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Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency

59 points by marban 5y ago

nowherebeen 5y ago
This is the website if anyone is wondering.. https://worldcoin.org/ https://worldcoin.org/ © 2021 Tools for Humanity Corp.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wilde 5y ago
  Their logo is cool, but it also feels faintly evil to me because I watched too much mid-2000s sci-fi.
randomhodler84 5y ago
Gross. Good luck with that. I’ll stick to actually valuable things like bitcoin secured by Ecdsa keys thank you very much.
artfulhippo 5y ago
Is this being censored? I would think this thread would have 1000 comments by now.
- runbathtime 5y ago
  Probably, my comment was downvoted.
- choppaface 5y ago
  Sometimes the HN mods will “re-bump” a story to see if it will get more votes. Would be interesting to know what they did in this case. The moderation of the thread about YC Founders skipping the vax line was unquestionably biased in favor of YC.
  - dang 5y ago
    > was unquestionably biased in favor of YC Literally the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, but we're extremely conscious and careful about it. The first step in onboarding any HN moderator is to instill in them the fear of god, hellfire, and the internet about this. If you want to share what you specifically saw about what specific thread, I could try to reconstruct what we did. Just in general, though, it's extremely easy to read sinister patterns into this material, for the simple reason that there are more than enough data points to support any pattern. This is the curse of the von Neumann elephant (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=von%20neumann%20elephant&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Or to put it another way: "unquestionably biased" is internet speak for "I saw a thing that I thought kind of looked like that". > Would be interesting to know what they did in this case I'm afraid the rather boring answer is that we did nothing because we didn't see it (until now, 18 hours later). It's not the sort of article we'd put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), because there's little new information there. The authors seemed to have "caught" these guys in the act of working on their startup, cornered them for an interview, but didn't manage to squeeze much out of them. So I think we'd probably all be better off waiting for the thing to actually launch. That's one of the more reliable HN principles: "there's no harm in waiting" - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
    - choppaface 5y ago
      Dang, your use of rhetoric here is flaimbait. Where I have moderated, your behavior would not be tolerated as a user. What you’re doing here is purely for your own entertainment using the security of your privileged status. Here is your post to where you admit to making major modifications to a post that had a title the slightest bit critical of YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400556 Dang, I’m not going to debate this with you, and your replies to me here in public are frankly unwelcome.
- dang 5y ago
  No. There's a mild software downweight on bloomberg.com the same way there is for other major media websites, but that's all. I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'censored', but there wasn't any moderator intervention nor any software penalty other than the one I just described. I'd be happy to turn the penalty off, but that title is impossibly baity and I'm not quite sure what to do about that. Also, other than a weird iris-scanning orb and something-something cryptocurrency, there really isn't much information there. Bloomberg is usually better than that title, which makes me wonder if they're compensating.
- afgasgbui 5y ago
  A lot of people, even around here, are bored of obviously money-losing startups and cryptocurrencies. What is there to say?
runbathtime 5y ago
Is scan your eyeball the new proof of work? Can't read this article- behind a paywall.
runbathtime 5y ago
You cannot just create a crypto out of thin air and expect it to have value, unless you are selling eye scan data to generate revenue that might give value to these tokens somehow. I fail to see how any crypto can be UBI, if they do not have value in dollars. UBI cannot be done through a private person, must be done through the government, which makes me think he is intending to partner with the government to make this a reality. It sounds really really disgusting. It actually seems like a backdoor to raising money via ICO, the con being you provide your eye scan (something valuable) for a worthless token (something worth zero). The con being they con people into believing these tokens are in fact valuable somehow. If this was a contract, it would fail contracts law 101 since something of value must be exchanged on each side.
- rspeele 5y ago
  > You cannot just create a crypto out of thin air and expect it to have value Counterpoint: every crypto? Doesn't make sense to me either.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Not quite -- in Bitcoin (and other hard money, proof of work coins) we use energy to mine, and that ensures that bitcoin is hard to produce. We must consider the 'stock to flow' model of emission. Proof of Stake coins are made up out of thin air and are actually worthless.
    - rspeele 5y ago
      The work isn't what makes Bitcoins valuable though. I could create a new PoW cryptocurrency with twice the mining difficulty of Bitcoin, and it wouldn't be worth as much as Bitcoin, let alone twice as much. The labor theory of value doesn't hold up. The only thing that makes Bitcoin, PoS coins, gold, or anything else valuable is a market of willing buyers. There seems to be no rule stopping that market from developing for practically any asset no matter how absurd.
    - Tepix 5y ago
      If i create another PoW coin then it will also become valuable if i just increase the hashrate enough? No. It has to be desirable, too. Given that bitcoin has lost most of its utility since its inception, it's also losing its desirability.
sushid 5y ago
So it's he's creating a Minority Report crypto wallet and airdropping privacy centric coins to everyone in the world?
pcaversaccio 5y ago
I'm convinced this entire UBI idea is a fucking scam. It completely contradicts the survival of the fittest notion (here in the context of work). I'm a person who always embraces new ideas but this one that combines the cryptocurrency hype with UBI is really more a marketing gig rather a value-adding product/service. This idea won't fix any problems out there.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >It completely contradicts the survival of the fittest notion (here in the context of work). It doesn't because working gets you even more money. The contradiction lies in the idea of taxing work to pay for it.
  - pcaversaccio 5y ago
    Survive !== having a lot of money. UBI assures that all people are "survivable" w/o any effort. Therefore, there is no competition to survive in any case. Hence the contradiction.
    - odyssey7 5y ago
      Are you advocating that a good economic system is one that kills people who aren’t working? I just don’t clearly understand what you mean by “survive.”
      - runnerup 5y ago
        For those who believe that a good economic system is one that kills the "least fit"...I wonder what their idea of an optimal ratio of fit-to-killed is. Should the policy levers be set so that each year 0.1% of the population starves/freezes/overheats to death, or 1%? For a system which targets killing off "unfit" people, what would be signs of killing off too many people? Killing off too few? Instead of a stack-ranking system, is there some minimum bar that they imagine people should have to exceed? I wonder how many people would have exceeded that bar 500 years ago, or 500 years from now.
22c 5y ago
Scant technical details in the article, but I assume this is part of a "Proof of Identity" scheme. I think, ultimately, Proof of Identity solves a lot of "fairness" problems that other schemes don't solve, things like having coins minted by a fair lottery system or making sure airdrops don't get gamed, etc. In general, what I'd like to see more with identity systems is the ability to have pseudonyms. eg. I should be able to prove to Service X that I am the only "me" on their platform, but I don't necessarily want you to associate with the Service X "me" with the "me" that's on Service Y. For some reason, companies that are working on these kind of identity systems always seem to overlook that use case. Perhaps it doesn't sound good in the pitch to their investors.
- jmole 5y ago
  It would nice to be able to have a provably private system for something like this. Proof of identity, or proof of personhood, or whatever you want to call it is going to be a foundational element of online trust in the coming years. As a forum or community, I want the ability to ban a troll without them coming back under a different pseudonym. But at the same time, I don't want to post under my real name, or even something that can be linked back to me. So you ideally should be able to have multiple pseudonymous identities that can't be linked together by a 3rd party, but also have the ability to block the "root" identity, even if you only know the pseudonym.
Tepix 5y ago
The idea of giving every human (now and in the future) the same amount of coins is both obvious and enticing. Iris scans sound pretty good. The other way forward would be to give everyone their coins who has a digital id certificate issued by his/her government. That would however exclude a lot of people right now and could also be insecure if any of the governments screws up (i.e. it's just a matter of time).
eimrine 5y ago
Is it possible to download that eyeball data for using in malicious aims? Blockchain approach means that nothing can be hidden on somebody's private server.

59 points by marban 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wilde 5y ago
Their logo is cool, but it also feels faintly evil to me because I watched too much mid-2000s sci-fi.

Gross. Good luck with that. I’ll stick to actually valuable things like bitcoin secured by Ecdsa keys thank you very much.

artfulhippo 5y ago

Is this being censored? I would think this thread would have 1000 comments by now.

runbathtime 5y ago
Probably, my comment was downvoted.
choppaface 5y ago
Sometimes the HN mods will “re-bump” a story to see if it will get more votes. Would be interesting to know what they did in this case. The moderation of the thread about YC Founders skipping the vax line was unquestionably biased in favor of YC.
- dang 5y ago
  > was unquestionably biased in favor of YC Literally the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, but we're extremely conscious and careful about it. The first step in onboarding any HN moderator is to instill in them the fear of god, hellfire, and the internet about this. If you want to share what you specifically saw about what specific thread, I could try to reconstruct what we did. Just in general, though, it's extremely easy to read sinister patterns into this material, for the simple reason that there are more than enough data points to support any pattern. This is the curse of the von Neumann elephant (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=von%20neumann%20elephant&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Or to put it another way: "unquestionably biased" is internet speak for "I saw a thing that I thought kind of looked like that". > Would be interesting to know what they did in this case I'm afraid the rather boring answer is that we did nothing because we didn't see it (until now, 18 hours later). It's not the sort of article we'd put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), because there's little new information there. The authors seemed to have "caught" these guys in the act of working on their startup, cornered them for an interview, but didn't manage to squeeze much out of them. So I think we'd probably all be better off waiting for the thing to actually launch. That's one of the more reliable HN principles: "there's no harm in waiting" - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
  - choppaface 5y ago
    Dang, your use of rhetoric here is flaimbait. Where I have moderated, your behavior would not be tolerated as a user. What you’re doing here is purely for your own entertainment using the security of your privileged status. Here is your post to where you admit to making major modifications to a post that had a title the slightest bit critical of YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400556 Dang, I’m not going to debate this with you, and your replies to me here in public are frankly unwelcome.
dang 5y ago
No. There's a mild software downweight on bloomberg.com the same way there is for other major media websites, but that's all. I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'censored', but there wasn't any moderator intervention nor any software penalty other than the one I just described. I'd be happy to turn the penalty off, but that title is impossibly baity and I'm not quite sure what to do about that. Also, other than a weird iris-scanning orb and something-something cryptocurrency, there really isn't much information there. Bloomberg is usually better than that title, which makes me wonder if they're compensating.
afgasgbui 5y ago
A lot of people, even around here, are bored of obviously money-losing startups and cryptocurrencies. What is there to say?

runbathtime 5y ago

Is scan your eyeball the new proof of work? Can't read this article- behind a paywall.

runbathtime 5y ago

You cannot just create a crypto out of thin air and expect it to have value, unless you are selling eye scan data to generate revenue that might give value to these tokens somehow. I fail to see how any crypto can be UBI, if they do not have value in dollars. UBI cannot be done through a private person, must be done through the government, which makes me think he is intending to partner with the government to make this a reality. It sounds really really disgusting. It actually seems like a backdoor to raising money via ICO, the con being you provide your eye scan (something valuable) for a worthless token (something worth zero). The con being they con people into believing these tokens are in fact valuable somehow. If this was a contract, it would fail contracts law 101 since something of value must be exchanged on each side.

rspeele 5y ago
> You cannot just create a crypto out of thin air and expect it to have value Counterpoint: every crypto? Doesn't make sense to me either.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  Not quite -- in Bitcoin (and other hard money, proof of work coins) we use energy to mine, and that ensures that bitcoin is hard to produce. We must consider the 'stock to flow' model of emission. Proof of Stake coins are made up out of thin air and are actually worthless.
  - rspeele 5y ago
    The work isn't what makes Bitcoins valuable though. I could create a new PoW cryptocurrency with twice the mining difficulty of Bitcoin, and it wouldn't be worth as much as Bitcoin, let alone twice as much. The labor theory of value doesn't hold up. The only thing that makes Bitcoin, PoS coins, gold, or anything else valuable is a market of willing buyers. There seems to be no rule stopping that market from developing for practically any asset no matter how absurd.
  - Tepix 5y ago
    If i create another PoW coin then it will also become valuable if i just increase the hashrate enough? No. It has to be desirable, too. Given that bitcoin has lost most of its utility since its inception, it's also losing its desirability.

sushid 5y ago

So it's he's creating a Minority Report crypto wallet and airdropping privacy centric coins to everyone in the world?

pcaversaccio 5y ago

I'm convinced this entire UBI idea is a fucking scam. It completely contradicts the survival of the fittest notion (here in the context of work). I'm a person who always embraces new ideas but this one that combines the cryptocurrency hype with UBI is really more a marketing gig rather a value-adding product/service. This idea won't fix any problems out there.

imtringued 5y ago
>It completely contradicts the survival of the fittest notion (here in the context of work). It doesn't because working gets you even more money. The contradiction lies in the idea of taxing work to pay for it.
- pcaversaccio 5y ago
  Survive !== having a lot of money. UBI assures that all people are "survivable" w/o any effort. Therefore, there is no competition to survive in any case. Hence the contradiction.
  - odyssey7 5y ago
    Are you advocating that a good economic system is one that kills people who aren’t working? I just don’t clearly understand what you mean by “survive.”
    - runnerup 5y ago
      For those who believe that a good economic system is one that kills the "least fit"...I wonder what their idea of an optimal ratio of fit-to-killed is. Should the policy levers be set so that each year 0.1% of the population starves/freezes/overheats to death, or 1%? For a system which targets killing off "unfit" people, what would be signs of killing off too many people? Killing off too few? Instead of a stack-ranking system, is there some minimum bar that they imagine people should have to exceed? I wonder how many people would have exceeded that bar 500 years ago, or 500 years from now.

22c 5y ago

Scant technical details in the article, but I assume this is part of a "Proof of Identity" scheme. I think, ultimately, Proof of Identity solves a lot of "fairness" problems that other schemes don't solve, things like having coins minted by a fair lottery system or making sure airdrops don't get gamed, etc. In general, what I'd like to see more with identity systems is the ability to have pseudonyms. eg. I should be able to prove to Service X that I am the only "me" on their platform, but I don't necessarily want you to associate with the Service X "me" with the "me" that's on Service Y. For some reason, companies that are working on these kind of identity systems always seem to overlook that use case. Perhaps it doesn't sound good in the pitch to their investors.

jmole 5y ago
It would nice to be able to have a provably private system for something like this. Proof of identity, or proof of personhood, or whatever you want to call it is going to be a foundational element of online trust in the coming years. As a forum or community, I want the ability to ban a troll without them coming back under a different pseudonym. But at the same time, I don't want to post under my real name, or even something that can be linked back to me. So you ideally should be able to have multiple pseudonymous identities that can't be linked together by a 3rd party, but also have the ability to block the "root" identity, even if you only know the pseudonym.

Tepix 5y ago

The idea of giving every human (now and in the future) the same amount of coins is both obvious and enticing. Iris scans sound pretty good. The other way forward would be to give everyone their coins who has a digital id certificate issued by his/her government. That would however exclude a lot of people right now and could also be insecure if any of the governments screws up (i.e. it's just a matter of time).

eimrine 5y ago

Is it possible to download that eyeball data for using in malicious aims? Blockchain approach means that nothing can be hidden on somebody's private server.