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Comment by _9omd | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine how naive you have to be to not see account selling as a massive problem. Especially when your plan is to first onboard users in poor countries. Why would these people do anything other than signup and immediately sell their accounts, for what may amount to a month or two of normal pay, just for waiting in line and getting scanned. I find it crazy that they claimed their system is Sybil resistant when it had this most obvious flaw. Maybe they don’t really give a crap and just wanted to collect that sweet sweet VC money.

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>Why would these people do anything other than signup and immediately sell their accounts..?

If you are tech savvy you can sign up and convert the worldcoins to money yourself, via Kucoin or similar brokerages. Which is allowed and intended.

> sweet sweet VC money

Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.

Or maybe, just possibly, there might be more to it.

Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.

(Disclaimer: I have no association with this project, haven't gotten my irises scanned, don't own the token, haven't invested any effort to understand it. But I've been around long enough to recognize the smell of reflexive groupthink cynicism, and to profit by betting against it.)

I’m not saying it’s a scam, just that it seems their system isn’t really Sybil resistant due to the issue of account selling. And if that’s the case they either didn’t think this would be an issue, or they expected it but don’t really care, and the claim of Sybil resistance is just marketing. Is this wrong in some way you’d like to explain?

I can't explain anything about this project because I haven't invested the effort to understand it.

Maybe I'll spend the 20 minutes to read the 5000 words in Molly White's article, and then another couple hours to read the whitepaper, then another who knows how many hours researching the claims and counterclaims to make my own judgment.

But probably I'll never do any of those things, and I'll still have high confidence that the project probably isn't simply a scam for sweet, sweet VC money, or unimaginably naive, or full of fatal flaws that every rando can identify instantly.

Because in the past, when anonymous internet commenters are of one mind that a new thing is a scam or fatally flawed, while the team behind the new thing are highly capable, with good reputations for not being scammers or unimaginably naive, usually the anonymous internet commenters don't understand what's really happening.

And then I'll ctrl-f the whitepaper to search for 'sybil' and discover that the arguments in this thread are already discussed in the whitepaper, which gives me even more confidence that the hivemind conclusions of scamminess or naivete are most likely uninformed.

Once again, I never claimed this was a scam. I'm simply pointing out that the system has an inherent flaw regarding account selling, which makes it not sybil resistant, as claimed by the founders. I usually give projects the benefit of the doubt, but I've never heard Sam or the other founder talk about this major issue with their system design.

It's weird that you are so confident while literally admitting you don't know what you're talking about.

> Sure, yeah, maybe that's all it is, a scam that's totally transparent and obvious to every random internet commenter but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road.

You write this like it's an absurd notion, but we've already been through Juicero, WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, and FTX among others.

> but totally non-obvious to the simple and gullible marks on Sand Hill Road

You mean the ones who also invested in Theranos, WeWork, and FTX? They don’t always make the wisest investment decisions. They’re not complete idiots, but they’re sucsceptible to same biases and misjudgements as the rest of us. And I’m sure they‘re aware of some or all of WC’s flaws, and are just investing b/c Sam Altman, or because they invested back in the 2018-2021 crypto bubble. There’s also some time pressure, they’ve gotta put that money somewhere within a year (standard VC LP contract), or give it back.

> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand than just piling on to the reflexive groupthink cynicism which passes for conventional wisdom around here.

Molly already put extensive effort into just that in the OP, as did several other folks she references and links to. If you have any critiques of her critiques and why she may be wrong, love to hear it. But without that, it’s not her or us that’s being reflexive here.

> Perhaps it takes a little more effort to understand

If that's the case, then isn't it on WorldCoin to educate us? Their communications so far have apparently been insufficient, if people are rejecting the scheme merely because they don't understand it.

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