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Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'
- asadlionpk 5y agoI am kind of a yc fanboy but I never get why sama was chosen by paulg. He has no success story whatsoever and comes up with dumb ideas like this one.
- mrlanderson 5y agoDespite what Michael Douglas thinks, greed is not good.
- vagab0nd 5y ago> Fraud-resistance: The iris is difficult to physically modify and the biometric capture can be made hard to spoof. I'm very doubtful about this. This process is either completely centralized (which means privacy is at risk), or not going to work properly. My experience has been: the more you think about the Sybil problem, the harder it becomes.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThis is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in quite some time. The implications of all of it and all the bad avenues it could go down chill me. A person’s right to anonymity gone forever. I think all people should deserve the right to disappear and be unknown if they don’t have IDs on them. I understand what Sam is going for here (equitable distribution of wealth) but this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.
- hef19898 5y agoIt seems Sam is going for his wealth before equal distribution of wealth.
- astoor 5y agoFurthermore, according to https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works, it seems the billionaires are planning on enriching themselves by exploiting individuals in some of the poorer nations first (Chile, Kenya, Indonesia, Sudan). (According to GDP per capita at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)..., Chile is 80, Indonesia is 132, Kenya is 176, and Sudan is 181.)
- ElijahLynn 5y agoSam has enough money, seems highly unlikely he is doing it to get wealthier. Not for or against Worldcoin with this comment just saying there is likely a different motive.
- hef19898 5y agoThen Sam would be the first rich Person mit persue additional wealth.
- nemoniac 5y agoI don't mean to diminish Snowden's point in the slightest but how long will it be until regular CCTV cameras will be able to register the irises of passers-by?
- sharmin123 5y agoFacebook Safety Tips: Take Steps Now and Avoid Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/facebook-safety-tips-take-steps-now-and-avoid-hacking/ https://www.hackerslist.co/facebook-safety-tips-take-steps-n...
- ahazred8ta 5y agoAdmins, please ban sharmin123, shahin841, hackerlist.co, and look at other shahin* user accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sharmin123 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sharmin123
- thinkingemote 5y agoYou need to email them, they do not scan for these types of comments.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- censormenow 5y agoThe admins rate limit and flag (ban and censor) anyone talking negatively about Apple products, Google products, or Worldcoin. This is my third account of the week.
- dang 5y agoPlenty of users criticize all those things without getting banned. You're banned for posting flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines, as well as for creating a long string of accounts to troll HN with. That's not cool. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. We're always happy to unban people when they sincerely want to use HN as intended, and we believe they'll actually do so. It's nothing personal—we're just trying to have an internet forum that stays interesting, doesn't burn itself to a crisp, and staves off the regression to internet mean for as a long as possible. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20scorched%20earth&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- space_rock 5y agoIt's such a gross subversive of the technology. Satoshi created bitcoin so no one would have control of the money supply So con artist and VCs created "crypto" where every con artist has there own money
- fleddr 5y agoTrue, VCs really hate Bitcoin. They can't control it, it doesn't give them data the rest of us can't already see, they can't roll out software updates, it's too late for early phase mining. When VCs hate it, it means it really, really good.
- lottin 5y ago> Satoshi created bitcoin so no one would have control of the money supply There's no such thing as the money supply. There are many currencies, each one with its own supply.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoEver since the movie "Demolition Man", it should be obvious why biometrics are a bad idea. (Yeah I know they also can try to scan for signs of life like blood flow - still, I don't like it). Even without the Demolition Man scenario, an even worse issue is that you can't change your biometrics in case somebody steals them. Fake fingerprints are already easy to do, other things surely can be cloned, too.
- ozim 5y agoKids or coworkers are not going to make fake fingerprints to mess with me. What they can do is to see password or pin code while I am typing those over my shoulder. Someone on the street also won't be able to see my pin code for unlocking phone if I use fingerprint. Those are scenarios that biometrics are handling really well. Biometrics against sophisticated attackers is not good idea. I don't encounter in my life "sophisticated attackers" that would spend time making copy of my fingerprint. If you are person that has risk of running into sophisticated attackers then don't use biometrics and biometrics are bad idea.
- JohnFen 5y ago> Kids or coworkers are not going to make fake fingerprints to mess with me. I know a few kids and coworkers who absolutely would, if it would get a laugh.
- fsloth 5y agoYeah, similarly we have crap locks in doors. They are there more to make it somewhat laborious to open to door, hence signal privacy, than make it nigh impossible to break in. That's why we have bank vaults and so on when we really want to deny access. For convenient security you want just enough complexity a bot wont automatically unlock it, for proper security something that can be even a bit unconvenient as long as it's more secure. I agree, biometrics should probably be in the "breakable, convenient" category.
- hef19898 5y agoExactly, every-day security is there to prevent random dudes. And even they can, to stay with homes, just break a window. Serious opponents, especially if they are really motivated, will be able to break into everything. The three letter agencies, and their counterparts in other countries, are obviously on the very professional and very motivated end of the spectrum. Personally, I don't see any reason to make overly easy for any of those parties. So no biometrical data to be exchanged for some new form dogecoin.
- faxlp 5y agoFirst OpenAI launches the code laundering tool CoPilot, now Altman wants to scan the world's irises. Could Altman perhaps sit down and fucking program something himself? Show us your code.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bvaldivielso 5y agoHow is Altman's code relevant?
- nkmnz 5y agoI registered the domain thiseyeballdoesnotexist.com - anyone interested in training a GAN for that page?
- captn3m0 5y agoYou can just use https://biic.wvu.edu/data-sets/synthetic-iris-dataset https://biic.wvu.edu/data-sets/synthetic-iris-dataset
- Tenoke 5y agoHow will that help you? You need the orb, too and those operating the orb can presumably tell the difference between a real person and a jpg of an eyeball.
- danuker 5y agoWorldcoin issues tokens to people for scanning their retinas. Their magical orb device sends a biometric hash to their network. Here's my take on it: You can possibly replace their biometric device with a random hash generator. * If it works, it means the currency is not fairly distributed, but anyone sending valid hashes to their network is issued tokens, irrespective of whether the eyeballs described by those hashes exist. This is called a Sybil attack. * If it doesn't work, it means there is some secret or centralized check that the network performs, which means the currency is not open. This is why we still use proof-of-work in spite of its energy expense: it is simple to understand, it can not be faked, and it can be openly verified. So, do not support this biometric-gathering enterprise.
- Yetino 5y agoThe first half of your argument makes sense. Justifying the use of proof-of-work appears to be a fallacy of relevance though
- bsedlm 5y agoI consider the energy expense exactly the reason (and the cost) of the decentralized trust afforded by PoW. How is it irrelevant?
- idorosen 5y agoProof of work, it’s inefficiency, or it’s security implications on transactions more generally are not relevant to your comments on the vulnerability of their coin faucet or the veracity of their claims.
- ericmay 5y agoThey related these two points by saying that either it’s hackable, or there’s something weird going on under the hood, and that proof of stake alleviates these issues. Idk if I agree or disagree but it seemed straightforward and relevant what they were asserting.
- shafyy 5y agoIncredible how out of touch the Silicon Valley elite is with the real world.
- LurkingPenguin 5y agoWhen I left Silicon Valley, it was to escape the bubble. What you wrote is what I felt. But in hindsight, I think "Silicon Valley is out of touch with the real world" is too innocuous. Obviously, it is, but a lot of the "elite" aren't just happily enjoying their bubble. They are intent on shaping "the real world", and they have enough resources and influence to be successful some of the time. I doubt very much that the masses will be scanning their retinas into The Orb so that they can get Worldcoin, but these people are not going to stop coming for your retina, your DNA, even more of your digital fingerprints, etc. Sadly, they're eventually likely to get it all.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> Sadly, they're eventually likely to get it all. Not mine! But WTF, I'm just a paranoid weirdo.
- anonporridge 5y agoThing is, you don't matter. If I have access to the data of 95% of people in a society, I have enough to model and predict behavior, and maybe even the hooks to inject information and influence future behavior. The long tail of paranoid weirdos who spend all their time and energy fighting to maintain their privacy are irrelevant to the goal of societal domination.
- LurkingPenguin 5y agoThis is sadly spot on. I had a conversation that touched on privacy once with a person I met at a bar who works for Big Evil Tech Co. and she basically came out and said this in slightly more diplomatic terms.
- 5y ago
- victor22 5y agoRIP Sam Altman's reputation
- patrec 5y agoGenuine question: what is Sam Altman's reputation based on? I'm aware that Paul Graham had a serious mancrush on him, and that he somehow managed to turn a failed startup into a $40M acquihire, which is nothing to scoff at -- but is his success mostly based on his genius of selling himself and whatever he's involved in, or has he actually said or done anything that shows some deeper form of insight or ability?
- clpm4j 5y agoIt seems like he spoke and acted as he does now (at 36yrs old) when he was a 19yr old kid at Stanford, so he was the hotshot whizkid that SV fetishizes. Then he joined the first batch of YC and hit it off with pg. He basically cemented a reputation as a smart kid who speaks well and socializes with the right people, and has seemingly ridden that wave really well for the past 15 years. Kudos to him.
- alisonkisk 5y agoselling garbage for $40M and charming an upcomimg billionaire requires insight and ability.
- xiphias2 5y agoI’m not sure, but I really miss the optimism of PG here on HN. It’s too bad that he retired so early, he was a lot of fun to listen to. I felt the same when Larry Page ,,took back’’ Google from Eric Schmidt who understood that fun and exploration is an important part of software engineering.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoI wondered exactly the same, for years, and have, for years, not seen an answer.
- Julien_r2 5y agoWow I feel I just came out of a cave, to discover only now about Worldcoin.. Apart from the arguable concept itself, I'm genuinely wondering why betting on yet another scanning device, instead of using fingerprint scan, which is now available on most smartphones ? Is it that much more reliable that it's worth going through the pain of engineering a new hardware ? Finally, how they could expect any other reactions than doubt, fear, and reject, out of this solution, while fingerprint and face detection already go through so much ethical issues ?
- dboreham 5y agoIf the problem is "make money from a blockchain" then things may look different.
- JohnFen 5y ago> how they could expect any other reactions than doubt, fear, and reject, out of this solution, It looks to me like they're targeting people who are not as concerned or thoughtful about such issues.
- jamisteven 5y agodoesnt iOS do the same thing, without the incentive.
- gruez 5y agofaceID doesn't use retina scans.
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y agoAs I understand it, the distribution mechanism of Worldcoin is not part of the protocol. The protocol does not know anything about eyes. So the distribution seems completely centralized. A central authority distributes the coins however they wish. Today they might use a process involving eye scans. Or maybe not. There is no way to check. Tomorrow they might change their approach however they like. And we would have no way of knowing. The issue that seems to be overlooked is that there is no way to look at a hash and decide if it was created via scanning an eye. The hash is signed via some key that - according to the makers of WC - sits in an eye scanning device which behaves a certain way. But we have no way of checking that.
- New_California 5y agoCorrect.
- m3kw9 5y agoWait so I can fake a retina and get coins?
- trutannus 5y agoTime for "This retina does not exist"?
- bobm_kite9 5y agoI just need to write a GAN to generate plausible looking irises, then - Profit!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anonuser123456 5y agoI imagine this attack is more difficult than is assumed. The device itself is likely tamper resistant, has built in DRM and will have a high fidelity camera + signal processor. So you will need a system to write a 200MP image on the surface the size of an eye ball. Also, since the light passes through a lens in your eye, there are probably optical tricks that can validate the surface is curved like a retina and has been distorted by a lens. Oh yeah. And the vascularization of the retina means that you can view heart rate pulses. So your image will need to pulsate too. One could also imagine marrying this with a stereoscopic camera to image detect that a real face is. It could even ask you to smile or frown to validate it's a real face. Lots of ways to harden this technology to the point where even intelligence agencies would struggle to defeat it.
- pzo 5y agoHow about contact lenses similar to those like for halloween but just don't look creepy? I'm pretty sure you can already buy those and they should generate different hash. Face probably can also modify with makeup/mask/beard etc - after all face recognition is not perfect on iPhone any many times cannot automatically detect faces.
- astoor 5y agoThis is just so wrong in so many different ways, it actually fills me with despair to think that there are people somewhere who actually think this is in some ways a good idea. To the point of wondering if there is some way of organising more direct action to stop this kind of disaster from befalling the human race.
- ganzuul 5y agoAt some point one needs to assume it is no longer a matter of ignorance, but instead one of malice. Not sure if this is near that point. Perhaps this guy is simply a fluff bunny who has never seen any evil in this world.
- ramesh31 5y ago>Perhaps this guy is simply a fluff bunny who has never seen any evil in this world. Having met Altman, "fluffy bunny" is not a too far off assessment.
- astoor 5y agoI know there's the whole "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence", but is incompetence a more likely path to becoming a billionaire?
- anonporridge 5y agoMaybe it's not quite malice. Is there a word for knowingly becoming the villain because you've decided that the force of Moloch in civilization is unstoppable and if it's not you who uses your power to take control of something vulnerable and weak, someone else eventually will, and they might actually be malicious.
- shafyy 5y agoThis might be an onpopular opinion on here, but I think that software (and hardware) development needs to be regulated, similar to pharma or other regulated industries. The regulation can take into account several factors to make the barrier for smaller projects not too high.
- pzo 5y ago1) previously you had to worry only about browser fingerprinting to avoid being tracked 2) currently some countries planning/want to implement covid check-in at every place you wanna enter 3) and now you have to worry that some private company want to make a modern fingerprint (irisprint?) that most likely is going to be used to at least another way of ad tracking. However with 3) you won't be able to easily protect yourself - you cannot change eyeballs. Maybe you will have to wear some special contact lenses.
- exdsq 5y agoI like the idea of a unique identity per person but I'm unsure about security: - Iris scans have false positives at scale - You can have eye surgery changing your iris - Cheap scanners can be fooled by photos, so you'd need to require live-tissue scanners which are really expensive
- New_California 5y agoThe single biometric identity per person is a terrible idea because it cannot be discarded once compromised.
- exdsq 5y agoI'm also slightly unsure that Iris -> Hash is correct, I don't see why it wouldn't be Iris -> [Hash]. Maybe scanners are that good but I'd have thought depending on things like light reflection you'd end up with different hashes. Maybe not!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AussieWog93 5y agoHe really missed an opportunity here by not making the project "Sam Altcoin".
- New_California 5y agoThat's his next project.
- joshxyz 5y agoHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA COME ON. But seriously, damn are this the best we can come up with other than captchas good lord so dystopian
- cblconfederate 5y agoYou know what, do catalogue them. Fake contact lenses are not expensive, let's drive the spying industry crazy.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoWhy should I care about what some IT guy in Russia thinks?
- seibelj 5y agoMy theory is Altman invested a shitload of money into a hardware startup that made an orb-shaped retina scanner. For whatever reason it doesn’t take off. Solution? Tie it to a cryptocurrency!
- fidesomnes 5y agoEdward Snowden... opinion discarded.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Traster 5y agoI thought I'd look at the actual company after hearing about this. I'm just not a silicon valley person. Here's their how it works page - https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works . It includes a projection graph that has a scale in 500m user increments and 2 years. Then you have the real data: over 6 months they've signed up 120k users. Or to put it another way - their real data doesn't even appear on the scale that their projections are displayed. They've basically extrpolated from 0 to 1.5bn. Oh and the graph lists sign ups per orb as if manufacturing the orbs is the limiting factor for signing people up to your shitcoin. It also claims they're going to give out thousands of these orbs. But these orbs are the trusted hardware devices for generating unique hashes from biometric data. So if 1 of these thousands of devices falls into the hands of a hacker who can crack the hashing algo they're done. Not only will they have no guarantee that the users are unique, and probably they've also leaked huge amounts of biometric data. They actually mention this on their how it works page - don't worry guys, they'll make it hard to spoof! Honestly. It'll be tamper proof! I kind of understand how you could try and argue that these devices are ok if you're going to have a small number of them extremely securely protected, but the plan is literally to manufacture 4,000 of these per month and hand them out to random people. Honestly, it's like they've just never had a conversation with someone who thinks critically about anything.
- fortydegrees 5y agoTo protect the device getting cracked, couldn't you just have it send a message if/when the device is opened in a way it shouldn't (e.g. for inspection) and thus make that key invalid?
- Traster 5y agoSure and maybe that slows people down a bit, but the second device they get their hands on they’ll be smarter. This isn’t a new issue, look at video games, look at blu ray and hd dvd, security against a sophisticated attacker with physical access is almost impossible. It’s rare for video games to last 1 week before being cracked, and that’s not even for something important.
- yissp 5y ago
- simmo9000 5y agoPhase 1: Collect eyeballs; Phase 2: ; Phase 3: Profit!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deweller 5y agoSnowden is assuming that Worldcoin is saving hashes of eyeballs. That is not what Worldcoin is doing. Zero Knowledge proofs allow the system to prove that an eyeball exists without actually tying the biometric hash directly to an ID. From the article: "We use the open-source Semaphore[19] zero-knowledge proof system to transfer the uniqueness of IrisHashes to the uniqueness of user accounts, without linking them." Now, of course, one needs to trust that Worldcoin is actually doing what they say they are doing, but that is a different discussion. Edit: I see now that they are saving this data during field testing. But it looks to me that the long term plan is to use ZK crypto to unlink the hash from the account. Snowden's "hot take" ignores this. https://semaphore.appliedzkp.org/ https://semaphore.appliedzkp.org/ https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/ https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/
- thruway516 5y agoHuh? They’re collecting and saving them, at least up to the point of confirming all new user accounts which happens sometime after they scan irises. I might have missed it but I don’t see anywhere in their docs where it says they discard the hashes even after they’ve minted a unique user account for the new user. They need to store the hashes at least until they’ve registered all possible users - how else will they confirm that a new user hasn’t previously registered.
- dangirsh 5y agoAll iris hashes are publicly saved, but not linked to wallets. Details here: https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works#crypto https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works#crypto (Account Privacy section)
- thruway516 5y agoI think it's the idea of collecting them in the first place that most people are uncomfortable with. It's still a lot of trust to put in the hands of a private company. It reminds of the whole brouhaha with Apple and their CSAM privacy measures.
- 5y ago
- booleandilemma 5y ago“A new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.” Let’s ignore the fuzzy utopia talk and pretend that this is just a creepy plot to get a hash of every single person’s eyeballs. What’s Sam’s next move? What do you do when you have the hash of everyone’s eyes?
- Melting_Harps 5y ago> What do you do when you have the hash of everyone’s eyes? The same thing you do with everyone's Amazon purchase habits, porn watching habits, and their social media behaviour: sell it! The only real question is to what end, and to be honest one need only look at the dystopia the CCP are creating with their survielence model in Xianjing to see how pernicious this all is when it's in the wrong hands. You have entities hell bent on creating some sort of minority report type prediction system, though to be honest I think it's more like Psycho Pass at this point: one where their is a clear divide between classes of people and their obedience to the system, which I guess in this case would be 'the Orb.' In psycho pass it's a sort of Hivemind of the most brilliant to the most violent members of society to try and predict any and all possible outcomes. Silicon Valley tropes have bled into real life for far too long, be it wokeness, to the fomenting of discord via social media as a business model to sway elections (something intelligence agencies and political parties have clearly made use of) or create discord in Society and to be honest it's exactly why SV's influence has to be curbed. The honest answer to what they will do with the data is: we can't possibly know, and that's why it shouldn't be done. Auroracoin was trying to achieve a UBI drop in Iceland as a response to the calamity from the 2008 financial crisis, with noble goals but failed in 2014, and while I think it is something that I think should warrant more focus from developers and VC money it's hard to envision how they completely bypassed how Microsoft's ION [1] has been working on ID on the Bitcoin blockchain for years they could have built on top of. I'd normally lambast anything MS has done, but it's open source and operates over the most secure network, why are we allowing Altman and his YC/SV cronies to hi-jack the narrative that collectively those of us in this space have been working on trying to address this in a trust-less manner for nearly a decade?! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin 1: https://topbitcoinbuyer.com/2021/03/26/microsoft-launches-identity-platform-on-bitcoins-blockchain/ https://topbitcoinbuyer.com/2021/03/26/microsoft-launches-id...
- teddyh 5y ago“Slams”? What’s next, “Owns”? “Epic takedown”? These exaggerated headlines, I swear.
- zamadatix 5y agoI love them, it's a good filter for me which signals I should go find a more original source, or at least better analysis, should I be interested in the topic. Same with intentionally vague headlines. One this morning was "Why you should avoid this large European country after latest CDC update". It's a great signal that the article is full of fluff wording and unlikely to add useful additional insight and if I really care I should go check the CDC news bulletins for the actual news.
- whalesalad 5y agoIt feels like a Trojan horse for collecting biometric data.
- throwawaycities 5y agoDoesn’t seem fair for those people without retinas to scan. I guess if you want to be part of the new world currency you better not have any disabilities or disfigurements.
- nothrowaways 5y agoThe worst privacy honeypot of all times. You should never let your minors or relatives or friends close to this app. If somehow they scanned their eye with this Blockchain app, it will stay. Your personality and opinions may change but this will be a mistake you will always regret.
- lazzlazzlazz 5y agoAre you aware that the biometric data isn't stored or linked with the wallet that receives the distribution?
- iammisc 5y agoAre you aware that companies lie to make money off you?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- leodriesch 5y agoIf this is supposed to be a real currency, isn’t it awful for privacy? If your wallet is unique to your person (eyeball) and the public key is ever leaked, everyone can see your account balance and transactions. Would that be the case or am I missing something?
- dangirsh 5y agoThe wallet and iris hash are never linked. The privacy properties of a Worldcoin wallet are identical to an Ethereum wallet (i.e. pseudonymous until you doxx yourself). See https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works#crypto https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works#crypto
- leodriesch 5y agoSo you can have multiple wallets but only once receive your free share?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoHow they are supposed to detect Eye Balls That Do Not Exist? Looks trivial to do.
- vdddv 5y ago"20% of all Worldcoin tokens will be set aside for the development team. In crypto, this used to be known as a “premine” and ranks among the biggest red flags that a project is intended to enrich insiders." https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/10/25/why-everyone-is-mad-at-sam-altmans-worldcoin/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/10/25/why-everyone-is-mad...
- dmix 5y agoSo basically XRP but with even worse privacy implications.
- anonporridge 5y agoAlso ethereum.
- optimalsolver 5y agoIndeed, Ethereum not only had a ridiculous premine, but they forked the entire thing after a bunch of insiders were about to lose a ton of money in the DAO hack.
- webinvest 5y agoIt might just go down the route of Mastercoin. (Down)
- zoba 5y agoTangentially related: For anyone else who is tired of the highly-dramatic word “slam”, you may appreciate SlamCount. A Twitter bot that keeps an eye on news orgs usage of the word: https://mobile.twitter.com/slamcount1 https://mobile.twitter.com/slamcount1
- 9387367 5y agoYou gotta give it up to the disconnect, sense of entitlement and grandiose delusion of VCs for wanting to not only create another shitcoin but a WORLD coin, which they own 20%, premine.
- andrewla 5y agoCartoon idea: Man walks into WorldCoin center with a bag of human eyeballs -- "where are my free coins?"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- passwordreset 5y agoThere is also an incentivization problem here. For every person that they get onboard, “Worldcoin will allow everyone to claim a free share of it.” That share is worth $0.07 in US dollars today. If I don't think it's worth 7 cents to produce my iris data, then the best strategy is to wait until the coin goes up to my price point before entering that market. It makes the most sense to hold off until the coin hits $65,000 US before getting the "free share" and immediately converting it into another currency.
- rsynnott 5y agoOi! Altman! No!
- RegW 5y agoI have a congenital cataract. Periodically opticians try to photograph my retina and fail. Is my money safe?
- bestcoder69 5y ago> says A World With Trillionaires Is Inevitable > sends eye-scanning Orbs (his name) to Africa to pump up the value of Altmanbucks that his team owns 20% of I'm laughing now at how cartoonish this guy is, but might not be laughing later when my children must Surrender to the Orb to pay off their fathers' crypto-debts.
- annoyingnoob 5y agoI could envision a mortuary worker having a lot of fun with this, tons of eyeballs to scan.
- pixel_tracing 5y agoSo if you have eye surgery or an eye injury you lose access to your coins?
- cseleborg 5y agoI understand it so that you merely need a scan to create a wallet. After that, you no longer need to scan. Still, there are so many ways this is bad, it's not even funny. Starting with the question of granting anyone without a retina access to the technology...
- beckman466 5y ago20 years from now: "I'm sorry sir, if you want to participate in our currency, you'll have to forfeit your left nut."
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoThe retinal scan is used to issue a e-ticket (identical for everyone) which allows you to create an account and then the scan is immediately discarded. The scan is in no way tied to your account at any time. Many of the comments here would be better informed by reading how this process works. There are issues to discuss, but a lot of what's in these threads has nothing to do with the actual workings of the project. https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design
- Loughla 5y ago>https://worldcoin.org/privacy-during-field-testing https://worldcoin.org/privacy-during-field-testing >We collect the following data through the Orb after the user gives us their consent: Images of users’ body, face, and eyes, including users’ irises (visible, near infrared and far infrared spectrum) Three-dimensional mapping of users’ body and face
- deegles 5y agoI wish I could see the pitch from the hardware people who told Sam Altman that the orbs were not going to be cracked... the whole project will fall apart as soon as (if) Worldcoins have significant value and an orb falls in a moderately-skilled hacker's hands. Or someone will just do it for the lolz. That or orb-owners will just set up a booth in poor areas of the world and give people cash for a scan, pocketing the distributions forever.
- mgraczyk 5y agoOne thing I found interesting about Worldcoin is that they have a graph of predicted "future sign-up rate" extrapolated from their trials. They predict an exponential increase in sign-ups with >2B people signed up in 2 years. Like other crypto projects, they misleading fit their data with the wrong curve. If you fit growth numbers with an S-curve instead of an exponential, you get results that are highly sensitive to noise in the initial data: https://constancecrozier.com/2020/04/16/forecasting-s-curves-is-hard/ https://constancecrozier.com/2020/04/16/forecasting-s-curves... This is why it will end up being the case that the actual number of users signed up for Worldcoin in 2 years was assigned a probability of ~0.00 by their growth model.
- robbywashere_ 5y agowhy is every counterpoint a "SLAMS" headline?
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- sireat 5y agoAgain per Gibson: "“What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking. “Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”"
- ksec 5y agoI think the idea to introduce WorldCoin now, using the method as described, during the current climate, basically sums up everything that is wrong with today's Tech, VC and Silicon Valley.
- moneycantbuy 5y agoWhat a cancer. These guys are already ultra rich, but it’s never enough. Sociopathic greed. And of course they spin it as some benevolent humanitarian effort. Tax these shameless parasites back to reality. I love HN, but we need better.
- lhh 5y agoI really don't understand all the outrage in most of the comments here. Seems to me like they're just trying to launch a new cryptocurrency, they're trying to find a reasonably equitable way to distribute the initial tokens to bootstrap it, and iris-scanning is the best non-centralized, technically and logistically feasible way to identify new unique human entrants that they came up with. The principle of it sounds great to me! Does the specific mechanism they're attempting to employ raise some concerns? Sure. Instead of the vitriol though, how about some suggestions for a better mechanism? Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion. What does that say about you?
- helloworld11 5y agoThe fundamental idea behind this of, "Here, take this shiny object that may or may not have some value at some point in exchange for enslaving your most personal data to us who want to work for 'your own good'" is just shitty and elitist regardless of how its pursued. Also, >Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion. Seriously? What an absurd notion. Oh hey, X attempt was in good faith! What a terrible person you are for criticizing it... Not to compare Altman with people like Lenin but I suppose that by this logic, one is bad for criticizing revolutionary demagogues because their hearts were always in the right place?