Looking at their website (<a href="https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works</a>) 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>I wrote a thread with the comparisons noting how the incentives are aligned to let operators scam their way to money: <a href="https://nitter.net/captn3m0/status/1451259136365105154" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.net/captn3m0/status/1451259136365105154</a>
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..<p>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?
> 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”.<p>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?
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
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.<p>Setting aside the fact that the Orb idea will strike many people as creepy...<p>> 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.<p>>If a cryptocurrency were adopted at scale, it would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make applications possible that are now unimaginable.<p>Any sort of specifics would be great. The website says little about <i>why</i> 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?<p>I tried digging a little deeper... There are more technological and not ontological/existential details provided here: <a href="https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works</a>. 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?<p>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.<p>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. <i>Now</i> I'm living in the future!
A recruiter for these guys reached out to me and I was like 99 percent sure it was a joke - apparently not.<p>Also, this tells me Sam Altman has never seen Demolition Man.
1. Pay people to build a global iris scan database<p>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)<p>3. Sell iris database to oppressive governments<p>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.<p>Serious comments aside, I know one place where this would take off:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/world/middleeast/trump-glowing-orb-saudi.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/world/middleeast/trump-gl...</a>
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]<p>Seems a rather expensive piece of kit to ship around the world.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/sam-altman-s-worldcoin-will-give-free-crypto-for-eyeball-scans" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/sam-altma...</a>
"UBI."<p>Should stand for "Unbelievably Bad Idea."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...
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.<p>Not dystopic at all.
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 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!<p>That said, at first glance I thought the headline was for an article in The Onion.
After all Gates isn't that evil? Holy shit this idea! Sad.<p>I wanted to do Human Captcha[0] and people told me it is creepy but this is on another level.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101966" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101966</a>
This whole thing looks like a solution in search of a problem.<p>I think a better solution that would be both cheaper and more effective would simply be creating a good digital bank.
I understand (and happy they exist) most of the frustrated comments here.<p>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.<p>The smartest minds of this generation are wasting on crypto.
From the article:<p>> <a href="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OrbOperator_Indonesia.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/OrbOperato...</a><p>Wowing the natives with shine and magic. Neo-colonialism alive and well in SV. They have to be self-aware, right? Right?!
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.