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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand how this is supposed to prevent sibyl attacks?

How do they prevent fake virtual iris scanning devices from pretending that they scanned a person that doesn’t actually exist?

Or is the idea that sama is will run a centralised private identity system that aims to replace government identity management? Then why do you need crypto?

Are they trying to replace proof of stake/proof of work with “proof of being a human being”? I don’t see how the iris scanning achieves this?

I think it’s fundamentally impossible.

If you don’t have a centralised authority verifying identity, the best thing you can get is peer-to-peer federated identity verification like PGP. But with this, identity is relative, as in “I trust a guy who trusts a gal who says this person is real”.

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> sibyl attacks?

This is exactly the same problem as spam detection - nobody has found a good way to prevent people from generating large numbers of fake identities, short of government identity registration. The classic "Why your solution to spam won't work"[1] checklist applies.

[1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Yea, so he’s building an alternative to a government identity system. Which is cool I guess, but why does it need a coin?

It's a tip/gift/bonus/incentive for people to give away their data. And since this is a game of numbers, they knew that throwing $10-20-30 USD to about 400mn people in poor countries they would get the momentum going.

I expect Europeans to shun this.

I fear though that once they hit "1bn people" they will invoke the FOMO into the rest.

> I fear though that once they hit "1bn people" they will invoke the FOMO into the rest.

Over a billion humans have intestinal parasites, but that doesn't mean people are queuing up for worm eggs.

Perhaps not, but that's what marketing is for...

"Increase your resistance gut to parasites with our revolutionary cure!"

Or some such...

And then you realize what complete sleezy snakes most of these tech bros are.

comparing software to parasites... Is this a Steve Ballmer account?

> why does it need a coin?

Otherwise it wouldn't Make Money Fast.

This came up a few weeks ago on HN, with someone from a small country writing that they quit a crypto startup because they realized it was a scam. The startup was starting up an exchange, which doesn't really need a "coin". But they had to have one, so they could play games with the financial structure and Make Money Fast.

This is why there are very few real DeFi crypto exchanges. A trustless exchange, where the exchange never has custody of the money, is the way a crypto exchange ought to work. The exchange is then just a matching service - people put limit orders on a blockchain, the exchange finds ones that match, and tells both parties "go". Like the NYSE, which never owns a stock.

But there's no Make Money Fast in that. It's getting your hands on the customer assets that pays off.

It needs to be a coin so they can pocket $240m in an ICO, which is significantly easier than getting a large government contract because ICO investors are not sophisticated, largely don’t have rights, and insider trading is much easier.

https://icodrops.com/worldcoin/

I think fake iris scanning is the least of the concerns here. The big problem, and likely reason this will fail, is there’s nothing preventing you from selling your account for a small fee after getting your initial scan to set it up. And that’s likely exactly what will happen, because they’re onboarding users in poor countries first. These users don’t give a shit about world coin, they’re simply lining up and being scanned to make a bit of easy money.

The premise is that you can make spam filtering and bot filtering and circles of trust work if you have a finite amount of accounts. Currently on the internet there are infinite accounts. If there's only a billion accounts, filtering becomes much easier.

And all the poor people who sold their accounts when that seemed to have no cost for $50 (which is real money) are locked out of the internet forever

No idea how world coin is supposed to work.. but couldn’t they get their account back by scanning their iris again? Like, I’m guessing you’re not supposed to have to scan your iris every time you use your account. But can’t the iris be like a “I forgot my password” mechanism?

AFAIK, nope. If that was the case there would be no point in buying anyone's account. If you stored value in it they could always use their iris to get into it.

Yeah, it’s a cool idea, even though it creeps me out.

But why do you need a coin for that? If you have centralised accounts you may as well have a centralised ledger.

On the other hand, if you decentralise account creation - let me tell about my friend, the virtual iris scanner powered by /dev/random

The signup module is indeed a centralized system, which then records the new registration on a distributed ledger (which only someone with Worldcoin’s private key can do). From there, payment operations are done distributed on Ethereum / L2.

The signup process is always a sensitive part of a cryptosystem, and open network membership is not always expected (for instance, CBDCs, Ripple…). There is certainly a philosophical argument to be made against closed membership, since it can disadvantage people that struggle for access, and lets the company discriminate in the future once they get a stronghold, which can be especially problematic considering the primary value of human-uniqueness is to restrict voting to an in-group whose bounds historically have been heavily argued even in non-repressive regimes.

But it seems unlikely to become predominant. Some people have prosthetic eyes; I would be hard-pressed to imagine, say, Apple releasing an iPhone that is inaccessible to a population in such a significant way.

If you have centralised signup and identity you may as well run a Postgres DB or a git repo.

It could still be a cool idea, but I don’t get how this needs crypto?

How else do you get A16z to invest?

You play League of Legends while on a pitch call with them

I believe that was Sequoia? Who just massively downsized that very fund this week. (Tho he did seem to play LoL on a lot of calls…)

That sounds like a real power-move from a top-tier mind.

Presumably so that the underlying system can be auditable by 'anyone'?

That can still be done by streaming the updates to whoever wants them (can even hash each chunk of updates, and include the hash of the prior chunk in each chunk, to get a linked list of chunks, which would prevent undetected manipulation of prior chunks).

It’s a value of the database play and graph databases (association, social credit) gain most of their value (like social networks) from scale. You don’t have to have great data, but you need a LOT of data, for them to serve the purpose.

There is a lot of room for systems that are the silver standard and the math enables a great deal of reliability for those outside of the traditional financial systems (many people). It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.

>How do they prevent fake virtual iris scanning devices from pretending that they scanned a person that doesn’t actually exist?

Each scanner is registered, authorised, tracked etc. Presumably with a private key but also I think they have the location, operator details and so on for every one.

doesn't sound very decentralised to me ;)

Of course it will be centralized! There is no cryptocurrency that isn't. Cryptocurrencies can't scale without centralization, and there's no way to interface with the real world without some sort of trust.

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