So, my understanding of the current play in this space is as follows:
- 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!
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.
- Create a large number of worthless C-corp shares for a company with zero revenue
- Distribute 100% to the founders
- Onboard new investors through a series of progressively higher valuations, diluting less and less with each subsequent round
- Go public at a lofty, inflated valuation that leaves retail with little to zero chance at producing the 100x gains that early investors got to experience
- Profit!
Money is simply a representation of value. If you can create value out of "thin air", or even the perception of value out of thin air, then you can make a profit. That much has always been true.
What gives the C-Corp shares value, particularly the ones that trade at very high P/E ratios? Speculation on future growth, speculation on potential dividends, speculation on favorable market conditions, speculation on quantitative easing bringing yet more trillions flowing into stock market, etc.
What's interesting to me, is that people think our US Federal Reserve fiat monetary system is not an MLM scheme in the same way. We know who profits from the existing system: the older participants who got in early. We know who's been totally screwed by the current system: millennials and Gen Zers who can't afford housing, saddled with debt, living with their parents in their 30s:
The government always plays catchup on these things, and now is a less than pristine time for financial supervision.
This seems to be the way this has always operated right the way back to Bitcoin - distribute tokens, and fund a market to provide initial "liquidity" until enough people are using it to maintain some semblance of value.
Fundamentally, the definition of money is a token of exchange that people are willing to use. What preferences one form of money over others is the government allowing/requiring tax payments in it. (Which presumably is now the case for bitcoin in El Salvador at least.) The easiest way to succeed at this is to provide funds to create a market - with the proviso that as more and more currencies get created, the "supply" part of the equation gets a bit out of hand. Something very similar happened with the 1840´s libertarian banking experiments in the US.
Governments ultimately execute the wishes and wants of citizens at large, and voters have collectively given a resounding yea to get-rich-fast crypto lotteries.
To be fair, Keeping a lot of stock for yourself and self-promotion is also how successful startup founders make money.
The pump and dump aspect is that the reasons given why anyone should value the token are flimsy. If they were solid then it would just be a good investment.
There is a mechanic at the heart of investment that, purified of anything resembling social worth, becomes a gambling game that people can play for fun, despite knowing that it has no other value.
It seems to me that there are some not-uncommon diseases that could affect this, e.g. if someone develops macular degeneration, do they lose their savings? Or can they double their coin share?
What is the state of the science behind retinal-imaging-as-authentication? Are these patterns truly known to be stable over the course of a person's life?
Unfortunately, they have painfully admitted that they are not joking and they're serious about this ponzi scheme.
So now one of the creative ways of building an exit scam also involves having 1984 as a business model, even worse than the majority of cryptocurrencies out there.
> 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 [...].
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.
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.
2) If there are bogus signups how do you deal with reconciliation when there are ID collisions?
3) It's going to take many years for this to get a critical traction and to deploy coins to individuals.
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.
Their "how it works" page has a whole section dedicated to your first question:
> Spoofing attacks involve presenting the Orb with modified, fake, or non-human irises. For example, an attacker might show the Orb a photo of an iris or an animal iris, hoping to generate a unique IrisHash. To defend against attacks like this, we’ve equipped the Orb with a suite of multi-spectral sensors and custom fraud-detection algorithms. This advanced anti-spoofing system complements the iris imaging system, and operates locally on each device.
> The Orb is also resilient to various forms of tampering, including attempts to modify its software, extract its cryptographic secrets, or disable its anti-spoofing system. This resilience is critical, since any of these intrusions might allow a hacker to generate fraudulent IrisHashes. The Orb’s embedded systems reliably detect advanced attacks of this kind, and prevent corresponding fraud.
> To further increase the difficulty of an attack, Orbs will be remotely monitored and compared to other Orbs. Such monitoring is based on non-biometric metadata from the Orb, including battery level, temperature, and network strength. Anomalies will be flagged and lead to Orbs being deactivated. This anomaly detection happens in a controlled environment in the cloud and therefore comes with higher security guarantees than device-level spoof and tamper detection.
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.
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.
The vision here is huge. Ultimately a complete transition of the global economy.
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)
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.
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.
Just let people mint it from thin air but make sure all minting is traceable on the block chain.
This will obviously create immense inflation, but since everyone is capable of just inflating their own holdings to match it's perfectly fair and the relative value of individual holdings should stay fairly constant.
How you actually price goods using this currency is left as an exercise for the reader.
So they say it’s about UBI, but… what’s wrong with the ways we establish human-ness now?
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.
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.
2. What’s even good about the Orb versus something more boring
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.
So if we have special licensed operators, with controlled hardware, why not generate a key randomly with that hardware?
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.
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.
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!
ThePhysicist|4 years ago
chrisco255|4 years ago
Money is simply a representation of value. If you can create value out of "thin air", or even the perception of value out of thin air, then you can make a profit. That much has always been true.
What gives the C-Corp shares value, particularly the ones that trade at very high P/E ratios? Speculation on future growth, speculation on potential dividends, speculation on favorable market conditions, speculation on quantitative easing bringing yet more trillions flowing into stock market, etc.
What's interesting to me, is that people think our US Federal Reserve fiat monetary system is not an MLM scheme in the same way. We know who profits from the existing system: the older participants who got in early. We know who's been totally screwed by the current system: millennials and Gen Zers who can't afford housing, saddled with debt, living with their parents in their 30s:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
neffy|4 years ago
This seems to be the way this has always operated right the way back to Bitcoin - distribute tokens, and fund a market to provide initial "liquidity" until enough people are using it to maintain some semblance of value.
Fundamentally, the definition of money is a token of exchange that people are willing to use. What preferences one form of money over others is the government allowing/requiring tax payments in it. (Which presumably is now the case for bitcoin in El Salvador at least.) The easiest way to succeed at this is to provide funds to create a market - with the proviso that as more and more currencies get created, the "supply" part of the equation gets a bit out of hand. Something very similar happened with the 1840´s libertarian banking experiments in the US.
nikanj|4 years ago
skybrian|4 years ago
The pump and dump aspect is that the reasons given why anyone should value the token are flimsy. If they were solid then it would just be a good investment.
There is a mechanic at the heart of investment that, purified of anything resembling social worth, becomes a gambling game that people can play for fun, despite knowing that it has no other value.
rootsudo|4 years ago
beckman466|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
jcpham2|4 years ago
walrus01|4 years ago
step 2) ???
step 3) profit!
Leader2light|4 years ago
[deleted]
walrus01|4 years ago
>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
I'm sure absolutely nothing can go wrong with this at all. Wow. I hope this is satire.
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.
paisawalla|4 years ago
What is the state of the science behind retinal-imaging-as-authentication? Are these patterns truly known to be stable over the course of a person's life?
rvz|4 years ago
So now one of the creative ways of building an exit scam also involves having 1984 as a business model, even worse than the majority of cryptocurrencies out there.
Oh dear.
have_faith|4 years ago
AlanYx|4 years ago
lifeformed|4 years ago
f38zf5vdt|4 years ago
O brave new world, that has such people in it!
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Etheryte|4 years ago
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.
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
TigeriusKirk|4 years ago
squidproquo|4 years ago
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.
2) If there are bogus signups how do you deal with reconciliation when there are ID collisions?
3) It's going to take many years for this to get a critical traction and to deploy coins to individuals.
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.
esnard|4 years ago
> Spoofing attacks involve presenting the Orb with modified, fake, or non-human irises. For example, an attacker might show the Orb a photo of an iris or an animal iris, hoping to generate a unique IrisHash. To defend against attacks like this, we’ve equipped the Orb with a suite of multi-spectral sensors and custom fraud-detection algorithms. This advanced anti-spoofing system complements the iris imaging system, and operates locally on each device.
> The Orb is also resilient to various forms of tampering, including attempts to modify its software, extract its cryptographic secrets, or disable its anti-spoofing system. This resilience is critical, since any of these intrusions might allow a hacker to generate fraudulent IrisHashes. The Orb’s embedded systems reliably detect advanced attacks of this kind, and prevent corresponding fraud.
> To further increase the difficulty of an attack, Orbs will be remotely monitored and compared to other Orbs. Such monitoring is based on non-biometric metadata from the Orb, including battery level, temperature, and network strength. Anomalies will be flagged and lead to Orbs being deactivated. This anomaly detection happens in a controlled environment in the cloud and therefore comes with higher security guarantees than device-level spoof and tamper detection.
knownjorbist|4 years ago
have_faith|4 years ago
jnsaff2|4 years ago
TigeriusKirk|4 years ago
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.
The vision here is huge. Ultimately a complete transition of the global economy.
Will it get there? No idea. But I'm very, very excited to see someone working on it.
lvl100|4 years ago
And then you come up with this garbage.
mcgingras|4 years ago
md8|4 years ago
So collecting fingerprints and iris scans, Privacy by Design?
mediocregopher|4 years ago
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.
rokobobo|4 years ago
beecafe|4 years ago
vorpalhex|4 years ago
sodimel|4 years ago
[0]: Bullshit.js − https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/
__alexs|4 years ago
everlost|4 years ago
1. Are the coins allocated to each user lumpsum, or on a fixed schedule?
2. How can privacy be protected when converting coins into fiat currency?
3. Why would anyone trade these coins, when they can simply get their own freshly issued?
3. How can the coins have any value when nobody trades them?
rvz|4 years ago
This is a definitive edition ponzi scam.
sfe22|4 years ago
__alexs|4 years ago
This will obviously create immense inflation, but since everyone is capable of just inflating their own holdings to match it's perfectly fair and the relative value of individual holdings should stay fairly constant.
How you actually price goods using this currency is left as an exercise for the reader.
neilk|4 years ago
So they say it’s about UBI, but… what’s wrong with the ways we establish human-ness now?
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.
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.
2. What’s even good about the Orb versus something more boring
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.
So if we have special licensed operators, with controlled hardware, why not generate a key randomly with that hardware?
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?
99112000|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
0xBA5ED|4 years ago
kangnkodos|4 years ago
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.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
pikwip|4 years ago
f38zf5vdt|4 years ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20211021151209/https://worldcoin...
hereme888|4 years ago
asjdflakjsdf|4 years ago
Unfortunately, from reading that webpage, I don't think "Worldcoin" sounds like a very promising application of the concept.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
leppr|4 years ago
w-m|4 years ago
epa|4 years ago
luckystarr|4 years ago
chaostheory|4 years ago
bla15e|4 years ago
jagger27|4 years ago
Come on guys.
hnechochamber|4 years ago
xx511134bz|4 years ago
lifeformed|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
esnard|4 years ago
yownie|4 years ago
nynx|4 years ago
npv789|4 years ago
kfprt|4 years ago
A share of nothing is still nothing.
908087|4 years ago
[deleted]
seibelj|4 years ago
For readers - a Senior Blockchain Engineer position is available! https://worldcoin.org/job/4001608004 HNers - apply now!
beaconstudios|4 years ago
TigeriusKirk|4 years ago