So, my understanding of the current play in this space is as follows:<p><pre><code> - Create a large number of worthless cryptographic tokens.
- Distribute around half of them as "freebies".
- Keep the other half to yourself / distribute them among your investors.
- Start a hype by injecting your investors money into your currency.
- Hope that people will start to trade/speculate with your currency, buying it for real monies.
- As the trading volume ramps up, start extracting money from the system by exchanging your tokens for real monies.
- Profit!
</code></pre>
Is this about right? I mean it's quite ingenious as you seem to create money out of thin air, but I really can't wrap my head around how this isn't outlawed as an MLM scheme by governments.
> ensuring that every person on Earth can prove that they are indeed human<p>>To address it, we built a new device called the Orb. It solves the problem through biometrics: the Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes<p>I'm sure absolutely nothing can go wrong with this <i>at all</i>. Wow. I hope this is satire.<p>Imagine what a major nation state intelligence agency could do with a data set of globally-unique eyeball vein pattern images of billions of persons.
> We are only a few months away from a global launch and we are running field tests in many locations around the world. In these field tests, people are waiting hours to receive their free share of Worldcoin [...].<p>Using dark patterns like artificially limiting supply before the product is even released to create an illusion of demand pretty much says everything you need to know about this. There are no interesting new concepts here, except that in addition to being yet another bogus coin, you're also expected to give up your biometric data.
I think the overarching idea here makes sense, but the devil is in the details.<p>1) It's going to be difficult to ensure that the 'Orb' device can't be hacked and allow bad actors to send a bunch of random codes to signup for a Worldcoin.<p>2) If there are bogus signups how do you deal with reconciliation when there are ID collisions?<p>3) It's going to take many years for this to get a critical traction and to deploy coins to individuals.<p>4) The value of this coin will be extremely small when it's divided amongst the world's population. Assuming it's spent shortly after it is received, this money will just flow back to the owner's of capital anyways.
The vision here is a first step toward a global UBI. If you're going to give everyone an income, you first need to know that each account is a real person. That's essential.<p>So this is a way to get there. I'm sure it will have glitches and hitches. That's fine, this is how you work it all out, by taking practical real-world actions.<p>The vision here is huge. Ultimately a complete transition of the global economy.<p>Will it get there? No idea. But I'm very, very excited to see someone working on it.
The thing about these "drops" is people will liquidate them into real currency as quickly as possible. If the goal is to distribute a currency to as many people as possible (so everyone has a piece of the currency to use) then you have to remove any possible off ramps. But, then you run into the problem of nobody _actually_ being interested in the coin since it has "no real value" (can't trade it for USD)
A similar project here: <a href="https://www.proofofhumanity.id/" rel="nofollow">https://www.proofofhumanity.id/</a><p>They don't solve the proof-of-humanness problem via biometrics, it's more of a web-of-trust kind of thing. Probably also broken as hell, but this is a hard problem being solved in new ways so that's expected.
What stops an Orb Operator from just opening up the Orb and publishing random hashes? Assuming that "privacy is preserved" and the hash can't be turned back into an iris, there should be no way to tell.
This home page have a score of 29 bullshit[0], nice one!<p>[0]: Bullshit.js − <a href="https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/" rel="nofollow">https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/</a>
Interesting project, but many open questions:<p>1. Are the coins allocated to each user lumpsum, or on a fixed schedule?<p>2. How can privacy be protected when converting coins into fiat currency?<p>3. Why would anyone trade these coins, when they can simply get their own freshly issued?<p>3. How can the coins have any value when nobody trades them?
Free coins for scanning your face on a blockchain and it will be there forever? Absolutely no thanks and no deal.<p>This is a definitive edition ponzi scam.
I also had a similar coin/currency idea to share with every human equally, but could not come with a good plan to distribute it, besides after carefully thinking this would not be truly necessary, because if people are free, productive ones will quickly make money, even if they start with zero. A bigger problem might be land and other world resources that are not currently being equally distributed.
1. Why the orb?<p>So they say it’s about UBI, but… what’s wrong with the ways we establish human-ness now?<p>Usually it’s a combination of national ids, photo ids (also a kind of biometric) and respected persons like doctors or licensed engineers attesting you exist. No one method is dominant, which has its privacy benefits.<p>The eyeball scan, plus the cryptoasset incentive, seems like a strategy that could place this company as a very dominant broker of human-ness. Regardless of whether WorldCoin becomes a useful financial token.<p>2. What’s even good about the Orb versus something more boring<p>So the orb bootstraps a user into having a private key. So I have all the same privacy difficulties of managing my own key, don’t I? It’s not like I can pay for things with my eyeball.<p>So if we have special licensed operators, with controlled hardware, why not generate a key randomly with that hardware?<p>Presumably they have provisions for transitioning you to new keys when your iris changes, so… if that is done by a controlled hardware and a licensed orb franchise, why not just use regular national or photo ID methods, sign that data with the Orb-station’s private key, and we’re done?
Let me guess: Nobody has access to the data because it is encrypted from literally everyone so there will never be any conflicts of interest ever, right?
There have been studies which start with giving everyone the same amount of money, and then simulating random transactions. In a very short amount of time, one person ends up with 95% of the money.<p>When it is run different times, a different random person ends up being the one rich person. But it never ends up with everyone having about the same amount of money.
Broken link for me, but you can see the original page here.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20211021151209/https://worldcoin.org/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20211021151209/https://worldcoin...</a>
The idea of a fairly distributed world coin is fascinating, and something I would absolutely love to see.<p>Unfortunately, from reading that webpage, I don't think "Worldcoin" sounds like a very promising application of the concept.
Sorry for the meta post, but it's quite funny how HN's legendary skepticism towards cryptocurrency manages to get even Sam Altman's project flagged on his own (former) board.
Start working on a way to print uniquely patterned contact lenses now, to be ready at launch. Even thisisnotaniris.com is still up for grabs, have fun with your infinite number of tokens!
Wow it looks like YC / HackerNews is going all in on cryptocurrency! Congrats YC team!<p>For readers - a Senior Blockchain Engineer position is available! <a href="https://worldcoin.org/job/4001608004" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/job/4001608004</a> HNers - apply now!