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.
The Aadhaar Project in India was also born out of a similar desire. Unfortunately, it has led to exclusions, deaths, frauds, and a multitude of scams and leaks.
Aadhaar also had to spend a decade getting to a billion enrollments just within India, with the full power of the Indian government. I'd say their projections are a tad too optimistic.
You thought credit card skimmers and SS fraud were bad.. I'm going to take my black-market orb to time square and start collecting identities..
But seriously, I get the feeling software people just assume hardware is infallible somehow? Hardware-centric blockchains are extremely sensitive to Sybil attacks. Somewhere in that glorified iPhone of an Orb, there's a sensor sending a plaintext 'yes this is a valid iris, proceed' message. Now the validity of your blockchain is based in the physical security of a device..which you're distributing to contractors worldwide?
In that case all you're doing is creating wallets and minting worldcoins into them for people. You can't access them unless you have their eyes(and their willingness to comply).
Worldcoin is aiming to make their proof-of-personhood network in the least dystopian way possible, that being said, it still requires scanning a billion people’s eyeballs with a 5-pound chromatic sphere called “The Orb”.
I don't understand how this isn't hackable. Wouldn't someone be able to just reverse engineer this Orb device, and then create millions of fake iris hashes in the ETh blockchain? If they are handing out free crypto for new users, one per new iris hash uploaded, why not just bypass the physical scanning process and upload a gazillion randomly generated hashes?
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
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:
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.
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.
Sam Altman is, by all accounts, a smart individual with a lot of startup and startup evaluation experience, and presumably the resources to pursue whatever idea he wants. Though Worldcoin initially strikes me as being poorly thought out, given Altman's reputation, I've been trying to see the point of Worldcoin. I find myself very confused.
Setting aside the fact that the Orb idea will strike many people as creepy...
The internet is powerful because of large networks. Email, social apps, and marketplaces are examples of such networks. The more participants they have, the more powerful they become. For the first time, cryptocurrencies make it possible to distribute ownership and control of those networks to their users, rather than a single entity.
If a cryptocurrency were adopted at scale, it would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make applications possible that are now unimaginable.
Any sort of specifics would be great. The website says little about why it is important to get a new cryptocurrency in the hands of every person on earth. It sort of sounds like they want it to be used for UBI disbursement? Even if inflation, cost of living, etc. is radically different and changing at different rates in every sub-municipal area?
I tried digging a little deeper... There are more technological and not ontological/existential details provided here: https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works. Given that the founders do not make explicit their motivation, they seem to expect that people will go through the Orb procedure based on vague crypto promises?
Solving the "proof of personhood" problem for digital crypto wallets is important because... it will allow literally everyone to vote on how to run an email service? Own a fractionalized share of an NFT? And if everyone has a Worldcoin, then by definition, it isn't scarce.
I'm left to conclude that either the founders all know something that is opaque to the rest of us in terms of what problem they are actually intending to solve (with the eyeball thing being just one part of the solution)... Or they are in for being on the receiving end of a surprising number of wicked coordination problems which aren't technological in nature.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
From this Bloomberg article back in June:
"The company has fewer than 20 prototypes in circulation around the world, Blania said. A prototype orb costs about $5,000 to make, but the price will decline steeply as the company refines the process, he said." [1]
Seems a rather expensive piece of kit to ship around the world.
We already have some form of this in the US. That is what WIC, SNAP, Section 8 etc are...and our neighborhoods were devastated by all the "free" money. Nothing in this World is "free"....just ask farmers who end up having to dump milk on the ground because the cost its selling for is less than it cost them to produce. Lights, Fodder, Land, Taxes animals...none of that is free either.
I really wish I could make everyone understand that the things that are valuable are intangible: dignity, honor...knowledge and trust in one's abilities. You can't be given those; you have to earn them by doing the WORK.
Those Section 8 apartments? Filled with lead, asbestos, roaches. Not free. The costs come in the form of horrible respiratory numbers for minorities who live in them.
WIC?? Government cheese made mostly of oils and bad fats??? Not Free. The costs come in the huge obesity numbers for people on food programs. No, it isn't the only contributing factor, laziness plays a part, but crappy free food is where it starts.
Do you really want the rest of the World to look like our neighborhoods? I don't...stop trying to manage and fix everything for everyone. Let them ask for help when they feel they need it. Otherwise, you are simply creating dependency. Self motivation is the greatest poverty ender ever. And you would rob them of feeling it's effects by your "generosity"...which by the way is suspect. Why aren't you teaching them to code instead? That's how most of you got wealthy...
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.
I'm pretty skeptical that there are no false negatives of the matching algo when capturing (and hashing) the iris. I'm also curious how many people that participate understand the orb is collecting face photos and biometrics, is the form factor specifically meant to obscure that there's a bunch of cameras in there?
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.
I understand that giving a percentage of the company to investors is the way modern venture capital works, but attempting to create a global currency and then giving 10% to a handful of investors seems like a bit too much centralization right out of the gate. Given the current state of the economy, I have no doubt that the majority of the wealth will eventually be centralized in the hands of a few, but I don't think we need to start there.
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.
Captchas solve the wrong problem. Abuse is what you want to prevent, and so you need to detect abuse, not humanness. Rate-limiting, reputation check, web of trust etc all are valid techniques.
Bots can be nice. Humans can be bad. Focus on the right problem.
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..
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.
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.
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
What 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. If you disagree please reply instead of flagging.
Comments
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.
The Aadhaar Project in India was also born out of a similar desire. Unfortunately, it has led to exclusions, deaths, frauds, and a multitude of scams and leaks.
Aadhaar also had to spend a decade getting to a billion enrollments just within India, with the full power of the Indian government. I'd say their projections are a tad too optimistic.
I wrote a thread with the comparisons noting how the incentives are aligned to let operators scam their way to money: https://nitter.net/captn3m0/status/1451259136365105154
You thought credit card skimmers and SS fraud were bad.. I'm going to take my black-market orb to time square and start collecting identities..
But seriously, I get the feeling software people just assume hardware is infallible somehow? Hardware-centric blockchains are extremely sensitive to Sybil attacks. Somewhere in that glorified iPhone of an Orb, there's a sensor sending a plaintext 'yes this is a valid iris, proceed' message. Now the validity of your blockchain is based in the physical security of a device..which you're distributing to contractors worldwide?
These 2 statements (from the sidebar) are utter opposites:
In that case all you're doing is creating wallets and minting worldcoins into them for people. You can't access them unless you have their eyes(and their willingness to comply).
That's an oxymoronic sentence if ever I saw one.
I don't understand how this isn't hackable. Wouldn't someone be able to just reverse engineer this Orb device, and then create millions of fake iris hashes in the ETh blockchain? If they are handing out free crypto for new users, one per new iris hash uploaded, why not just bypass the physical scanning process and upload a gazillion randomly generated hashes?
Yes. They deactivate Orb devices if they detect anomalies, but expect this to be hacked very soon.
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
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:
https://papers.humanode.io/whitepaper.pdf
https://www.brightid.org/whitepaper
You clearly don’t understand modern crypto. No, I don’t mean the tech, I mean the business of the buzzword. Here:
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.
OakCoins were great but the proof of oak made block speed too slow
Trees are just physical NFTs.
So physical representations of digital tokens meant to represent physical objects?
Now, if we could tokenize the tree token trees..
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.
https://saveplanetearth.io/
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.
https://docs.klimadao.finance/about-klima-dao
If I want to buy carbon offsets why would I not just buy them from a farm/landowner? What does crypto do for me that I can’t do with a dollar bill?
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.
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.
you just made a bull case for coinbase.
When there is a gold rush, the surest way to make money is to sell shovels.
Sam Altman is, by all accounts, a smart individual with a lot of startup and startup evaluation experience, and presumably the resources to pursue whatever idea he wants. Though Worldcoin initially strikes me as being poorly thought out, given Altman's reputation, I've been trying to see the point of Worldcoin. I find myself very confused.
Setting aside the fact that the Orb idea will strike many people as creepy...
Any sort of specifics would be great. The website says little about why it is important to get a new cryptocurrency in the hands of every person on earth. It sort of sounds like they want it to be used for UBI disbursement? Even if inflation, cost of living, etc. is radically different and changing at different rates in every sub-municipal area?
I tried digging a little deeper... There are more technological and not ontological/existential details provided here: https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works. Given that the founders do not make explicit their motivation, they seem to expect that people will go through the Orb procedure based on vague crypto promises?
Solving the "proof of personhood" problem for digital crypto wallets is important because... it will allow literally everyone to vote on how to run an email service? Own a fractionalized share of an NFT? And if everyone has a Worldcoin, then by definition, it isn't scarce.
I'm left to conclude that either the founders all know something that is opaque to the rest of us in terms of what problem they are actually intending to solve (with the eyeball thing being just one part of the solution)... Or they are in for being on the receiving end of a surprising number of wicked coordination problems which aren't technological in nature.
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!
$1 billion valuation and $25m in funding for a database and 30 prototype orbs (aka cameras which can scan an eyeball).
The world has gone mad.
A recruiter for these guys reached out to me and I was like 99 percent sure it was a joke - apparently not.
Also, this tells me Sam Altman has never seen Demolition Man.
I had to check the date of the article to make sure it wasn't April 1.
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)
3. Sell iris database to oppressive governments
4. Profit
Can touch ID or face ID already do most of this with extra hardware? Unless the API's are not open to general use or something.
Serious comments aside, I know one place where this would take off: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/world/middleeast/trump-gl...
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.
Few realize this.
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.
From what I understand, the only information an iOS app gets from face ID is a "success" or "failure", no actual information about your face.
Specialized non-consumer accessible hardware is a huge stumbling block for these types of solutions.
So if you lose an eyeball you lose your money?
Yes - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.stm
and ( warning: NSFW ) Yes - https://youtu.be/CbM--4-z0cs?t=87
But think of the upsides.. every pet in your household is a new digital wallet and sign on bonus. My cat's crypto portfolio is doing better than mine!
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.
This is such garbage. Literally, no good can come from this.
For proof of identity, only use physical objects you are prepared to hand over.
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.
No. There's no link between your eye and the wallet private key: https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design
From this Bloomberg article back in June: "The company has fewer than 20 prototypes in circulation around the world, Blania said. A prototype orb costs about $5,000 to make, but the price will decline steeply as the company refines the process, he said." [1]
Seems a rather expensive piece of kit to ship around the world.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/sam-altma...
So the creator of these "Orbs" has complete control over printing currency. Sounds super decentralized.
"UBI."
Should stand for "Unbelievably Bad Idea."
We already have some form of this in the US. That is what WIC, SNAP, Section 8 etc are...and our neighborhoods were devastated by all the "free" money. Nothing in this World is "free"....just ask farmers who end up having to dump milk on the ground because the cost its selling for is less than it cost them to produce. Lights, Fodder, Land, Taxes animals...none of that is free either.
I really wish I could make everyone understand that the things that are valuable are intangible: dignity, honor...knowledge and trust in one's abilities. You can't be given those; you have to earn them by doing the WORK.
Those Section 8 apartments? Filled with lead, asbestos, roaches. Not free. The costs come in the form of horrible respiratory numbers for minorities who live in them.
WIC?? Government cheese made mostly of oils and bad fats??? Not Free. The costs come in the huge obesity numbers for people on food programs. No, it isn't the only contributing factor, laziness plays a part, but crappy free food is where it starts.
Do you really want the rest of the World to look like our neighborhoods? I don't...stop trying to manage and fix everything for everyone. Let them ask for help when they feel they need it. Otherwise, you are simply creating dependency. Self motivation is the greatest poverty ender ever. And you would rob them of feeling it's effects by your "generosity"...which by the way is suspect. Why aren't you teaching them to code instead? That's how most of you got wealthy...
I'm sure I missed something here.
I thought biometrics = a password you cannot change = a bad idea.
How is this different?
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.
https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design
Wonderful, a couple of billionaires not only would have most money they'll also be the ones minting it while being the gatekeepers of personhood.
Not dystopic at all.
thiseyeballdoesnotexist.com – just in case someone wants to earn some free crypto...
Show HN: haveibeen0rbed.net, running on Ethereum, with API and Python library.
"Just look into the orb, bro."
Remember the glowing orb:-
https://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'm pretty skeptical that there are no false negatives of the matching algo when capturing (and hashing) the iris. I'm also curious how many people that participate understand the orb is collecting face photos and biometrics, is the form factor specifically meant to obscure that there's a bunch of cameras in there?
Sam Altman is a Mark Zuckerberg wannabe.
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.
honestly this could be an onion article
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.
I understand that giving a percentage of the company to investors is the way modern venture capital works, but attempting to create a global currency and then giving 10% to a handful of investors seems like a bit too much centralization right out of the gate. Given the current state of the economy, I have no doubt that the majority of the wealth will eventually be centralized in the hands of a few, but I don't think we need to start there.
the problem is that biometrics aren't really proof of unique human, they can be traded or harvested from others (or probably generated by a computer)
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.
https://imgflip.com/i/5rb3gg
After all Gates isn't that evil? Holy shit this idea! Sad.
I wanted to do Human Captcha[0] and people told me it is creepy but this is on another level.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101966
Captchas solve the wrong problem. Abuse is what you want to prevent, and so you need to detect abuse, not humanness. Rate-limiting, reputation check, web of trust etc all are valid techniques.
Bots can be nice. Humans can be bad. Focus on the right problem.
Looking forward to a future where someone attacks me in a dark alley and cuts out my eyeball.
This whole thing looks like a solution in search of a problem.
I think a better solution that would be both cheaper and more effective would simply be creating a good digital bank.
No, this is a billionaire in search of rubes to scam.
I hate absolutely everything about this. At every angle and level of resolution I can think about it, I hate it. It's a fractal of things I hate.
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.
"Launching a new global currency by giving a free share of it to every person on Earth is an enormous challenge." - https://worldcoin.org/
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?
https://www.givedirectly.org/
"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..
I came to say the thing.
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.
Is there such a thing as a Christian monetary system; what would it look like?
No.
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
Rev 13:16-17
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.
Why do you think this has something to do with religion?
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.
The smartest minds of the last generation were wasted on building intrusive internet advertising.
The smartest minds of this generation are wasting on crypto.
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.
For example Gates and Jobs were never about ad business model.
From the article:
Wowing the natives with shine and magic. Neo-colonialism alive and well in SV. They have to be self-aware, right? Right?!
While i am pro-cryptoeconomy, i think we 've reached peak bullshit
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.
I read this comment in the toilet, and i was thinking there might be a solid investment idea here
I' 100% bull(shit)ish on this!
The one and true shitcoin.
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
What 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. If you disagree please reply instead of flagging.