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Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud.

Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.

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Can you provide sources on that statement about CERB? I'm aware of some people claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud), and people claiming when ineligible which was a risk they were aware of, but not any type of fraud that would be resolved by "proof of personhood" as in biometric scans of every person in the country.

This argument sort of reminds me of Reagan-esque "welfare queen" talking points.

If the government has a list of all citizen wallets, they can ensure efficient and even distribution without risk of fraud. There are no checks in the mail to interdict or fraudulent details to enter on an application.

> people claiming when ineligible

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that.

> claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud)

Proof of personhood doesn't solve that. A government assigned wallet is merely a different target than a bank account number.

> Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today.

The main obstacle is that there is just not enough money for everyone. There is absolutely no problem to prevent fraud by checking government-issued IDs.

I feel compelled to mention the charity Give Directly which is actually operating charitable UBI in some countries. I think they are very worthy of donations, and their programs are directly relevant to this discussion.

You could look at their operational overhead, but I don’t think it’s high enough to justify the assertion that global UBI would be impossible. But I also think the concept of a global UBI, beautiful though it is, skips out some evolutionary steps that are necessary. It’s entirely possible that a better end state is that each nation implements it’s own UBI program. And that is definitely doable with non-crypto.

Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset.

Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.

Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized.

Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue.

Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions.

You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.

Worth noting that the only thing centralized here is identity. Once everyone in the world has a trustworthy unique identifier, any number of currencies and services can make us it.

The rub is: what to do about newly born humans, and about death? Worldcoin is far from solving that problem, and probably won't even if they succeed, since by then numerous actors (including governments) will have gotten involved.

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