Much as I dislike crypto, that's more of "having no sense of other people's privacy" (and hubris) than general scamminess.

It's a Musk-error not an SBF-error. (Of course, I do realise many will say all three are the same, but I think it's worth separating the types of mistakes everyone makes, because everyone makes mistakes, and only two of these three also did useful things).

It's not just about privacy either.

Worldcoin is centrally controlled making it a classic "scam coin". Decentralization is the _only_ unique thing about cryptocurrencies, when you abandon decentralization all that's left is general scamminess.

(Yes, there's nuance to decentralization too but that's not what's going on with Worldcoin.)

True decentralisation is part of the problem with cryptocurrencies and why they can't work the way the advocates want them to.

Decentralisation allows trust-less assurance that money is sent, it's just that's not useful because the goods or services for which the money is transferred still need either trust or a centralised system that can undo the transaction because fraud happened.

That's where smart contracts come in, which I also think are a terrible idea, but do at least deserve a "you tried!" badge, because they're as dumb as saying "I will write bug-free code" rather than as dumb as "let's build a Dyson swarm to mine exactly the same amount of cryptocurrency as we would have if we did nothing".

> Decentralisation allows trust-less assurance that money is sent

That is indeed something it does.

But it also gives you the assurance that a single entity can't print unlimited money out of thin air, which is the case with a centrally controlled currency like Worldcoin.

They can just shrug their shoulders and claim that all that money is for the poor and gullible Africans that had their eyeballs scanned.

> But it also gives you the assurance that a single entity can't print unlimited money out of thin air, which is the case with a centrally controlled currency like Worldcoin.

Sure, but the inability to do that when needed is also a bad thing.

Also, single world currencies are (currently) a bad thing, because when your bit of the world needs to devalue its currency is generally different to when mine needs to do that.

But this is why economics is its own specialty and not something that software nerds should jump into like our example with numbers counts for much :D

> Sure, but the inability to do that when needed is also a bad thing.

When and why would BTC or ETH need to print unlimited money and devalue themselves?

Wrong framing, currencies don't have agency. You should be asking when would you need your currency to be devalued, regardless of what it's called or made from.

And the answer to that is all the reasons governments do just that, except for the times where the government is being particularly stupid and doing hyperinflation.

Not a very convincing answer at all.

What would a convincing answer look like?

Convincing to who? It's not like crypto is widely used as currency anywhere

There's a difference between the answer being unconvincing to people who understand it and not understanding the answer.

When the economy grows, the amount of currency needs to grow as well. Otherwise prices will fall (deflation). That hurts the economy as a whole because e.g. real wages might increase too much

> that's more of "having no sense of other people's privacy"

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

It's not particularly advanced, it's the same thing that means the supermajority of websites have opted for "click here to consent to our 1200 partners processing everything you do on our website" rather than "why do we need 1200 partners anyway?"

It's still bad, don't get be wrong, it's just something I can distinguish.

If it fools billions of people and does significant damage to the lives of people, then it's plenty advanced to me, even if it happens through a more simple or savant-like process than something that looks obviously deliberate.

I don't think the cookies thing is a good example. That's passive incompetence, to avoid the work of changing their business models. Altman actively does more work to erode people's rights.

> It's still bad, don't get be wrong, it's just something I can distinguish.

Can you? Plausible deniability is one of the first things in any malicious actor's playbook. "I meant well…" If there's no way to know, then you can only assess the pattern of behavior.

But realistically, nobody sapient accidentally spends multiple years building elaborate systems for laundering other people's IP, privacy, and likeness, and accidentally continues when they are made aware of the harms and explicitly asked multiple times to stop…

I think those websites actually have only one partner, one of the tiny oligopoly of advertisement brokers. That partner (*cough*Google*cough*), in turn, bows to the fig leaf of user consent via those interminable dialogs. So the site owners' question should probably be "Why do we need to partner with this behemoth that shackles us to 1200 'partners?".

> that's more of "having no sense of other people's privacy" (and hubris) than general scamminess.

It’s both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40427454

Because of course he's got a crypto grift going. Shocking.

I think people tend to assume our own values and experiences have some degree of being universal.

So scammers see other scammers, and they just think there's nothing wrong with it.

While normal people who act in good faith see scammers, and instinctively think that there must be a good reason for it, even (or especially!) if it looks sketchy.

I think this happens a lot. Not just with Altman, though that is a prominent currently ongoing example.

Protecting yourself from dark triad type personalities means you need to be able to understand a worldview and system of values and axioms that is completely different from yours, which is… difficult. …There's always that impulse to assume good faith and rationalize the behavior based on your own values.