- Create a large number of worthless cryptographic tokens.
- Distribute around half of them as "freebies".
- Keep the other half to yourself / distribute them among your investors.
- Start a hype by injecting your investors money into your currency.
- Hope that people will start to trade/speculate with your currency, buying it for real monies.
- As the trading volume ramps up, start extracting money from the system by exchanging your tokens for real monies.
- Profit!
Money is simply a representation of value. If you can create value out of "thin air", or even the perception of value out of thin air, then you can make a profit. That much has always been true.
What gives the C-Corp shares value, particularly the ones that trade at very high P/E ratios? Speculation on future growth, speculation on potential dividends, speculation on favorable market conditions, speculation on quantitative easing bringing yet more trillions flowing into stock market, etc.
What's interesting to me, is that people think our US Federal Reserve fiat monetary system is not an MLM scheme in the same way. We know who profits from the existing system: the older participants who got in early. We know who's been totally screwed by the current system: millennials and Gen Zers who can't afford housing, saddled with debt, living with their parents in their 30s:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
This seems to be the way this has always operated right the way back to Bitcoin - distribute tokens, and fund a market to provide initial "liquidity" until enough people are using it to maintain some semblance of value.
Fundamentally, the definition of money is a token of exchange that people are willing to use. What preferences one form of money over others is the government allowing/requiring tax payments in it. (Which presumably is now the case for bitcoin in El Salvador at least.) The easiest way to succeed at this is to provide funds to create a market - with the proviso that as more and more currencies get created, the "supply" part of the equation gets a bit out of hand. Something very similar happened with the 1840´s libertarian banking experiments in the US.
With Worldcoin the creator of this "orb" hardware has complete control of currency creation. I don't see any path towards decentralization here..
Not really; no (even theoretically democratic) has a flat distribution of citizen political power for that to be true in general; it is true in cases where the general opinion happens to be in line with elite opinion, or so strong as to overcome the power inequalities, but otherwise governments act according to elite opinion, not general popular will.
The pump and dump aspect is that the reasons given why anyone should value the token are flimsy. If they were solid then it would just be a good investment.
There is a mechanic at the heart of investment that, purified of anything resembling social worth, becomes a gambling game that people can play for fun, despite knowing that it has no other value.
There's definitely a wastefulness aspect that may have been underestimated, though...
step 2) ???
step 3) profit!
>To address it, we built a new device called the Orb. It solves the problem through biometrics: the Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes
I'm sure absolutely nothing can go wrong with this at all. Wow. I hope this is satire.
Imagine what a major nation state intelligence agency could do with a data set of globally-unique eyeball vein pattern images of billions of persons.
What is the state of the science behind retinal-imaging-as-authentication? Are these patterns truly known to be stable over the course of a person's life?
The irishash is used to get an initial airdrop, not to access funds/make transactions later.
But since equality seems a key principle, I am wondering how they'll deal with people without eyes.
So now one of the creative ways of building an exit scam also involves having 1984 as a business model, even worse than the majority of cryptocurrencies out there.
Oh dear.
It almost by definition cannot work for biometrics.
O brave new world, that has such people in it!
Using dark patterns like artificially limiting supply before the product is even released to create an illusion of demand pretty much says everything you need to know about this. There are no interesting new concepts here, except that in addition to being yet another bogus coin, you're also expected to give up your biometric data.
1) It's going to be difficult to ensure that the 'Orb' device can't be hacked and allow bad actors to send a bunch of random codes to signup for a Worldcoin.
2) If there are bogus signups how do you deal with reconciliation when there are ID collisions?
3) It's going to take many years for this to get a critical traction and to deploy coins to individuals.
4) The value of this coin will be extremely small when it's divided amongst the world's population. Assuming it's spent shortly after it is received, this money will just flow back to the owner's of capital anyways.
> Spoofing attacks involve presenting the Orb with modified, fake, or non-human irises. For example, an attacker might show the Orb a photo of an iris or an animal iris, hoping to generate a unique IrisHash. To defend against attacks like this, we’ve equipped the Orb with a suite of multi-spectral sensors and custom fraud-detection algorithms. This advanced anti-spoofing system complements the iris imaging system, and operates locally on each device.
> The Orb is also resilient to various forms of tampering, including attempts to modify its software, extract its cryptographic secrets, or disable its anti-spoofing system. This resilience is critical, since any of these intrusions might allow a hacker to generate fraudulent IrisHashes. The Orb’s embedded systems reliably detect advanced attacks of this kind, and prevent corresponding fraud.
> To further increase the difficulty of an attack, Orbs will be remotely monitored and compared to other Orbs. Such monitoring is based on non-biometric metadata from the Orb, including battery level, temperature, and network strength. Anomalies will be flagged and lead to Orbs being deactivated. This anomaly detection happens in a controlled environment in the cloud and therefore comes with higher security guarantees than device-level spoof and tamper detection.
Doubt. In the end this is a device collecting signals, signing them cryptographically, and sending them to the cloud. If there's an economic incentive someone will find a way to get it to sign fake signals.
There's also the centralization issue, where the manufacturer of these orbs essentially has total control over producing the currency.
So this is a way to get there. I'm sure it will have glitches and hitches. That's fine, this is how you work it all out, by taking practical real-world actions.
The vision here is huge. Ultimately a complete transition of the global economy.
Will it get there? No idea. But I'm very, very excited to see someone working on it.
And then you come up with this garbage.
So collecting fingerprints and iris scans, Privacy by Design?
They don't solve the proof-of-humanness problem via biometrics, it's more of a web-of-trust kind of thing. Probably also broken as hell, but this is a hard problem being solved in new ways so that's expected.
[0]: Bullshit.js − https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/
1. Are the coins allocated to each user lumpsum, or on a fixed schedule?
2. How can privacy be protected when converting coins into fiat currency?
3. Why would anyone trade these coins, when they can simply get their own freshly issued?
3. How can the coins have any value when nobody trades them?
This is a definitive edition ponzi scam.
This will obviously create immense inflation, but since everyone is capable of just inflating their own holdings to match it's perfectly fair and the relative value of individual holdings should stay fairly constant.
How you actually price goods using this currency is left as an exercise for the reader.
So they say it’s about UBI, but… what’s wrong with the ways we establish human-ness now?
Usually it’s a combination of national ids, photo ids (also a kind of biometric) and respected persons like doctors or licensed engineers attesting you exist. No one method is dominant, which has its privacy benefits.
The eyeball scan, plus the cryptoasset incentive, seems like a strategy that could place this company as a very dominant broker of human-ness. Regardless of whether WorldCoin becomes a useful financial token.
2. What’s even good about the Orb versus something more boring
So the orb bootstraps a user into having a private key. So I have all the same privacy difficulties of managing my own key, don’t I? It’s not like I can pay for things with my eyeball.
So if we have special licensed operators, with controlled hardware, why not generate a key randomly with that hardware?
Presumably they have provisions for transitioning you to new keys when your iris changes, so… if that is done by a controlled hardware and a licensed orb franchise, why not just use regular national or photo ID methods, sign that data with the Orb-station’s private key, and we’re done?
When it is run different times, a different random person ends up being the one rich person. But it never ends up with everyone having about the same amount of money.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211021151209/https://worldcoin...
Unfortunately, from reading that webpage, I don't think "Worldcoin" sounds like a very promising application of the concept.
Come on guys.
A share of nothing is still nothing.
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