Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

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trompetenaccoun

Sybil resistance/proof of personhood is a serious problem and interesting challenge to work on, not just in the cryptocurrency ecosystem but for the internet in general. I'm really surprised reading this thread and seeing that so many HN users apparently have never even heard or thought of this.

The very website we use can be and probably is gamed by Sybil attacks. The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts.

I am very skeptical of Worldcoin myself but you shouldn't simply dismiss the idea.

As for minting an NFT based on your passport: Sure, that's absolutely possible. Sounds like a better idea than what worldcoin is doing. The hashing would also be a lot simply since all you'd have to do is check the validity of the passport and base the hash on the passport number which is unique. My guess is there are legal reasons to them not taking this more sensible approach.

There are many other projects working on solving the problem. Check out Idena for a non-creepy idea, but that too comes with its own drawbacks imo.

> The problem is even greater on sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are regular news of them shutting down thousands of bot accounts.

I don't think I would ever be willing to use or recommend a service that could ban people for life in such a manner. Even with hashed biometrics, the difference between "doesn't currently have any accounts" and "not on our list of banned hashes" is minuscule.

I agree censorship is another issue but keep in mind language models are getting better and better, soon you wouldn't be sure if you're talking to a real human or bot used to influence your thoughts. Arguably on twitter where posts are limited in length and users don't interact as directly that threshold is already reached.

We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online. What to do about sites silencing users is another issue. Imo these (social) media corps need to be regulated and forbidden from arbitrarily banning users. Same as water or electricity providers can't just cut off people they don't like. Users being given the option to block other users is enough. If there's anything actually criminal it's a matter for the courts.

> We need this if we want to keep communicating and exchanging ideas with strangers online.

I disagree. There are indeed a few cases where you can't initially be certain that you're interacting with a human but sustained interactions over a long enough period of time solve that. So the only time we would "need" such a approach is for people to know that something written by a total stranger was written by a human. But you should be getting to know people and not trusting complete strangers anyway!

Even then it doesn't actually solve anything. Paid actors can still post things in an attempt to influence complete strangers. This is exactly what happens right now. So you'll know the paid actor is a human. Or at least paid off a human to provide access to one of their online identities. Great.

So it's a knee jerk response to scary new ml but the ml isn't actually that scary once you think about it and the proposed response doesn't actually solve the supposed issue or any other current problems and it erodes our freedoms in the process.

Paying real people is a thing, but it doesn't scale the way using AI does. Those who do wish to speak to a machine can still do so, but users should be protected from bots randomly showing up in their social media and feeding them misinformation about science or commercial products without the user being aware of it. Again, depending on how the app is set up users wouldn't be aware, especially taking into account ever improving language models. Soon your "long enough" period won't be long enough anymore and a bot tricks you into thinking it's human.

ML isn't scary to me at all, humans with bad intentions are. The same way I'm not scared of nuclear fission in itself but a warhead containing enriched uranium in the wrong hands is a serious danger.

Saying that fighting the problem won't do anything unless it can be completely solved is an illogical statement, one could bring the same fallacious argument against any law. The issue with liars, misinformed folks and paid human actors remains, but a future where billionaire individuals or governments can flood us with thousands of seemingly different takes from apparently different "people" while secretly creating a consensus between the majority of them which is what you're feed when accessing internet media, that is massively worse and more dangerous than anything we have now. Imagine HN were this now and almost none of the people you're interacting with are real. It costs the attacker only server time but it brings them power over potentially all humans.

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