Police raid Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi

This project builds a global identity database even if the crypto part disappears. Their tokenomics are a mess and their CEO openly admitted to market manipulation recently. Good on Kenya for shutting this down, I hope many more follow.

I really don&#x27;t want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy.<p>Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.

I know a lot of people will use this to say that blockchain bad, and that is up to you. But really biometrics collection has little to do with blockchain. Worldcoin is firstly a company that collects biometrics and secondly they decided to use an immutable ledger to record the data (although they claim that it is only hashes).<p>That aside if I wanted to record a bunch of hashes for perpetuity blockchain would actually be the right technology - does not go out of business and take down the servers with it.<p>The article makes me laugh and sad at the same time though. This Altman guy...

I&#x27;m actually surprised how rapidly this went downhill exactly how people were warning it would.

Related: Sam Altman saying himself that users who are concerned about privacy should not sign up:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3186" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3186</a>

&gt; On Thursday, Worldcoin said it is planning to implement <i>crowd-control measures</i> and collaborate with the government before resuming work.<p>What does this even mean?

A huge amount of the value of big tech companies comes from outrunning regulators (AirBnB, Uber) and&#x2F;or existing in a state of exception (section 230). Congrats to Kenya for calling BS in short order.

Will the Kenyan government now have access to the biometric data collected by Worldcoin?

&gt; It has also launched in various countries including Indonesia, France Japan, Germany, Spain and the UK. Data watchdogs in some countries have already said they are examining Worldcoin.<p>I don&#x27;t know about Indonesia but that&#x27;s not going to fly in the other countries of this list either.<p>Especially not in very privacy-oriented EU members.

Interesting, especially in conjunction with an apparent global outage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;segunolakoyenikan&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;sam-altmans-worldcoin-app-goes-offline-limiting-users-access-to-wallets&#x2F;?sh=401e6c026cb9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;segunolakoyenikan&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;sa...</a>

charitable interpretation: this project is trying to address the problem of distributed and anonymized KYC. Because the current setup where you upload your passport to Coinbase turned out to be a cruel joke on the original idea of a cryptocurrency: it&#x27;s the exact opposite of anonymous&#x2F;pseudonymous, and the exact opposite of distributed. By this point Coinbase is really no different than a bank (with one &quot;improvement&quot; that it also tries to entice you to play lottery with shitcoins). Whether it will succeed or has any additional agenda i have no idea.

&gt; In Transparency International&#x27;s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, Kenya scored 32 on a scale from 0 (&quot;highly corrupt&quot;) to 100 (&quot;very clean&quot;). When ranked by score, Kenya ranked 123rd among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector.<p>&gt; Despite market reforms, several business surveys reveal that business corruption is still widespread and that companies frequently encounter demands for bribes and informal payments to &#x27;get things done&#x27; in Kenya, a trend that has contributed to an increased cost of doing business in Kenya. The country ranks 56 among 190 economies globally on World Bank&#x27;s Ease of Doing Business Index 2019.<p>&gt; The public procurement sector in Kenya suffers widespread corruption and is the leading form of graft in the public service and always at the centre of all major corruption scandals. The use of agents to facilitate business operations and transactions in Kenya is widespread and poses a risk for companies, particularly at the market entry and business start-up stage.<p>It&#x27;s cute on HN everyone is bashing Worldcoin while there is not a single discourse in regards to gov regulation and the business environment in Kenya and how it may (or may not) be relevant in this case(?)<p>I knew a few kenyans personally many years back (who were working in Mainland China and Hong Kong) and they were clearly not big fans of the kenyan gov. I wonder if there are improvement in the recent years.

A lot of shops have popped up recently in the city purporting to sell high-res prints of your iris. I thought it was pretty weird, in the same level as mattress stores suddenly appearing everywhere. Now I wonder if there isn&#x27;t some iris-scanning crypto scam underneath.

&quot;Worldcoin, founded by US tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, offers free crypto tokens to people who agree to have their eyeballs scanned.&quot;<p>Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD?

Half-baked effort to hypnotize the global south. A GPT would be presented as the totalitarian “superintelligence”, and non-native speakers would have a hard time challenging any of it.

Interesting interview with Peter Thiel walking alone with Sam Altman in 2015. Wondering if anyone here can shed some light on what this is<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iPis68U7bdo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iPis68U7bdo</a>

seems like several african countries are getting fed up with post- and neo-colonialism especially with regard to attemps of the west to control their economy by parasitic currencies like the cfa tethered to the franc guaranteeing cheap French access to their natural resources while at the same time handicapping the competitiveness of their economy.

Using developing countries to build “social proof” in terms of user numbers while not even registering a company and surely not paying taxes. What do we call this, dystopian tech neo-colonialism?

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I was just traveling recently and found a number of iris art shops set up in high traffic tourist areas. These IRis Art shops (places that scan your iris and enlarge it into a picture for you) seem to me to be capable of the same aim as world coin.

I can&#x27;t believe people willingly sign up for what is clearly a fascists&#x2F;totalitarians wet dream....<p>You could offer me a million dollars and I wouldn&#x27;t hesitate sith my &quot;no&quot;, and I&#x27;m far from wealthy.

World-where-we-haven&#x27;t-been-regulated-yet-coin

My last trip to Kenya I got stopped by the police at the airport for a bribe for some stupid made up stuff. I expect this is mostly a shake down for bribe money.<p>I&#x27;m also a happy WorldCoin user. I think a lot of people who want it shut down are kind of miseries that don&#x27;t like seeing other stuff being successful.

Worldcoin does the whole thing wrong.<p>What they SHOULD do is to--<p>1. Scan biometrics. They should not restrict themselves to just irises, because <i>not everybody has irises or eyes</i>. But they <i>should</i> only scan things that you can get surreptitiously without too much work... meaning things that everybody gives away anyway just by walking down the street.<p>2. Bind the biometrics to keys generated only for that purpose, and never <i>used</i> for anything but attesting to other keys... in zero-knowledge so that you can&#x27;t associate different sub-keys attested by a given master key.<p>3. NOT bind the biometrics to names or any other information about the person.<p>4. Go right ahead and <i>publish</i> the biometrics themselves, together with the associated public master keys. Because again, they are not things anybody should be thinking of as secret... and pretending you can <i>keep</i> them secret is foolish even if you <i>don&#x27;t</i> put them in a database.<p>5. Stop centralizing the system that attests to the bindings given in (4); do the work to eliminate trust from that. Or at LEAST don&#x27;t go out of your way to RELY on a centtral authority.<p>Once you have that, you have all you need for Sybil resistance, which gives you the global uniqueness they need. Then go build your crypto system on top of it.

I wonder what proportion of people in the comments section here use Clear, which stores biometric data in a centralized database (unlike Worldcoin, which instead uses cryptography to avoid storing anything unnecessary, and never stores biometric data).

Why does this have to be a crypto currency? My ssn is not a currency and it is used for id. Why can&#x27;t it be like that, a database of id&#x27;s? Should we make our drivers licenses or passports into crypto currencies? What is the advantage?

CryptoBro Sam Altman will have to deal with goat eyes being scanned in as well pretty soon

I&#x27;m waiting for religious zealots to start smashing those Orbs. Looking at long lines of people waiting to stare into one is enough to make me (very briefly) wonder if my crazy uncle might have had a point with his take on Revelations.

Did Sam Altman forget to bribe the right people? Because if he would bribe I would understand why governments would allow a private entity to steal data, content, ip, and identities en masse, as it currently happens in some jurisdictions.

Worldcoin puts off extremely bad vibes. I&#x27;m glad Africa is ejecting this mess.

Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;restofworld.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;exporter-worldcoin-kenya-india-upi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;restofworld.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;exporter-worldcoin-kenya-india-...</a>

Even if they have a database, what can they use it for? scanning eyes isn&#x27;t a simple operation, you can&#x27;t scan with a smartphone etc. How can it possibly be used or sold to?

Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny – whether that&#x27;s market scrutiny from the SEC&#x2F;etc or privacy scrutiny under GDPR and other legislation well understood by SV lawyers.<p>Good on Kenya for holding Worldcoin to account. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what they do as they enter the &quot;and find out&quot; phase.

Taxation and control of the money supply is the single most powerful and fundamental right reserved by a government, and it&#x27;s backed up by lots and lots of guns.<p>Godspeed with changing that, crypto bros.

This is good for Bitcoin.

WorldCoin is a stupid idea and the entire crypto thing is a scam but these things are not as bad as MLM, lotteries and gambling. Everytime some country tries to ban them they will come under heavy US &amp; WTO pressure.<p>Why do you think it&#x27;s like that?

Well, another ideas used for identity in the crypto world was having a twitter account for more than a specific time period, and a number of followers. So I was considered unidentifiable as a person because I had a Twitter account that did not have the requisite number of followers - so I couldn&#x27;t get test network tokens for development work. SMH.<p>Limited partners (pension funds) are paying for this aspirational idea (less any funds from selling tokens perhaps) while a16z will pocket a Venture Capital fee.<p>Lots of money sitting around might as well roll the dice.