It's funny how, in the end, the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world. Sort of how the ultimate decentralized currency is encompassed in the global market of rising and falling economic powers. The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles. There is only the test of time. Or something along that line.

People still don't understand the 'this is not a pipe' painting...

Indeed. I have better luck, though, with "The map is not the territory".

Can you provide a synopsis of this lecture transcript?

It's a speech by the author Robert Anton Wilson discussing the work of Alfred Korzybski, who helped to explain and popularize the map/territory distinction and how it relates to the philosophy of science.

I'm a huge fan of Wilson and Korzybski, the ideas Wilson discusses in this lecture definitely changed my life and the way that I think about science, but even I would caution that it's not all that relevant to the discussion here.

Words are tools of communication, but they are also tools of deception and obfuscation. They never represent reality correctly, but they can be useful.

There is a chain of complexity where subatomic wavicles assemble into atoms, molecules, self-reproducing molecules, cells, multicellular life, specialized multicellular life, different clades of life, and on up to forms of intelligence and self-awareness.

It is not possible for a human-equivalent intelligence to maintain continuous awareness of all these levels of complexity, and so we operate, much of the time, in abstractions and metaphors that we mistake for being real. We code-switch, consciously and not, through sets of behaviors that pretend that various abstractions are real.

Among these abstractions: a town is a group of buildings and people, but different social abstractions don't have to agree about the contents. So the post office, the street maps, the police and the real estate agents can all be simultaneously in disagreement about the house where the author lives in terms of their mappings of "towns" and "jurisdictions", yet all agree on the street address and which building they mean.

When you can't do something because it's illegal, you can do it, but you know that various social institutions will attempt to inflict various consequences on you if they become aware of your action in the appropriate ways. But most of the time you just say "I can't" and fall back on "I shouldn't".

There's a lot more, but it's about the same: we build lots of maps, we don't agree on them, but we keep acting as though they were real even though we know that they aren't. When someone is invested enough in their current map, they can become very upset with someone who points out that it's fictional.

I never realized that painting was at the LA county museum of art until I was standing face to face with it. It felt ironic to have one level of meta removed. I was thinking "this is "this is not a pipe""

"You can't think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something." -Seymour Papert

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/05/488669276/remembe...

I strongly second latexr's recommendation of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", and the spread he linked to above. Scott McCloud is the Marshall Mcluhan of Comic Art.

I keep coming back to Scott McCloud’s spread in Understanding Comics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220819061912/https://i1.wp.com...

The whole book is fantastic. I recommend it even to people who are not into comics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

Exactly, tech is hellbent on preserving and even recreating humanity while discarding the embodied world that connects us and makes us human. It's a schizoid's fantasy.

It reminds me of that one now-infamous tweet about how an NFT of a diamond is more valuable than an actual diamond since a diamond can be destroyed.

which, funny enough, wound up being true for the NFT's original creator. i don't believe that is the case any more, though, lol.

Interesting that you raise the connection to schizotypal thinking. I recently learned there is a quite explicit connection between excessively instrumental, abstraction-obsessed thinking and schizophrenia. I recommend looking into the work of Iain McGilchrist if you want to learn more. A brief sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfMnaLpU7s

That’s because it’s mostly schizoids creating this stuff (myself included)

Do you have an inability to form close connections with other humans? Would that be different towards artificial ones?

reputation based

The existing finance system is largely reputation based, with a light side of contract enforcement and a heavy dose of middlemen. It mostly works, but one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.

> is removing the need for reputation and trust

Except it doesn’t. That’s exactly what we’ve learned over the last decade. It never did either of those things. What it did is that it clouded reputation and trust just about enough to trick people into the illusion of a “trustless” system. There is no such thing. In the end you trust the coders trusted by the people who use the apps implementing the blockchain. There’s no tangible difference to trusting the coders trusted by the banks you use. Yes, with some cryptocurrencies they’re not associated directly with a centralised organisation. But that will absolutely change over time if the cryptocurrency ever becomes relevant to the big corporations of the world. Just as the WWW in practice now is controlled by Google and Apple.

The point of selling the idea that a cryptocurrency is “trustless” is to trick you into trusting it just long enough to pull off a Ponzi-scheme or rug-pull. And yes, that goes for Bitcoin too.

Controlling the commercial web is not the same as controlling the web.

Holding a bunch of bitcoin or mining a bunch of blocks does not allow you or anyone else to redefine bitcoin's fundamental rules.

These are incorrect statements.

> one of the biggest advantage of crypto stuff is removing the need for reputation and trust.

I don't think it does that, though, at least when used as a currency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.

> The irreversibility of crypto transactions means that you have to have some trust that the person you're dealing with will be willing to make things right when erroneous transactions happen.

The cypherpunk answer to this dilemma is that revertability of transactions under some circumstances is a service that, if it is desired (for quite some applications of cryptocurrencies, it is), should be build in a layer above the "bare-metal" blockchain.

When people say "trust" in the context of Bitcoin, it's about not having to trust a middle man, e.g. PayPal, who are notorious for capriciously locking you out of your account and stealing your money, or denying service to marginalized populations.

It doesn't mean you can't get ripped off by the party you're transacting with directly, but neither does cash, unless you pay for some kind of insurance. Which you can also do with cryptocurrency.

Credit cards come with a form insurance built in, but that doesn't mean you're not paying for it (they charge fees), including when you trust your counterparty and don't want to pay extra for insurance on a low-risk transaction.

> When people say "trust" in the context of Bitcoin, it's about not having to trust a middle man

That's all fine if you're a cryptocurrency guy, but in terms of what ordinary people mean by "trust", I don't see how cryptocurrency removes "the need for reputation and trust." You still need those things.

> neither does cash

True. Which is why cash also has a need for reputation and trust.

All I'm asserting is that the need to trust people is not eliminated by using cryptocurrency. How is my assertion wrong?

Someone says that TLS secures your credit card number when buying things online. Which it does.

You say that it doesn't do that, because someone could break into your house and install a hidden camera to capture you entering in your credit card number and it doesn't prevent that.

But you use other things to prevent that. That isn't the kind of security that TLS claims to provide.

And notably, there aren't a lot of alternatives to the kind of trust that blockchains would allow you to avoid placing in the likes of PayPal.

Is that an advantage? At the very least, what it entails is that losing your private key is game over.

Almost by definition, everything else is a low resolution replica which is inevitably open to be exploited.

> the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world

I buy this.

Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem[0]. I believe this approach of identities withstanding "the test of time" solves the oracle problem but at the cost of a delayed solution. Initially you have lots and lots of bots and Sybil attacks are common. Then after a while, identities/nyms that exist and interact with the world increase in trustworthiness. Trustworthy identities will eventually be stolen or sold to bad actors, but like fake identities today they will be expensive.

My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

For instance Islamic State terrorists were buying counterfeit passports allowing them to enter the EU for 15,000 USD [1].

The major downside of such a system is that isolated people or people with few resources would be at a major disadvantage and we would essentially be replicating much of inequality of the credit score system.

[0]: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality, Daniel Suarez, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS5i1S8FXno

[1]: "One such network, run by an Uzbek with extremist links living in Turkey, is now selling high-quality fake passports for up to $15,000 (£11,132) purporting to be from various countries. In at least 10 cases the Guardian is aware of, people who illegally crossed the Syrian border into Turkey have used his products to depart through Istanbul airport.", https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/revealed-how-f...

Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think you can get there with something like Urbit IDs that are easy to ban. If IDs are not infinite you can some protection against abuse - pairing that with some proof-of-humanity and you can get closer, but there are still issues of someone doing the proof and then selling their ID to a bot. At least if it's easy to ban you can try to make that not economical. Doubly true if the IDs have a non-zero (but low) cost.

Helps make you resistant to a sybil attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

The problem isn't trivial though - it's not obvious what will work best and it'll likely always be somewhat of an arms race, especially if you want to keep privacy.

> Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think something like this could've worked, which is why I was so sad over its demise. I think Keybase (like the MIT PGP keyring, which it is sort of a fancier version of) was predicated on the idea that it's much easier to build a centralized keyring and then decentralize it once it's widely adopted than to build a decentralized keyring from the ground up.

That did seem to be the direction Keybase was exploring. Their merkle trees weren't properly decentralized but hinted at ways that they could be.

I'm curious where Keybase would have gone if they were better incentivized to explore that before its demise.

> My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

Not if you have access to the HN database :^)

Plus now with ChatGPT, you don't even have to write the comments.

Many users here are far more insightful than ChatGPT. You might get some OK comments with ChatGPT and a stray upvote here and there, but I think you're more likely to get banned if you employ ChatGPT to write your HN comments at any significant volume.

Not that everyone writes great comments, all the time, but I'm arguing you probably won't break into the 1000s of HN karma if you try to automate it (because you'll probably get shadowbanned first)

I thought there's no shadowban on HN.

There definitely is. Turn on showdead in your settings if you want to see all the comments from shadowbanned people

I don’t know if many people read other users comment history or heck even their user names.

Ok so if I make 1000 LLM controlled AIs right now, then in 10 years I can sell them for millions?

Sounds like a great system, let's do it.

Even that's a bit of a crapshoot. I have a Reddit account that's over 15 years old. I have a Neopets account that's over 20. I can't get into either of them, a consequence of (my abuse of) poor UX design. (What's the fake birth date I chose in 2000? Who knows! Was taking advantage of Reddit's account-juicing tactic of not requiring an email worth losing a decade-old identity to hackers? Probably not!)

I've tried to recover them, and faced a (perhaps justified) customer support brick wall. Was Neopets to anticipate Millennial nostalgia (and our preteen willingness to circumvent COPPA) in their sign-up processes a generation ago? How obligated is Reddit to investigate someone's claim to any single account?

But without those accounts, I'm two closer to being a digital non-entity, for significant portions of my life.

> Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem

I also wrote about almost the exact same thing as what Worldcoin is doing back in 2006:

https://www.alexkrupp.com/fourwebs.html

As proof of the original publication date, not only is it in the Wayback Machine, but it's also cited in several academic papers and books. It's great that someone is actually doing it, but I'm also kind of ticked they didn't cite this essay as prior art in their patent application.

>My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

You can buy very old accounts on any platform for very cheap. Like under $100 for a 10 year account on a popular platform cheap. Most platforms offer comment editing, and most people don't archive everyone else's profiles nor do they have access to the database to check for consistent changes.

Meaning that if we use your account for example, if someone bought it from you (or it was hacked after inactivity and you don't care for it, etc), they could easily rewrite what they need to paint the picture that your user isn't actually about using your real name, but a pseudonym. Most aren't going to care about this that far anyways, as usernames are easily ignored on most sites, same with comment histories. Just indicating how easy it is to rewrite both of those aspects.

The only platforms where this would be difficult are platforms that already partake in substantial identity verification like Facebook.

On HN you can only edit comments until they're 2h old, only delete them until somebody responds. Editing history as you've described would require admin privileges. Good luck getting that for $100.

This assumes that platforms never change policies and that admin privileges are expensive and impenetrable. Neither are true, as we've already witnessed multiple times now across various platforms.

No, it doesn't. I'm not speaking of "platforms." I'm speaking of exactly one platform that has an extremely small admin crew. Buying your way to a rewritten history on HN is highly implausible. Hacking, perhaps, but I'd expect that this community has been rattling those doors for the platform's entire existence.

Such a fake passport is not the same as a complete fake identity. There is more to that than a passport and a lot of it you categorically cannot fake.

A fake passport can trick some people some of the time but not all people all of the time. As such those $15k do not represent a full fake identity. Your history of enhancing with the state in some way, paying taxes, requesting a new passport, getting your drivers license, whatever, serves as defense in depth.

States are pretty good at this, actually.

Also, you account is worthless. Hard or impossible to replicate, sure, but if there is no buyer it‘s worth zero.

> The oracle problem is a problem because there are no oracles

To expand on this and correct your first statement, physical engagement can't be a proof of personhood either.

There can never be a proof of personhood, or if someone is a human or not, or if someone is conscious, etc.

It's more practically applicable than it sounds. Think conjoined twins (sharing a brain), disabled people, people in coma, long memory loss and all other edge cases.

The proof of humanhood is being made of meat, and that is what Sam Altman went after.

The mistake he made is adding blockchain and crypto to that physical verification.

In the end, even that is an approximation. We want to limit our services to "humans" because humans can spend money, and humans can only put so much content into our services (spamming limited versus a bot), and humans want to talk to humans, maybe humans only want to date humans, etc.

But if there was a bot that was well behaved (for whatever that means for a given service), and somehow legitimately viewed ads, and could legitimately decide to buy something with real money from an ad, there's a lot of sites that would no longer want to ban that particular bot. Now they need to distinguish between that bot and the other "bad" bots. In general, if a bot can "behave well" we don't necessarily want to kick them out just for being bots.

In the end, the more bots become like humans and humans through things like the Mechanical Turk become more like bots, service providers will be required to very carefully think through what it is they actually want to demand of their users. Splitting people into "human" and "bot" is already only an approximation on the grounds that there's plenty of humans services don't want around, and there's already some bots that services are fine with (e.g., some helpful reddit bots), so that split isn't going to be good enough. The process of thinking through what is really desirable at a much higher level of detail will be fun to watch, and there will be a lot of different answers for different services.

For your service maybe certain humans don’t qualify and maybe certain bots qualify. However, the matter at hand and WC purpose is proof of humanhood in particular.

What an interesting thought. Maybe the increasing amount of entities I get to interact with that do less and less to bring that prove goes to show how increasingly unimportant being human will be.

>perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world.

Not even. People have been having double-lives for a lot longer than we've had the Internet. The difference is that in physical space it's a lot harder to do so, because you can only be in one place at one time and you have to move from place to place rather than teleporting. So if you want to catch someone in the act of, say, voting twice, you just need to trace their movements.

That being said, there are also plenty of situations in which we consider having multiple identities online to be a good thing. Facebook's "real name" policy - forcing everyone to tie themselves to a government issued legal name instead of just a consistent one - was and is cancer. The whole industry of V-Tubers literally runs on talent living a double life and a healthy dose of kayfabe. And we don't yell at character actors because Robert Downey Jr. is also Iron Man.

Anonymity is considered a vital bedrock of liberal values. But so is voting, and this is where being able to create additional identities becomes a problem very quickly.

Wikipedia has an interesting problem of "ripened socks" where people will register multiple accounts and keep them in reserve, specifically to defeat accusations of sock puppeting. This can be detected, but it's murky - are you actually a sock puppet, or do you just lurk Wikipedia a lot[0]? You could probably even go further and split your editing history across multiple sock puppets. Statistical analysis might be able to reveal that, say, two accounts tend to edit the same set of articles, but that would also have a high false positive rate and disenfranchise other editors.

The underlying base assumptions of the crypto crowd is a sort of extreme para-identitarianism. Anti-identitarianism in its extreme would be something like Japanese-style imageboards[1], with their obsession over anonymous posting. Identitarianism would be Facebook's real name policy. Paraidentitarianism instead wants identity to be a side effect of resource scarcity. An identity like a signing key is non-scarce, I can just make more keys, so you cannot hold elections by simply counting the signing keys. But the money in your Bitcoin wallet is a paraidentity: it is provable scarcity, and thus can be bent into a sort of identity, at the expense of disenfranchising everyone who has not bought into the system. In fact, crypto hucksters explicitly threaten people who do not buy their coins of being left out of their future utopia.

[0] I am in this situation

[1] 2channel, Futaba, 4chan, etc

I often see in software dev this idea of solving a problem by just offloading the problem onto another team/customer.

I guess crypto is fundamentally that. Trust, fraud, identity, insurance, are all very complex things that require massive institutions to manage successfully. But these crypto organizations are always just, shrug "yeah that's not our problem. Whatcha gonna do?"

I guess that is the core principle to begin with. But it's interesting to watch it in action. "Oh that big ball of wax? We don't address it. Not our problem."

With most crypto projects it's actively worse because they tell their users that "trust, fraud, identity etc don't matter because we have a blockchain!".

The rare few which are pretty upfront in saying that in exchange for their strong privacy guarantees the user is fully responsible for everything, are the only ones with any real utility (eg Monero).

Wait, the biometric information are only used for the creation of the wallet, not the later usage? Then isn't this scam? What is the actual value of using biometric for this?

It's crypto, and it's Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, but definition it's a scam.

What do you mean when you say scam? Are you claiming this is fraudulent in some way?

As in, the promises they claim are different from the actual results, and they know this as they are saying them. It is a con, like everything crypto.

What is the thing they are claiming which is different from the actual results and which they know is different from the actual results?

That it actually freakin' works at doing the thing it's trying to do (providing a currency with a guarantee that each account is controlled by one person)

I don't believe they have ever promised that. One person = one account is not at all how the system is designed. It is definitely never mentioned or promised here: https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/ and it is contrary to the system outlined in that document.

That whitepaper doesn't explicitly say "one person = one account", but it seems to be a really basic feature of the system:

- They clearly don't want accounts that don't belong to a person ("Keep the Bots Out" is an explicit goal).

- They also don't want one person with more than one account (World ID is intended to solve the problem of governance by ensuring that each person gets only one vote).

Everything in cryptography is a scam.

Cool.

Ssh is a scam. Got it.

Methinks you're committing the etymological fallacy. Crypto is not cryptography. Crypto is a specific subset of cryptography, quite far removed (in purpose, if not in technology) from normal cryptography.

Personally I think most coins are scams and the remaining are 50% scam

I mean the root comment pretty much already explained it. It is literally impossible for Worldcoin to actually perform its stated purpose, therefore it's a scam.

It is literally impossible for a simple deadbolt to keep intruders from entering your house. Are locks scams?

Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated purpose" is not something they have ever stated.

> It is literally impossible for a simple deadbolt to keep intruders from entering your house. Are locks scams?

If the lock manufacturer asserts or implies greater protection than the product offers (which is actually quite common), then yes, it's a scam.

> Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated purpose" is not something they have ever stated.

I encourage you to read their whitepaper, where they state that world id is indeed a proof of personhood. The allegation in this thread is that it fails at proving that someone is a unique person, and it cannot possibly due so because of the oracle problem. Therefore it is a scam.

https://whitepaper.worldcoin.org/

Oh, I think I see the confusion.

"proof of personhood" is something of a term of art which worldcoin did not invent. They are not literally claiming they can prove, in a mathematical sense, personhood. What would that even mean? See for example this, which seems to have originated the term in 2017: https://berkeley-defi.github.io/assets/material/Proof%20of%2...

"proof of personhood" was created in contrast to "proof of work" and "proof of stake". If you want to get technical "proof of work" is also not a mathematical proof, it is more of an argument of work, since it's possible to get lucky and find a low hash without doing all the work. The word "proof" is not doing what you think it is doing.

There are a couple other "proof of personhood" protocols and none of them mathematically prove personhood, because that is obviously impossible, some of them are listed at the beginning of this post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

Why does that make it a scam? "Scam" implies some kind of fraud or lie, I don't believe worldcoin has ever claimed biometrics were required for later usage.

The value of the biometric is in ensuring a ~ more fair ~ airdrop. With bitcoin the people who discovered it first and who were able to run miners received an outsized reward, and consequently the distribution of bitcoin is extremely unequal. The usage of biometrics doesn't _completely_ solve this problem, there is still a pool of insiders who have an outsized amount of wld, but a very large number of people will be able to walk up to an orb to claim some wld and they will all receive roughly equal amounts. The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.

> The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.

And how is this not a lie when it's so easy to game? It's only shifting the distribution from people who were running a computer early to people who buy biometrics early, steal biometrics or find ways to fake biometrics. And even worse, if you were once robbed of your biometrics in that system, you have lost it forever as I understand it? Is there even any way to get back what was robbed from you?

And just out of curiosity, does this system handle collisions of biometrics? Or is it just assuming and hopes for none to happen?

I disagree that it's so easy to game but maybe you know more than me?

I'm not sure what you mean by buying biometrics early, stealing them seems very uneconomical, and faking them is an engineering challenge which seems quite difficult.

> And even worse, if you were once robbed of your biometrics in that system, you have lost it forever as I understand it? Is there even any way to get back what was robbed from you?

The biometric is only used for the airdrop. It is possible to create a wallet and send and receive transactions without ever visiting an orb. The only thing the biometric does is send an initial amount of WLD to your wallet and ensure that you can only receive that initial amount once.

If someone steals your wallet there is no getting it back, it is not linked to your identity it is just a private key. I'm not really sure what it means in this context to steal your biometrics?

> And just out of curiosity, does this system handle collisions of biometrics? Or is it just assuming and hopes for none to happen?

This is territory I don't know very well. I believe irises were chosen specifically because they were not invasive and they contain enough entropy that the chance of collisions is quite small. I don't know if it has enough entropy that they can be sure there are no collisions or if it has enough entropy that the expected number of collisions was tolerably low.

It seems you didn't read the article, it specifically talks about people are already buying accounts for $30 or less to be able to make accounts in areas where you're not allowed to register.

> "Scam" implies some kind of fraud or lie

Then Worldcoin is a scam.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

what's fair about founders/investors holding 25% of all coins?

Does it? What prevents a factory owner from having all of his employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim their coin, and then hand over their wallets to him as a condition of employment?

Assuming this thing actually works and won't accept irises grown in a vat or someone scanning a chimpanzee, it at least rate-limits you to creating new wallets with new coin at the rate at which you can find and coerce other humans, but it doesn't actually guarantee the 1:1 mapping of wallet:human or an equal initial distribution of coin.

All it's doing is shifting the balance of power from people who command many machines to people who command many other people. It's like reverting industrialism back to feudalism, a digital replay of the same mistake made by every communist revolution of the 20th century.

I said and I meant "more fair". We both agree this will not be a perfectly fair airdrop. Anything not perfect is feudalism?

> What prevents a factory owner from having all of his employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim their coin, and then hand over their wallets to him as a condition of employment?

The airdrop is gated in multiple places. Everybody needs to visit an orb to claim worldcoin but the set of active orbs is managed by worldcoin and when one of them acts suspiciously the orb can be deactivated, among other counter-measures. A set of wallets all owned by distinct people will act differently than a set of wallets controlled by one person.

This is obviously not a perfect counter-measure, some fraud will absolutely occur. It is still a more fair initial distribution than any other currency I know of.

Describing it like this makes it sound very much like a ponzi scheme. When you buy into WLD, you're effectively giving money to current WLD holders, with the hope that more suckers will buy in and do the same for you.

You don't know what a ponzi scheme is. You're describing speculative markets, which have always existed, and must exist for any sort of economic stability to occur.

I assume, since Peter Thiel is involved, it somehow gets the biometrics to Planitir.

And from there to any intelligence agency willing to pay...

I understand your point, but why the separation of coin vs. non-coin tech? Meaning that the only real guarantee of cryptocurrency is prevention of double-spend rather than a confirmed unique identity?

Blockchains can extend the guarantees of the blockchain only to concepts that can be completely represented on-chain, which basically meant just coins. They don't have to interface with the real world so aren't subject issues at the boundary. At least that's one way of looking at it. As soon as you start trying to represent things that actually exist in the real world authoritatively, it breaks down - because the authoritative representation is actually off chain, i.e reality. In this case your identity is the authoritative representation, not the secret key you present.

This is really well said. I’ve been trying to articulate this point for a long time. I think the boundary is between things that are temporal or bounded by real time and space vs things that are time independent and state based. Oracles always suffer from this problem even if the authoritative representation is another digital thing. For example the whole NFT url swapping thing. Similarly this comes up in version control a lot when your code depends on things that are unversioned, the commit state may be idempotent but the application is not.

TBH it's hard to blame anyone for considering starting new cryptocurrencies. BTC/ETH have stuck around despite everything and remained at non-trivial prices. The "identity verification" step really just turns it into a club to join and that's still marketable in the world of cryptocurrency.

Instead of trusting Uncle Sam... trust Sam Altman.

> anyone, human or otherwise - can use that wallet.

But there are only 8 billion people, which is literally an infinite improvement over the status quo.

Yes, but it also assumes that the orb is perfect, and never hacked or reverse-engineered to generate completely arbitrary quantities of these keys. You're putting an awful lot of trust in this for a 'trustless' system.

There are ways to track which orb originated identities and it would be easy to mass remove a known compromised orb. It would result in some people needing to be rescanned but it would ultimately make this extremely high effort attack vector not very fruitful. Additionally any stolen orb would be immediately remotely blocked so this would take coordination with an orb operator who would also be banned for life

If there are ways to track whose id came from what orb it is completely possible to deanonymize people’s world ids.

And if worldid was ever used for a voting system, wiping out the votes of people who come from a specific area would be incredibly valuable. Attacking people’s identities even for only a few dollars each is a multibillion scam industry today.

You generate the secret keys beforehand in your wallet, and then only link them (in zero knowledge) with the iris hash.[1] , [2]

If we're going to be critical, let's at least understand how it works first.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1684939802083282944

[2]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

Most criticisms of worldcoin completely misunderstand/misrepresent how it works but this one does not. The GP is correctly pointing out that the iris hash is only necessary for receiving some of the initial airdrop. It is completely true that once a wallet is generated (and you don't even need to visit an orb to create a wallet) anyone who possesses the private key, human or robot, can send transactions using that wallet. Receiving some of the initial airdrop really does require trusting worldcoin that they are telling the truth and not saving images of your iris.

Is it possible for people to understand how it works and to still oppose it being broadly adopted in your opinion? Can you please clarify what exactly others are not understanding or misrepresenting?

It is of course possible to understand it and still be opposed. That's what makes it so frustrating that seemingly all of the negative coverage is ill-informed; I would love to read some informed criticism!

Just some simple examples:

> Imagine that your digital identity has been lost in some way — shut down by authorities for non-compliance, or otherwise blocked. With traditional cash — and other cryptocurrencies — you can always make a new wallet and stash some fresh coins in it. But this isn’t Minority Report, and you can’t get a new iris from your neighborhood surgeon.

You don't need to walk up to an Orb to create a wallet. You can own and transact worldcoin without ever showing your iris to an orb.

> When your immutable digital identity is locked — imagine merchants who won’t take your coins from you without a digital signature announcing your World ID — it’s over for you. No old account. No new account. No soup for you. You just lost your digital personhood.

This is also possible... with every other form of payment? Imagine merchants who refuse to accept cash. Once the government locks your credit card you're out of luck. Imagine a world where you have to sign in with google before you can pay for anything (why is the worldid dystoia apparently so easy to imagine, while the google one seems silly?). Once the government locks your google account you're out of luck. A dystopia has _many_ levers to pull and refusing to deploy worldcoin is not have any impact on the success of that dystopia.

There is really so much that it's not possible to clarify "exactly" what others aren't getting in a single comment, there are a dozen different misconceptions, if you have specific concerns I'm curious to hear them and attempt to reply to them.

The company behind Worldcoin are making fairly bold claims about the capabilities of their cryptocurrency and “proof of humanity” project. I think it is important to fully evaluate these claims and not take them on face value.

From worldcoin.org

> could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.

This breaks down into 3 claims:

1. Be able to identify humans from AI online in a privacy preserving manner 2. Provide a platform for global democratic processes 3. Provide a universal basic income.

If we cannot agree that these claims are Worldcoin’s main goals then I am afraid Worldcoin is going to need to update their website as I do not see how it could be interpreted any other way in the language they use.

So now that we have their claims we can begin to look at some concerns. Starting with the ones you provided:

> You don't need to walk up to an Orb to create a wallet. You can own and transact worldcoin without ever showing your iris to an orb.

If this is possible, they why is the orb necessary and how can Worldcoin provide the guarantee that everyone using their wallet and blockchain is in fact a person? If UBI and voting are to happen using this as the platform, not needing verification via their iris scanning mechanism calls into question how they can claim to prove that each world id maps to one and only one unique human. If anyone can create an account without verification and transact using Worldcoin then voting and fair distribution of UBI cannot happen the way they describe.

The second concern is something that can happen in the non-crypto space. But if this is a valid concern of the current system, replacing it with something like Worldcoin doesn’t resolve that concern. We would have that same problem. So if we are to replace the current system with a new one, why would we willingly carry over these kind of issues if it were possible to not do so?

Now on to my concerns. I am not an expert in cryptographic mathematics and the nature of zero-knowledge proofs. So I will accept the following:

1. Iris Hash generation is cryptographically unique, privacy preserving, and the database of Iris hashes will be deleted.

2. Iris Hash to World Id is generated in a sufficiently zero-knowledge proof way that makes it so an Iris Hash cannot be used to identify any one specific World Id.

3. World Id to Wallet Private Key is also generated in a sufficiently zero-knowledge proof way that makes it so an Wallet’s private key cannot be used to identify any one specific World Id.

With those assumptions, I have the following concerns:

1. Has the company behind Worldcoin allowed for 3rd party audits? Code reviews, attestation of the zero-knowledge proofs, and other standard security audits we would expect of a global biometrics hardware company?

If they haven’t, and we cannot independently verify any of their claims, they really cannot be trusted. The Worldcoin company has a financial incentive in becoming the global identity solution. Saying they are safe from any vulnerabilities, privacy issues, or flaws in implementation is not good enough for me.

2. Sybil attacks. What has Worldcoin done to prevent sybil attacks? If I can modify the appearance of my iris with the use of a contact lense, and any other biometric data they would collect, can they identify me as the same person? Are chimpanzees inhuman enough to not be allowed to verify? Can attacking the orb operator by completing a sybil attack be enough to perform a denial of service attack against Worldcoin? If my goal is to prevent people from accessing the UBI or voting process then if this attack is possible, as an attacker, I win if my fake personas go undetected and I can collect the UBI and vote fraudulently or if my attack is detected but this compromises the identities of anybody scanned using that orb thus invalidating their accounts or preventing people from accessing accounts by being scanned for the first time as a replacement orb for that area is needed.

3. Which leads to the orbs. If you or I am unable to build our own orbs and join them to the network, then any claims of decentralization is invalid. Of only official orbs are allowed, if they cannot be examined to verify behavior then we cannot trust them either (ties into the audit issues).

I could go on with more but at least based on my surface level understanding of Worldcoin and their operations, I can see several attacks that if this is widely implemented as the global ubi and voting system would be untenable.

If there is no account recovery system, the average person could easily be denied access to participating in society by a simple mistake on their part, let alone any targeted denial of service style attack. And if there is an account recovery process then that is a vector that can be attacked today.

Putting all the world’s eggs in one basket makes this system a nonstarter. Claiming that they don’t want to do that means the language on their website and rhetoric they use in interviews are lies or misinformation of some kind so why should we trust them?

What’s the “Oracle Problem”? Google gives me conflicting results

Try to imagine using a computer without any internet access to book an airline ticket. It doesn't really matter how many or which operations your computer can perform, it is not able to book an airline ticket unless there is another computer which can accept that booking and which your computer can talk to. The internet is next to useless for booking ryan air flights until ryan air puts one of their computers onto the internet and gives it authority to issue bookings.

Blockchains are like virtual computers. It is absolutely possible to imagine ryan air deploying a smart contract to ethereum and giving it sufficient authority to issue bookings but until that happens ethereum is next to useless for booking ryan air flights. This is the oracle problem.

Here I've focused on the write-path but "the oracle problem" usually refers to the read-path. Say you have some prediction market where participants can place bets on who the next US president will be. How do you resolve that market? When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will. But for now blockchains have to make do with various hacks which allow them to imperfectly track what is happening in the outside world.

> When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will.

The Oracle problem isn't the fact that this doesn't happen today, it's that it can never happen in a way that is trustable. When Congress (or anyone else) does decide to publish the election results to a blockchain, every dollar bet on the outcome will be a prize to be won by anyone who can subvert the publication process.

That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq. You're _never_ sure that your counter-party to some communication is who you think they are. The definition of the oracle problem you propose applies to almost the entirety of the modern world and would come up in conversation all the time.

TLS and other measures make me _very_ sure google.com is resolving to a server controlled by Google. A congress who wanted to do so could vote using hardware wallets and publish signatures and we could be just as sure that the blockchain reflected reality. A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality; ryan air could decide that the ethereum smart contract which manages bookings _is_ reality, then there would be no oracle problem even by your definition.

[1] or maybe it would require a constitutional change)

> That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq.

I don't follow, one of us is confused about what the other is saying and I'm not sure who. If the Oracle problem were solved tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is publishing stock prices to ledgers so that derivatives could be implemented in smart contracts, yes?

Anyway, what I'm saying is, whatever real world data you'd like to have on a blockchain ledger, election results or stock prices or sports scores or whatever, the Oracle problem is specifically the fact that you wouldn't be able to trust it if it were there, not the fact that it isn't there yet.

> A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality

This is a workaround - if the value on the ledger is the source of truth, there is no Oracle problem.

All the existing systems we have to solve this area are trust based systems. You trust your browser and OS to choose the correct CAs to trust, and they are the ones that validate to you that google.com is Google. Whole schtick of crypto folks is about reating trustless systems. It is trivial to add real world information to a blockchain if you have an authority that you trust, the oracle problem is how to do that when you don't.

Even the Congress example for who is president, we literally had a bunch of people certify fake election results last election and try to overthrow the US goverment. No matter how much you scream that one day the blockchain will be the reality, that goes agaisnt every single judicial and political system we have in the world, and if you disagree with it, I hope someday somebody doesn't hack your house away from you, cause then you will learn why all proper property systems have judicial systems with actual human beings running on human logic with power to do fixes.

> with power to do fixes.

the implication here is that those powers of the judicial system will always be used to do fixes in your favour. but if that optimism was shared by everyone, blockchains would have never been invented in the first place.

The more you write (talk) about this stuff, the less I understand.

The problem of moving information about the real world (stock prices, weather report, did the Knicks win last night) into a crypto ledger so that it can be speculated upon (e.g. a smart contract that only pays out if the Knicks win).

Using an LLM for such questions is more helpful in my experience

Moving data about within a blockchain is trustless - you don’t need to trust the network to move money. You can set up smart contracts to move money under certain conditions (usually other transactions)

When you want to interface with the real world, say trigger a smart contract on a stock price move - who do you trust to get that data? You’ve reintroduced a trusted authority.

This is the oracle problem. Now, if like me you don’t give a crap and are happy to trust middlemen in your day to day life because I trust banks over random merchants a million times… big whoop. But if you’re a cryptocurrency fetishist it becomes a big deal.

In a nutshell, the oracle problem is, where do you get data to make automated decisions and do you trust that data.

I mean technically the system is proof-of-eyeball rather than proof-of-identity, so you also need to trust any opportunistic criminals in your zip code that have access to spoons.

It looks like the airdrop gives you something like 25 WLD, or $50. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems to be around this order of magnitude. Your hypothetical spoon-wielding lunatic would be risking serious consequences in order to earn $50; that doesn't seem like a particularly strong incentive.

I think any system that wants to store assets would expect to store >$50 eventually and the incentives grow correspondingly.

People have been murdered (in the US) for far less.

There's no reason not to take both eyeballs then

cripple beggars in calcutta, for example, earn approx 30 cents per day and organized criminals maim and manage them in order to extract this amount. you're confident they wouldn't use a spoon to take 160 days worth of income?

* * *

Yes but you’re missing the point that it’s a relatively easy and solved problem to ban accounts and have circles of trust for banned accounts. Because these buyers are constrained in how many accounts they can buy it’s relatively effortless to ban bad actors compared to literally limitless fake personas today.

To me the problem should be modelled similar to what we have now: Some institutions (private or public) giving an ok or not ok on the keys. And platforms choosing which institutions to trust. At some point we may have platform choosing all governments+trustworthy institutions

You could make things like a "smart contract" returns your money (or triggers an investigation) if after 48 hours you report an issue with your account or transaction. Of course this would mean some change on the blockchains themselves

> it doesn't solve the oracle problem

That was never the goal.

> There's a black market in China for these identities already

It is built such that eventually, Worldcoin identities can be trivially reclaimed by the iris owner, so the market for these identities will drop to zero once people realize they can just sell their same Worldcoin cred over and over again and some sucker is going to buy it.

Their only goal here is to create an identity registration system where..

1. people don't need money to register

2. people don't need to have special friends to register

This is a sybil resistance mechanism, and no other system today does this. Also, the registration is basically fully anonymous. There is no way for anyone to enumerate everyone who has registered, and there is no way to link a registrant with the wallet activity of a credential holder. Say what you will, but IMO these are some pretty useful mechanics, and there are quite a few applications of this technology that can't be done without something like this.

> Also, the registration is basically fully anonymous.

You are uploading your iris scan into a black box, how can that be considered anonymous?

Designs are mostly open, and plans are for the orbs to be fully open hardware. The iris is hashed into an "iriscode" and the detailed scans are deleted, and never leave the device. Iriscode is then linked via some zero knowledge proof witchcraft to activate a World ID on a new keypair, which is completely dissociated with the iriscode.

And they want to do nothing. That’s a silicon valley thing all along. The negative externalities of these massive scale business models are pushed to society.

The scale and lack of security design is the cause of them. The mass scams on marketplace, the payment fraud, the harassment, the swatting, etc.

If we forced these companies to meet sane standards (especially visible in fintech) and customer service, oh no, they couldn’t do so many stock buybacks anymore, what a tragedy.

PT Barnum would be proud.

On a general plane why do we even care to identify a (non) person?

We should care whether the peer has some "skin in the game". For example a Bitcoin wallet with some Satoshis locked in a multi-signature smart contract would probably insure that. This approach would automatically ensure a free and robust digital identity and secure communication via secret/public key of that wallet.

If some rules need to be imposed - they could be managed through the smart contract plus some type of an oracle - here I second your thought. Though in this approach (with bitcoin wallet as identity) it is easy to fund the proper process in a transparent and balanced way because the funds are there already.