up real industry etc..
Privacy issues aside, identity is a huge problem in financial services. Not surprised that investments in this space are going far afield to meet this need. The most problematic aspect here: "crypto startup has one of the more comically rigorous user acquisition flows, licensing their Orb cameras to contractors across the globe who manually go through the person of verifying each and every new user on the network in every city of every country on every continent of the globe". This means a major up front investment in hardware likely to be outdated, damaged, vandalized, etc. very quickly alongside a major investment in physical human resources. Biometrics for identity in finance feels like the right direction, but this doesn't feel like the right answer.
Since there are a only a handful of orbs floating around I assume you have to save your eye hash to a phone or other device to make your wallet usable day to day. So what exactly is the point of the whole hash since it's only created and verified once at the time of wallet creation? What's to stop me from picking up my friend's phone that they accidentally left on my couch and sending all their orb bucks to my account? This just seems like silly security theater.
I don't think it's actually meant for operational security at all. It seems the iris scan is intended only to ensure that each human has at most one wallet.
Worldcoin does not use your biometric information as a password or private key. It's used to distribute unique identifiers, one per person. The Orb can't be used to recover private keys.
Imagining modifying my prosthetic eyeballs in such a way that scanning them with the "Orb" causes a buffer overflow and allows me to perform John Connor-style ATM withdrawals. Now I'm living in the future!
This would solve the problem of identity, i.e., knowing your customer, for decentralized financial platforms worldwide. It's a very real problem that must be solved, in a way that respects everyone's right to privacy. I hope Blania and Altman can pull it off. Kudos to them from trying!
That said, at first glance I thought the headline was for an article in The Onion.
I understand (and happy they exist) most of the frustrated comments here.
However, one thing to this is interesting to me. The idea that access to token of value exchange can (and maybe should) work based on biometrics, just because you exist. I absolutely can’t see how such a thing can be privately owned though.
That's because they are not able to make a meaningful change and money because of big corporations, unwillingness to change or adapt new ideas by companies, politics etc.
Actually, you are the one assuming they are technically ignorant just because they are slightly brown and not wearing stock western clothing, which is pretty offensive IMO.
1. Pay people to build a global iris scan database
2. Buy stock in rapid-acquisition iris scanners (I heard about 10 years ago that there were open-air scanners that could acquire 50 irises per minute, from a startup that wanted to use it for identification in an IoT setting)
107 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadhttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/remysmidt/president-tru...
Though that always reminds me of Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator:-
https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/The-Great-Dictator-Charle...
I think a better solution that would be both cheaper and more effective would simply be creating a good digital bank.
Then you'll love Fecalcoin!
Think having your eyeball scanned by "The Orb" to prove you're human is too dystopian? Just squat over The Block and pinch a loaf to mint a block on the Fecalcoin blockchain that is tied to your unique fecal biome.
Then take your steaming fresh Fecalcoin over to Fecalcoin's NFT marketplace, OpenGutter, and invest in whatever bullshit tickles your colon.
Why is it even matter if you are human or not if you are able to input computational power to PoW coin in order to mine then trade coins or use them to trade goods. Imagine AI bot which is programmed to mine PoW coin then trade and make you profit while you input computational power and electricity as the energy resource.
Serious comments aside, I know one place where this would take off: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/world/middleeast/trump-gl...
Unfortunately, Worldcoin plans to deploy it in untrusted environments, which sounds like the biggest "hack me for free money" sign ever.
At least with 2FA devices, when the thugs show up to ask, you have something to hand them that doesn't involve cutting off a part of your body.
and ( warning: NSFW ) Yes - https://youtu.be/CbM--4-z0cs?t=87
Building that out into a larger idea, it feels like the operators are trying to make this appealing to people in less-well-off areas that don't have so many regulations. One might even call it exploitative.
I'm unsure about what happens if you lose your phone, since you lose your keys. Do you get a new wallet? Do you get recovery keys to your old one? That seems very scary, if any Orb can sign recovery keys for any wallet for eg.
Step 1: create a blockchain.
Step 2: add some weird twist. Maybe each token represents an acorn of an oak so that we can save the planet by planting more oaks.
Step 3: hold onto most of the tokens yourself but give away a bunch to kickstart the economy of your coin and give it some minimal value.
Step 4: get Coinbase to pick up your coin to increase its value.
Step 5: sell your coins and profit while providing absolutely no value to anyone.
https://saveplanetearth.io/
https://docs.klimadao.finance/about-klima-dao
https://papers.humanode.io/whitepaper.pdf
https://www.brightid.org/whitepaper
Brilliant. Is that licensed under CC orrrr….?
> Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s,(A) and to God what is God’s.”
Matthew 22:19-21
> It also forced all people, great and small,(A) rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,(B) 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark,(C) which is the name of the beast or the number of its name
Rev 13:16-17
It's like all the worst things about SV rolled into one silver turd.
At least some Machiavellian or dumb things are actually workable, in the 'business' sense, I think this one doesn't even make sense as a startup.
This strikes me as a good problem to solve. Giving a free share to every person is exactly how a new global currency should be launched, no?
How would you solve it differently?
No, that's not how currency works at all.
A currency is just a means of exchange, it itself is not wealth.
A 'global currency' for example, might be something backed by assets. So anyone with assets can trade those in for some currency. (Which would be hard because it's hard to value those assets, but you see the point.) You'd need a regulator to try to control how much currency exists at any given time, if you're trying to keep it stable with respect to other currencies. (Or not if you don't want to that.)
In order for the Orb scheme to have any use use, you'd have to start everyone off with quite a bit of 'new currency', but because it's issued arbitrarily, it's unlikely that anyone would value it. For example, why would the surgeon accept a currency at face value when the same amount of currency was given to his 17 year old kid who played video games all year?
Imagine if we did this with regular, paper bills.
Imagine if you printed high quality physical currency, called 'World Bucks' and gave everyone on planet earth 100 000 each of 'World Bucks'. Would that catch on as a currency? It might in some niches for some things, but pragmatically no, it would not. It would be treated about as valuable as Monopoly money.
You can't print value out of thin air.
Crypto has a way of distracting people from the reality of what's going on, especially those without any financial background might tend to believe that if you just printed a piece of paper and called it money, that you could finance an economy that way.
If SV want to help poor people, then they can probably help the most by helping to root out corruption, by investing, setting up real industry etc..
I thought biometrics = a password you cannot change = a bad idea.
How is this different?
https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design
That said, at first glance I thought the headline was for an article in The Onion.
However, one thing to this is interesting to me. The idea that access to token of value exchange can (and maybe should) work based on biometrics, just because you exist. I absolutely can’t see how such a thing can be privately owned though.
The smartest minds of this generation are wasting on crypto.
For example Gates and Jobs were never about ad business model.
> https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OrbOperato...
Wowing the natives with shine and magic. Neo-colonialism alive and well in SV. They have to be self-aware, right? Right?!
2. Buy stock in rapid-acquisition iris scanners (I heard about 10 years ago that there were open-air scanners that could acquire 50 irises per minute, from a startup that wanted to use it for identification in an IoT setting)
3. Sell iris database to oppressive governments
4. Profit