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I find the fundamentals and implications of Worldcoin to be a really neat idea, but moreso for the potential to have true online anonymity while simultaneously

I find the fundamentals and implications of Worldcoin to be a really neat idea, but moreso for the potential to have true online anonymity while simultaneously being a provable Verified Unique Real Human Being. The idea of just having a public/private key that is associated with your biometrics. If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all sorts of things. Obtaining biometrics is a critical component of this, though--and doing this in a non-dystopian way is tough. Hashing that data is needed (as the article mentions), but even that has a bunch trickiness under the hood to unpack. The Worldcoin/UBI narrative seems like it would be a smart play to spur rapid adoption for this, but--again according to the article, it sounds like that execution has been...challenging.

daenz 5y ago
>If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all sorts of things. No it won't. It will only ensure that certain people and groups can be the absolute final say in what information people can say and hear. Only an extremely generous and unhistorical interpretation is that this will "reduce disinformation." It will only consolidate who is allowed to have the loudest disinformation. This is disastrous for so many reasons. For example, suppose a whistleblower has damning evidence of human rights abuses. The powers involved decide to flip a switch and digitally quarantine all individuals who could possibly be whistleblowers, and everyone N-hops away from those people, so the story can't get out. The public never learns of it, and the abuses continue. This is not a novel idea, but now we've just made it push-button and absolute. How do you propose whistleblowers exist in the system you are advocating for?
- parkaboy 5y ago
  Just blue-skying here, but you could have a process that allows the individual to revoke a previously used key pair and generate a new one associated with their biometrics whenever they want. The history of their online identity gets wiped as needed, but they're still a Verified Real Human Being online. Now of course, again -- the devil's in the details with this central entity and how it acquires/processes/stores those biometrics. And of course that central entity could be be morally/ethically dubious. It would be cool to have a more distributed way of acquiring and processing the biometrics instead of having a corporation run that part. Also to be clear: I'm not advocating all online communications need to have this identify verification in place. I'm envisioning something like Twitter badges, where you have some identifier that you're a guaranteed real-person, but people can still communicate without that. Like if I'm Reddit, I'm probably not going to care while perusing r/music if someone's a Real Human Being, and similarly if I get a whistleblower tip over an email. If I'm reading r/politics or r/worldnews where disinfo and troll accounts run rampant, I then might want to be able to filter the discussion or interact with Real Human Beings. I also readily admit my whole excitement for the concept assumes (and it's a big assumption) it's designed and implemented in a way such that it can't be abused. And I'm also not saying Worldcoin is taking the right approach to this overall concept.
- tern 5y ago
  This problem is easily solved with cryptography and proper decentralized identity design

daenz 5y ago

>If implemented and executed properly, you could put a big dent in online disinformation / troll farms / bot accounts and streamline all sorts of things. No it won't. It will only ensure that certain people and groups can be the absolute final say in what information people can say and hear. Only an extremely generous and unhistorical interpretation is that this will "reduce disinformation." It will only consolidate who is allowed to have the loudest disinformation. This is disastrous for so many reasons. For example, suppose a whistleblower has damning evidence of human rights abuses. The powers involved decide to flip a switch and digitally quarantine all individuals who could possibly be whistleblowers, and everyone N-hops away from those people, so the story can't get out. The public never learns of it, and the abuses continue. This is not a novel idea, but now we've just made it push-button and absolute. How do you propose whistleblowers exist in the system you are advocating for?

parkaboy 5y ago
Just blue-skying here, but you could have a process that allows the individual to revoke a previously used key pair and generate a new one associated with their biometrics whenever they want. The history of their online identity gets wiped as needed, but they're still a Verified Real Human Being online. Now of course, again -- the devil's in the details with this central entity and how it acquires/processes/stores those biometrics. And of course that central entity could be be morally/ethically dubious. It would be cool to have a more distributed way of acquiring and processing the biometrics instead of having a corporation run that part. Also to be clear: I'm not advocating all online communications need to have this identify verification in place. I'm envisioning something like Twitter badges, where you have some identifier that you're a guaranteed real-person, but people can still communicate without that. Like if I'm Reddit, I'm probably not going to care while perusing r/music if someone's a Real Human Being, and similarly if I get a whistleblower tip over an email. If I'm reading r/politics or r/worldnews where disinfo and troll accounts run rampant, I then might want to be able to filter the discussion or interact with Real Human Beings. I also readily admit my whole excitement for the concept assumes (and it's a big assumption) it's designed and implemented in a way such that it can't be abused. And I'm also not saying Worldcoin is taking the right approach to this overall concept.
tern 5y ago
This problem is easily solved with cryptography and proper decentralized identity design