Worldcoin issues tokens to people for scanning their retinas. Their magical orb device sends a biometric hash to their network.
Here's my take on it: You can possibly replace their biometric device with a random hash generator.
* If it works, it means the currency is not fairly distributed, but anyone sending valid hashes to their network is issued tokens, irrespective of whether the eyeballs described by those hashes exist. This is called a Sybil attack.
* If it doesn't work, it means there is some secret or centralized check that the network performs, which means the currency is not open.
This is why we still use proof-of-work in spite of its energy expense: it is simple to understand, it can not be faked, and it can be openly verified.
So, do not support this biometric-gathering enterprise.
Correct but efficacy of this process is pretty much irrelevant for the founders because the whole "fair distribution" is just a marketing gimmick to promote yet another shitcoin.
Only losers will provide their real retinas. Smart players will obviously game the system and then dump the shitcoin on yet another group of losers.
> In order to test this model and technology, we have onboarded twenty-five Operators that run more than thirty devices in twelve countries across four continents (Africa, South America, Europe and Asia).
> To illustrate the success and potential of these Operators, we will dive deeper into the operations from the following five countries: Chile, Kenya, Indonesia, Sudan and France.
Or... What if you had an AI randomly generate unique irises, you then print them on adhesive paper, and paste the cut-outs on the eyes of one of those robo-faces?
> They allegedly do liveness checks with an IR sensor to make sure they are scanning a live eye
If you control one of their devices, you could always just modify it fake a live input.
Even if they intend to control the scanners themselves, corruption can probably thwart that. This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001214) makes it sounds like they may be operating in countries with endemic corruption.
Assuming it was 99.99999% foolproof, then you may have some other problems which are even bigger: kidnapping, having children to collect their coins, etc.
The big logic flaw here is the same one as when the Soviet Union collapsed and shares of the state owned enterprises and assets were sold to the general public: poor people sell the assets to the wealthy.
The entire thing is strange, and doesn’t make sense.
I wouldn't call the coin distribution fair if the creators can allocate arbitrary amounts to themselves, which the Worldcoin creators appear able to do.
Then again, even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair if most of the long-term supply gets distributed in just the first few years, leaving only crumbs for late adopters.
Equal opportunity not equal outcomes is a huge red herring when talking about equality.
Most public places used to have bathrooms which anyone could walk into but no one could easily roll into on a wheelchair. That was equal opportunity.
Nowadays many places have been mandated to have bathrooms such that anyone who uses the space can access a bathroom without difficulty. That is an enforced equal outcome.
When it comes to bathrooms I think most people agree with wanting equal outcomes. That does not mean wanting equal outcomes for all other aspects of life.
Sure, but it's a good way to frame the question. We don't want anyone to be unable to use toilets. Surely there's no clear line where this logic stops. It's fuzzy. Is there anything wrong with wanting everyone to be supremely happy and compassionate and wealthy and thriving? Of course not. The only question is whether efforts in that direction are counterproductive in practice.
> Equal opportunity not equal outcomes is a huge red herring when talking about equality.
No, it's an extremely relevant debate because a certain political faction has been trying to redefine "equality" from its original definition of "equal opportunity" to a completely different one of "equal outcomes".
> Which is the correct approach?
This is a false dichotomy. You can want equal opportunity in most places, and equal outcome in a select few (just like you can want freedom of speech for everything but a select few edge cases).
This is the correct way to do it, actually - enforced equal outcome is inextricably linked with tyranny and oppression, and invariably results in massive loss of human life when it has been ((ostensibly) attempted to be) implemented in the real world.
If you have to pick one, tell me, which is better - for tens of thousands of handicapped people to not be able to access some public bathrooms, or for tens of millions to die in another Cultural Revolution?
If you're going for implausible comparisons, I'll go with the tens of millions, since in the first case, you piss off the handicapped version of Hitler, and he goes on a killing spree that ends with hundreds of millions dead, or more likely deadly disease spreads due to a lack of hand washing. That's at quite a lot of millions now, and people have stopped caring
Correct, but that does not mean its unfair. It just means being late, in the same way that I didn't buy early Apple stock. Nothing prevented me from buying that stock, the opportunity was equal at the time.
Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
If I have to believe the below articles, miners own less than 10% of supply, so the gold comparison is misplaced:
Of course that is true, but that's true of anything of value in society, it is unequally distributed. Surely nobody expects a software protocol to equalize any and all capital in the world?
What I mean by equal opportunity is that Bitcoin treats every wallet owner the same and does not favor any elite or closed group in any way. There's not been a "hidden" period where insiders could jump in, whilst others could not.
That's much different from almost any other crypto, where the development team pre-mines supply and rewards them to themselves before opening sales of their tokens.
Likewise, owning lots of Bitcoin does not reward additional Bitcoin. This rich get richer effect is simply not there. Although rich people do tend to get richer in other ways, but that's not Bitcoin's fault.
This too is different from PoS crypto, where owning lots of crypto rewards you even more of the token.
> It just means being late, in the same way that I didn't buy early Apple stock. Nothing prevented me from buying that stock, the opportunity was equal at the time.
Sure, and that's fine for equity but really bad for currency.
> Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
Again, totally fine for equity, shameful for currency.
> It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
Fairness and equality are different. Imagine 2 people of different heights who can't see over a wall - equality is giving them both a ladder of exactly the same height even if that means just the tallest person can now see over the wall, while fairness is giving them each potentially different height ladders so they can both see over the wall.
The PoW equivalent (not factoring in premine) would be to give the first person the tallest ladder, and each successive person vanishingly small ladders, which doesn't really come under fair or equal. PoW with premine puts you in front of the wall so you don't need a ladder, plus it gives you a pile of ladders which you can sell to the people behind the wall, and maybe even some bricks so you can arbitrarily make the wall higher if you want.
Regarding your first paragraph, from Oxford Dictionary, "fairness" means "impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination."
The above poster was right — it's fair if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
I've seen this whole ladder analogy commonly used in radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts, used to reframe discrimination in a positive light.
> "impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination."
That doesn't imply simplistically equal treatment. If the definition was "equal treatment" that's what it would say instead of "impartial and just".
Impartial and just and no favoritism or discrimination isn't meant to literally complain "hey, you're discriminating in favor of car crash survivors getting physical therapy, that's not fair, everyone should get the same physical therapy".
The definition probably would be better to use the term "prejudice" instead of "discrimination". There's no reality in which people see fairness in absolute lack of discrimination. It's fair to discriminate based on something like medical diagnosis or any other sort of fair judgment of situations.
The false dichotomy of opportunity vs outcomes is stupid. We can't make true equality of either, and we can care about both. And just saying that you see extremists use an analogy is not a reason to reject an analogy. Extremists also wear pants or sleep at night. Anyway, an absolutist no-discrimination view is about as extreme as we can find.
Which version of the OED includes the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" in the definition of "fairness"? The one I have access to, oed.com (OED Third Edition, December 2013; most recently modified version published online September 2021) doesn't include the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" - its full definition of "fairness" (meaning 6) is "Honesty; impartiality, equitableness, justness; fair dealing. In quot. c1450: sound judgement, good sense."
I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
> Which version of the OED includes the phrase "without favouritism or discrimination" in the definition of "fairness"?
It sounds like your definition is more of a list of synonyms — I was using the current Oxford dictionary available on iOS and Google.
> I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
Yes, exactly that, and that's what your comment above was doing, no? You reframed fairness as meaning equality of outcome, and framed equality as meaning equality of opportunity. (Equality of outcome = same end-height, equality of opportunity = same ladder height)
It's not even fair in opportunity since not everyone starts from the same place. For example, It's based on your already existing resources (computing power).
Computing power, or capital to buy the coins. But I don't think this level of "fairness" is productive to discuss. Every human being on the planet having the exact same amount of wealth is an impossibility.
I'll buy "undesirable", for the sake of the argument. But I'm really not clear why you think it is "impossible".
We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership, and they do seem to work reasonably well. (I completely grant they aren't super-popular, but, again, I'm not advocating change, I'm trying to understand why you think this qualifies as "impossible")
What do you think prevents this on a planet-level scale?
There's a few reasons as to why I believe it to be practically impossible to implement.
If everybody has the exact same amount of wealth, it means you've decoupled wealth from anything that is variable, most importantly human individual qualities like risk taking, hard work, talent, brilliance, persistence.
In a world where you can't better yourself economically, most incentives to innovate or produce would cease to exist. To still get a functioning society, a deeply oppressive regime is the only likely answer. After all, why would anybody work?
I suppose you're right that it's not impossible in the short term, just not sustainable in the long term. If nothing matters at all and is pointless, societies' output will degrade over time until the point it is unbearable.
That said, this is current thinking. It's possible to imagine a different equal wealth world that is futuristic. If we get so advanced as to achieve technical abundance, any citizen on the planet would have a high living standard, say upper middle class. Which satisfies almost everybody. And the standard is guaranteed over time, there's no insecurity to it. And those wanting even more things, have everything at their finger tips. Usage based, not owning things.
In such a world, money becomes meaningless. It's no longer a way to reflect scarcity, a way to secure your personal future, or a differentiator of status. Everybody is materially equal at a high and lasting standard. Differentiation might then be found intellectually or in social status. But probably the robots have taken over by then.
> We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership
We also have repeated instances throughout history of groups claiming to try to implement common ownership, and instead killing millions and installing tyrannical governments (see: most communist revolutions), of consistently larger scale (orders of magnitude) than the successes.
Historically, it's far more probable that such a common ownership experiment will result in death and tyranny (and not actual common ownership!) than a success - and, given the relative difference in scale between the successes and failures, there's a strong argument to be made that as the scale goes up, the probability of tyranny goes up.
This is one of the justifications for it being impossible in a practical sense (yeah, it's annoying that there's more than one definition for "impossible"). It's a fact that power attracts corruption, and it's also a fact that planet-level-scale common ownership would require more power to implement than any government has achieved so far. So, while not "impossible" in the hard-science sense, it's improbable (with a correspondingly large chance of a catastrophically bad alternative) to the point that it's not reasonable to attempt.
That said, your comment is a measured and thoughtful answer to a potentially-inflammatory topic, and I hope that my response is equally thoughtful.
I certainly consider it very thoughtful, and appreciate the time it takes to craft a considered message.
I do hear the "scale" concern, and it's interesting to think about it. I.e. for me, it immediately pops the question "why is scale a problem for common ownership, but not for individual ownership". I suspect - without having any proof - that scale is the thing that makes the transition impossible, not that it's an inherent problem for community property itself. Practically, the outcome is indeed the same - if you can't safely transition, the end state is impossible, even if it itself would be a stable state.
This also raises the question of democracy & unequal ownership as a possible stable state - Plato was certainly concerned enough about it, and history has done nothing to discourage that belief since then. There are plenty of rather deadly examples of failed non-communist states.
If nothing else, your comment (and the subthread in general) has lead me to a rather interesting paper: "Social instability and redistribution of income", by Josef Falkinger. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762... (Yeah, as usual, paywalled. Elsevier)
It's a deliberate attempt at modelling outcomes based on income distribution - which I think attempts to get to the heart of the "impossible" issue. It only tackles income, not wealth, but there's a rich set of references :)
> even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair if most of the long-term supply get distributed in just the few years
The number of early adopters with “diamond hands”, as they say, who resisted the temptation to sell at $2, $10, $100, … is vanishingly small. History is littered with early adopters who bailed out. Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value, and if the gamble pays off then people can currently buy Bitcoin at a fraction of its presumptive future value. There’s no unfairness here.
Everyone has had equal access the entire time, and Bitcoin people have been doing their best to get as many people onboarded as possible so they’re not left with “crumbs” after a monetary transition.
Of course, it’s not totally unreasonable to have believed that Bitcoin wasn’t going to work out, but in that case people have no grounds to complain about unfairness - they simply made a wrong choice (by current appearances).
> Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value
Making money by buying and selling bitcoin is zero sum. People are only making money because other people are losing out. There is no possible way that everyone buys bitcoins and gets rich from it. Bitcoins depends on the existence of rubes and the continual expansion of the pyramid to make money for "investors".
This is a very common misunderstanding of how monetization works. The actual value of Bitcoin comes from demonetizing other currently monetary assets (dollars, gold, real estate, etc.), plus some additional (partially externalized) value from increased efficiency as a monetary mechanism. People who are long those assets and not adequately hedged with Bitcoin are losing money to people who are long Bitcoin (assuming Bitcoin people are correct and it works out).
Well it dramatically decreases the efficiency of the monetary system (requiring 60 days of electricity and 1 iPad of e-waste to scribble a few bytes into the ledger every 10 minutes), and only one of the other assets you pointed out create value, the others are unproductive.
Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset - because people need a place to live and you can either live in a house yourself or you can rent it to others. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin.
Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. While a large amount of its value is attributable to speculation it has myriad industrial uses, and jewelry use. Some of this demand may go away as there's a large overlap between goldbuggery and bitcoin maxis.
Dollars have no intrinsic value, but instead their value is derived from demand which is created for them when they enter circulation. They're created via fractional reserve lending meaning that when a loan is issued, new dollars are created but also a debt is recorded - creating demand for those same dollars. That means dollars are 100% backed by demand for those dollars. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is nothing. It has no intrinsic value, it has no demand, it's simply a speculative number-go-up machine. It's not money, that's for sure. You could try and use it as money but that would be an utter disaster from a macroeconomic perspective.
So yeah, parent is right, its roughly a pyramid shaped MLM with a negative-sum component - the $60,000,000 per day you have to pay to miners to keep the music playing.
[edit] Also note that gold and real estate are not classically defined as "monetary assets" - those are for instance cash, bank deposits, investments in debt capital markets and lease investments. Monetary assets need to have a prescribed value in exact dollar terms.
This post is riddled with misconceptions, but I’m just going to focus on these because they’re probably the most productive places for you to start:
> Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset… Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset.
This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. When the primary medium of exchange is inflationary, people will use whatever non-inflationary value stores they can find with sufficient liquidity. Most of the value of gold, and much of the value of real estate, lie in their capacity as a wealth storage mechanism. They are monetized. Bitcoin does a better job of this and will likely subsume their monetization value.
> It has no intrinsic value
Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.
> This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized.
That is not the definition of a monetary asset.
"A monetary item is an asset or liability carrying a value in dollars that will not change in the future. These items have a fixed numerical value in dollars, and a dollar is always worth a dollar. The numbers do not change even though the purchasing power of a dollar can potentially change." [1]
Words have meaning, so I guess I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about.
> Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.
I used the phrase “monetary asset” once to mean “an asset which behaves and is treated like money”, but it would have been less ambiguous for me to use the phrase “monetized asset”.
> citation needed
Give me a minute to find a copy of the Official Rules of Economic Epistemology.
If you’d like to put forward any particular theory that assigns “intrinsic value” to objects I could address it specifically.
> I used the phrase “monetary asset” once to mean “an asset which behaves and is treated like money”, but it would have been less ambiguous for me to use the phrase “monetized asset”.
Real estate is a productive asset and gold is a commodity. I'm not sure in what way they "behave like money" - their prices float with respect to a currency and have roughly zero of the attributes of money [1] - but monetization just means to find ways to make money off an unproductive asset, rather than transmuting it into something that's basically money.
> Give me a minute to find a copy of the Official Rules of Economic Epistemology.
I'll wait. If you're going to accuse someone of a "dysfunctional mental economic model" it's best to have a case made.
I'm referring to intrinsic value in the economic sense not in the epistemological sense. Economic intrinsic value is an independent mathematical derivation of the market value of an asset - based on its qualities and attributes - divorced from the price at which it trades.
For instance, the intrinsic value of a SPAC is the cash on hand, and its extrinsic value is whatever its trading at on the hopes of an acquisition.
> Economic intrinsic value is an independent mathematical derivation of the market value of an asset - based on its qualities and attributes - divorced from the price at which it trades
This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it.
> their prices float with respect to a currency
So does EUR with respect to USD
> and have roughly zero of the attributes of money
Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?
> This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it.
No, it exists in math, with addition and subtraction. Like I said, a publicly traded bank account like a SPAC has an intrinsic value equal to its cash on hand. This is the economic definition of intrinsic value, and you're trying to once again substitute your epistemological definition. Same word, different meanings in different contexts, and it's disingenuous to try and substitute your definition as though it's the commonly accepted one in this context.
> So does EUR with respect to USD
This does not follow. Money isn't an asset, it's a currency, and a foreign exchange trade is a pair trade on the relative domestic purchasing power of the two. Currencies do not float with respect to other currencies because they are not priced in terms of each other.
> Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?
Ok let's talk about real estate. It's not fungible, each house is different. It's not liquid, in fact, sales take a substantial period of time. It's not necessarily durable, it decays without constant upkeep. It's totally not portable. And it's not broadly accepted as money. That's 0. Try bringing your deed to the Apple store to buy a MacBook. How is that 4.5 out of 5?
Gold of course isn't broadly accepted either, so that's a critical one. Try bringing a gold brick to the Apple store and see if you can buy an iPhone. Yes it could be money, it was at some point, but we replaced it because it was bad at being money, and these days it definitely is not.
> No, it exists in math, with addition and subtraction.
I’m sure you can imagine a formula. If you’d like to share a particular formula that works for determining the “intrinsic value” of any arbitrary asset I can explain why it’s wrong or meaningless.
> This does not follow
EUR literally floats wrt USD. There is no coherent way to disagree with this.
> Currencies do not float with respect to other currencies because they are not priced in terms of each other.
Yes they are, any time someone does an FX trade.
> Ok let's talk about real estate.
Typo, meant 3.5/5. Durable - yes, it persists better over arbitrary timescales than the dollar, especially raw land. Scarce - yes. Fungible - 0.5. Liquid - long settlement times don’t mean illiquid (although I probably should apply a penalty here) - yes. Portable - 0. I think you meant “1” since you didn’t disagree with scarcity.
> Try bringing your deed to the Apple store to buy a MacBook… Try bringing a gold brick to the Apple store and see if you can buy an iPhone
Try bringing EUR to a US Apple store.
> we replaced it because it was bad at being money
Do you really think that’s why Nixon suspended gold convertibility? That’s a… very charitable explanation
> I’m sure you can imagine a formula. If you’d like to share a particular formula that works for determining the “intrinsic value” of any arbitrary asset I can explain why it’s wrong or meaningless.
Sure. Net of assets minus liabilities. Book value.
> EUR literally floats wrt USD. There is no coherent way to disagree with this.
They both change value with respect to eachother but neither is priced in the other. Goods in the US are priced in dollars. Goods in Europe are priced in Euros. Euros are not priced in dollars, and dollars are not priced in euros. They're independent and exchangeable at a market rate based on relative purchasing power and demand.
The price of a euro is not determined by the dollar - although a rate of exchange exists. The price of an apple in the US is determined by the dollar. The price of a dollar isn't determined by the euro. The price of an apple in the EU is determined by the euro. I'm sure there's a name for this.
> Yes they are, any time someone does an FX trade.
I see what you mean, and yes the rate of exchange floats.
> I think you meant “1” since you didn’t disagree with scarcity.
It's not scarce, you can just build up. We impose artificial scarcity with zoning considerations, but it's not inherently scarce.
> Try bringing EUR to a US Apple store.
Why would I do that? I don't live in Europe, I don't participate in the European economy. I can exchange one for the other, or have Visa do it free of charge, as they participate in both. Currencies only apply within their boundaries of acceptance. The euro is not a currency in America which is kind of the point I'm making about acceptance. It's a currency somewhere but real estate is a currency nowhere like gold.
So given it carries few (or IMO very few) attributes of money and is not used as money anywhere and its price fluctuates with respect to a currency, it's not a monetary asset. It's not monetized. It's totally independent.
> Do you really think that’s why Nixon suspended gold convertibility? That’s a… very charitable explanation
I don't really care why we got where we got - the result is better. FDR really took the US off the gold standard in 1933 - following the UK ending the gold standard in 1931 "abruptly and unilaterally." [1] Nixon simply killed off the last vestiges.
Uh huh… and how do you calculate the values of these subterms? You told me you could calculate a number, not an expression with free variables doing all the work.
> It's not scarce, you can just build up.
Building land is not cost effective. Economists say land has an “essentially fixed supply”, cf analysis of Georgism.
> It's a currency somewhere but real estate is a currency nowhere like gold.
Bitcoin is a currency in El Salvador. More to come.
> I don't really care why we got where we got - the result is better
> I wouldn't call the coin distribution fair if the creators can allocate arbitrary amounts to themselves, which the Worldcoin creators appear able to do.
I'm certainly not defending any of this … however, it should be noted that "creators can allocate arbitrary amounts to themselves" is a typical thing even in regulated markets. Notice how Trump's new social media became a public company through a SPAC? The man behind that move has two degrees from MIT.
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, go for it. But people become very wealthy, very fast, via allocating "arbitrary amounts to themselves" even in regulated markets. Financial shenanigans.
If you haven't heard of the $100 million deli in New Jersey, feel free to Google that one.
I feel like many cryptocurrencies are attempting to achieve a metaphorical perpetual motion machine. The cryptocurrency world desperately needs its equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics / CAP theorem to help debunk dubious claims and prevent people from wasting efforts on futile endeavors.
No need to speculate, it's the second one and they even describe it on their web site:
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 the cloud and therefore comes with higher security guarantees than device-level spoof and tamper detection.
What you're mistaken about is that the "currency" is not the same as this biometric airdrop (initial distribution). The airdrop is not open at all. The currency itself, once distributed, is just a token on Ethereum (with optimistic rollups). It's essentially as open as any other Ethereum token.
I'm not here to support worldcoin because I think it's a bad idea. However, proof-of-work is also a bad idea. What bitcoin is is a decentralized clock rewarding random machines every tick. It produces bad dynamics. Parento distribution of reward, huge amount of energy waste. All so rich people (Yes, most bitcoin is held by a few rich people) can transfer wealth.
It's a stupid idea. You can appreciate it's simplicity and how everything fits together like puzzle pieces, but it is ultimately a stupid idea because it lives in the real world and has predictable real world consequences.
It's not a stupid idea. It's the invention of digital scarcity. It is supposed to be real world costly.
High energy use in itself is not the issue, it's CO2 emissions. Energy can be locally abundant, renewable, yet remote, hard to transport to civilization. That would be an idealistic example of sustainable mining. Bitcoin mining isn't fully at that level of sustainability yet, but it's a solvable problem.
Bitcoin isn't for rich people. It's for all people. It's highly popular in deeply inflationary regimes, amidst refugees and particular immigrants. The fastest growth in Bitcoin addresses for years has come from the African continent.
> Bitcoin mining isn't fully at that level of sustainability yet, but it's a solvable problem.
No it's not.
These sorts of arguments fundamentally misunderstand the Sisyphean design of Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm: difficulty is scaled to absorb any changes in hash power, and expending hash power is rewarded with a chance of minting coins and/or collecting fees.
Bitcoin could be made sustainable and clean today, with no extra infrastructure, no optimised hardware, no new solar panel breakthrough, etc.: miners simply have to turn off their equipment, then difficulty will adjust downwards, and Bitcoin would become efficient enough to run off a solar-powered RaspberryPi.
That won't happen; and for exactly the same reason miners won't stop burning cheap fossil fuels as well as diverting as much renewable power as they can away from useful projects like electrified transport, desalination, aluminium smelting, HVAC, etc.
Difficulty cannot scale downwards to the level you describe because then it ceases to be Bitcoin. It's supposed to be extremely difficult, this is what secures digital scarcity.
It doesn't help to speak in simplistic absolutes. Miners can definitely become more green and rapidly so. The massive move from China to the US that took place over the last few months likely has dramatically changed the energy mix to mine Bitcoin, for the better. There's also a Bitcoin mining council to promote best practices in renewable mining. There can be additional incentive structures (CO2 tax) to further discourage dirty mining.
Everything everyone else said plus e-waste. My lord, Bitcoin produces as much e-waste as the entirety of the Netherlands to scribble a few bytes into a ledger once every 10 minutes lol. 97% of all mining devices will never successfully mine a single block. Each transaction produces as much e-waste as throwing out an iPad. That's on top of the power demand. You cannot make that sustainable. It's grey goo.
The thing is, the discussion really isn't about Bitcoin's footprint. As a society, we don't care at all about high energy usage, CO2 output or waste.
We've ignored the issue for decades and fully embraced ACs, huge cars, big TVs, high-end gaming PCs, cheap products from China, air travel and the excessive eating of meat.
Even in these times of peak awareness, the typical consumer continues to add more electrical devices to their homes, install jacuzzis in their garden and get ever bigger cars.
Nobody is outraged about any of this behavior. We deserve these toys and justify them.
Bitcoin simply stands out as an easy scapegoat. It's not that people actually care about sustainability, they simply see something they don't understand or need, hence let's ban it. Compare it to the outrage regarding very large trucks, and people calling for a ban.
The trouble is, there's only a few of such trucks, so it does nothing. It would be much more fruitful to ban or heavily tax big TVs, as there's many more of them. And just like that, nobody's interested in sustainability anymore. Not when it personally hurts. So it's all optics, not outcomes.
I see no value in high-end gaming PCs and think they should be banned. They have no meaningful societal value to justify their energy use. You see no value in Bitcoin and think it should be banned.
Neither of us has the moral high ground. We're all a bunch of hypocrites that hand pick whatever we consider of personal value, and to disregard anything else that others may consider of value.
Not when the thing we're doing has a positive feedback loop. We continue until we overextend, collapse, and then start over. Humans are intelligent, so we usually try to do things differently after the collapse. Sometimes, individuals are smart enough to see the collapse coming and build an ark to ride out the chaos.
There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.
> There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.
Price is not consensus of goodness, and it's not value. You wouldn't believe what the market cap of heroin is. Market cap is the most recent trade price multiplied by supply. The price is overwhelmingly determined by USDT trading, not USD trading. According to Google Trends fewer people care now than in much of recent memory.
And further, they're quite mistaken about the impending doom. Just as the man with the megaphone yelling about the rapture has been wrong for decades too.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's time for an e-waste tax and a carbon tax.
[edit] You know, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, the official response wasn't "well folks we should probably just keep dumping stuff into the river until we find a new process, nothing to worry about, just wear these brominated swim trunks when you go for a dip to avoid burns" -- it was to create the EPA and tell companies to immediately cease and desist until they found a better way forward.
The dollar is highly popular in inflationary regimes, crypto is a popular thing to write about, and a few use it but the main defacto backup currency almost always becomes the dollar. (For instance in Venezuala)
I bet the people who around with the orbs will get the iris hashes they collect as a downline and the whole thing will just be a new permutation of crypto MLM.
> If it doesn't work, it means there is some secret or centralized check that the network performs, which means the currency is not open.
I could be wrong, but isn't this because distribution of 'free' worldcoin is centralized? Meaning you can create identities on the network that may or may not be tied to a real person's eyeballs, but that identity only gets free Worldcoin if scanned by lets say an Approved™ Orb scanner operated by an Approved™ Orb operator, who is (presumably) verifying that the orb is scanning real humans only.
This is basically Yet Another Shitcoin With Airdrop, but with some effort to try and control 1 human adopter = 1 free coin in the airdrop.
Regardless, that doesn't imply that the network is centralized / controlled, just the distribution of the initial 8 billion worldcoins is (philosophically, you might say that the centralization of the initial distribution of coins means that the network is effectively not decentralized, but presumably the network is running similar code as any other blockchain).
Proof-of-work is also the only way to preserve decentralization. One CPU, one vote. Everyone can and should participate. Bitcoin failed at this because the hashing algorithm can be accelerated by specialized hardware, leading to professional miners setting up large centralized operations and taking over the network.
Sure, but that doesn't give you the disproportional advantage bitcoin miners get with their specialized hardware. With two CPUs you get two votes. Bitcoin miners get god knows how many.
It really doesn't matter to the game theory of the system.
If bitcoin somehow managed to create a system in which general CPUs were the only thing that can be used to mine, it would just mean that we'd have CPU shortages as the people with wealth and power would buy them all up. Or at least, they'd buy up all the best ones and the plebs would get the low clock speed units that can only hash at a fraction of the rate.
The "one CPU, one vote" idea sounds nice to those of us with democratic ideals believing all humans should have an equal vote, but it just fundamentally doesn't work in practice.
Indeed. Fiat currencies issued by central banks are in many ways more democratic than Bitcoin, because at least every citizen has a chance (albeit an indirect one) of influencing their policy via traditional voting, using the desired “one person, one vote” basis, which is common in countries whose currency you might want to use.
Any form of computing power, whether CPU-based or GPU-based or ASIC-based or memory-based, is a possession that can be accumulated by the wealthy in order to grant themselves power.
I don't think it follows that fiat is more democratic.
Mining is not (and cannot be) a perfectly private thing that the wealthy and powerful have full control over. Ultimately, they operate at the pleasure of governments. They are subject to political whims. A nation state could theoretically nationalize all miners in the country if the political capital to do so existed.
What makes bitcoin unique to fiat currencies, is that it is democratic on a global scale between organizations and entities that control energy production and the technological capacity to produce efficient computation. And how these organizations use their voting power is still ultimately driven by the politics within, whether that's democratic or otherwise. It's not "one person, one vote", it's "one hash, one vote". The distribution of voting power across the globe is a constantly evolving thing that depends on how much electricity and computational efficiency different localities can muster.
This is why I personally think bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency. It automatically gives proportional voting power to countries based on how effectively they can summon computation, rather than how effectively they can summon violence and destruction.
Perhaps. It would still be a lot better compared to the current situation. Buying up all CPUs would not render existing ones useless due to order of magnitude advantages like what happened to specialized BTC miner hardware. People would still be able participate in the network.
Yes. Monero is the only cryptocurrency project right now that could succeed bitcoin in the form it was envisioned to be. I hope its privacy guarantees continue to be tested and evolve.
Like the other guy said, it doesn't matter. It's always spend $X to get Y% of the network. That's just how reality is.
By the way, bitcoin miners do not vote. It's not a democracy. Proof of work is not voting. That's important. Democracy would be a terrible system for governing money. Bitcoin is not a democracy. (Some of the proof of stake coins are, and that's bad.)
The argument against proof of stake is it leads to centralization of the network in the hands of those holding the most coin. Not everyone can participate. People need what, 32 ETH in order to run a node?
TY for the explainer. To make sure I understand, it sounds like a Sybil attack can exploit a hash function because ultimately, what is being hashed does not matter and to verify what is being hashed requires centralization.
Not necessarily. Maybe the scanners have a key that only it's creators can derive from some master key. The hash could come signed and all the public verification has to do is match against a public key. You don't need a database of hashes and you don't need a centralized db of source scans. Each scan hash could even chain with a previous scan hash and you can limit the number of times a key is good for, hence limiting number of scans a device can have. Only way to fake this would be to have the master key.
Which, as always, raises the question of why a blockchain is necessary. If the creators' master key can be trusted with the power to decide who gets new coins, why don't the creators just store everyone's account balance in a database, and get rid of the enormous performance and energy costs of a distributed ledger?
I don't know anything about Worldcoin specifically, but you could argue a case for an initial period of semi-centralized "fair" distribution, after which the protocol would (verifiably) cease to allow minting of new coins.
Proof-of-work was created precisely to prevent a Sybil attack, but while allowing an open network (i.e. not having to buy the token from the creators).
You need a form of scarcity to prevent a Sybil attack.
Solved cryptographic puzzles of an adjustable difficulty is one such form of scarcity.
Proof of work, it’s inefficiency, or it’s security implications on transactions more generally are not relevant to your comments on the vulnerability of their coin faucet or the veracity of their claims.
They related these two points by saying that either it’s hackable, or there’s something weird going on under the hood, and that proof of stake alleviates these issues. Idk if I agree or disagree but it seemed straightforward and relevant what they were asserting.
There were three concepts being conflated in the comment I originally replied to: Sybil attacks, double spending prevention mechanisms like Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, and exactly-once delivery to members of a group (i.e. what a coin faucet does and the creepy biometric privacy destroying Orb thing TFA reacts to). TFA discusses an identification problem, and how this particular solution is creepy and privacy-destroying.
A Sybil attack is a single or a small number of entities counterfeiting multiple peer identities so as to compromise a disproportionate share of the system. The actual network of communicating nodes that have copies of the distributed ledger (whether they be participant wallets, miners, validators, stakers, or any other kind of node), and the append-only list or tree of wallet-to-wallet transactions (i.e. the distributed ledger) are distinct, and may be what's tripping up some.
Within that distributed ledger, proof of work or proof of stake aren't what prevents the Sybils from using your (or others') identities on a cryptocurrency's network without your private key. Transaction signatures alone are the mechanism that prevents impersonation. Sybils can flood a cryptocurrency network with transactions with fake signatures all they want, but the transactions would be invalidated the moment that any node appending to the distributed ledger attempts to verify those transactions against its copy of the blockchain or ledger. In Bitcoin's case, the wallet address is the public key for that wallet, and the transaction signature is easily verified by using the source wallet (the one that has a balance) address as the public key for signature verification. (The wallet address is a hash of the public key, and I'm oversimplifying.)
The function of Proof of Work is to mitigate double spending by the same identity, which is a different concept from a Sybil attack, and is not even a type of Sybil attack. That double spending would otherwise "fork" the distributed ledger, and cause two different parallel versions of the distributed ledger to exist - one in which the destination wallet A has the transacted coin, and another in which the destination wallet B has the transacted coin. The iterated game miners play in PoW makes it computationally infeasible for a single party to double spend without controlling more than 50% of mining (e.g. hashing) power in the communications network of participating nodes. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, spending the same Bitcoin wallet balance twice by signing two different transactions using the same wallet private key. That is not a Sybil attack because the double spend (i.e. both transactions) originate from the same wallet. Double spending by a single identity is irrelevant to TFA, and not what TFA is talking about.
TFA responds to a coin faucet proposal (Worldcoin's "Orb" mechanism) that uses a biometric challenge to verify that coins are distributed to flesh and blood humans only, and exactly once. They're mitigating an identity problem with coin faucets, not an integrity or double spending problem that Proof of Work mitigates. (And in a creepy, biometric privacy destroying way, we'll get to that later.)
Coin faucets can be used to give some value (e.g. a small amount of cryptocurrency) to as large a population as possible to enable, for example, developers to play around with the cryptocurrency and new users to try it out before buying in with their own money. The referenced coin faucet is proposed as a wealth (re?)distribution mechanism. Currently, coin faucets mitigate a single or small number of individuals from consuming all of their cryptocurrency by restricting IP addresses, browser cookies, wallet addresses, and other forms of identification. The "Worldcoin Orb" hardware device for that identification collects biometric information (i.e. facial recognition, eye recognition, etc.) centrally to ensure that only flesh and blood humans receive the initial grant of their cryptocurrency. One of the comments here previously mentioned that you might be able to just spoof the output phashes of these "Orb" devices to perform a Sybil attack on the coin faucet in TFA that uses biometric phashes.
Hopefully this helps explain why this type of Sybil attack is distinct from attacks on the proof of work or proof of stake mechanisms, such as owning 51% of the mining power on a POW network or all the validators on a POS network.
As an aside: An encoded, encrypted, or hashed version of your biometrics that can be used to identify you from those biometrics is still biometrics. As long as it is generated from the source material, and uniquely identifies an individual, it's still biometrics, and still creepy facial recognition, IMO.
Just wanted to say I really appreciate this long and thoughtful response - and sure you are probably proving the OP wrong, I just don't think that what they wrote was inconsistent, even if it turned out to be wrong.
In this case, there are 2 graphs/networks (3 if you count the "Orbs"), 3 different kinds of Sybil attacks, double spending, ECC signatures, and more. It's easy to lose track. I wrote it to check my own understanding.
As for the network, it's as easy. It creates a hash of a retina on a single device with no further confirmation or verification.
So al this comes down to several rather simple steps:
- if the algorithm for the hash is known, generate new hashes programmatically
- if not, but the hash is simple, reverse engineer/brute force the hash, generate new hashes programmatically
- if not, generate synthetic retina images and feed them to the algorithm
--- cut off point, and a really don't think you would need anything beyond this point for a shitty cryptocoin like worldcoin ---
- if the algorithm can differentiate between flat images and "actual" retinas, for some definition of "actual", iterate through artificial eyes until they trigger the required response
While I don't care about Worldcoin (I think it will fail, because they are solving the problem that does not exist), this post is false in multiple ways.
First, retina scanning output hash is deterministic - it is supposed to generate the same result for the same eyeball. So it can't be replaced with random number generation.
Second, network does not interpret hashes, except for making sure that single hash is awarded funds only ones. Network however pays attention to whom is sending the hashes. It must be "legitimate" Orb units, likely considered to be legitimate because their public keys were whitelisted.
Third, process of distribution of initial tokens is obviously NOT OPEN. You need a "legitimate" Orb unit to participate. Which has nothing to do with how the network will behave for users already on-boarded.
Fourth, PoW has nothing to do with it. PoW is antisybil for people who might add new blocks. PoW has nothing to do with people who just want to transfer or hold funds. Or even with people who can create money according to network rules.
> First, retina scanning output hash is deterministic - it is supposed to generate the same result for the same eyeball. So it can't be replaced with random number generation.
His argument is valid, what stops you from replacing the retina scan with a random hash replicating a different person scanning each time and collecting new tokens? What ties the hash to the actual retina other than the device that you can mess with?
Presumably the orbs produce a verifiable type of hash. E.g. whatever output it has is also encrypted with their private key + some salt and you can always check if what a user provides has that.
Would it not just be a matter of time until the orbs are reverse-engineered and you can sign arbitrary input? Especially if this currency were to actually gain significant popularity.
It can be done in following way. Orb can have a baked-in private key (on hardware level). Public keys are stored in the blockchain. Each hash is signed by the private key stored in the orb.
That's orthogonal to the point. Here's the scenario:
1. User has a "fake" biometric A, generated via GAN or [1], that's cheap and easy to produce.
2. Suppose they can present A to any orb device, generating hash(A), which signs hash(A) using its built-in private key as usual.
As long as the user can generate a fake iris biometric scan accepted by an orb, no other part of the system needs to be compromised for this attack to work.
See my original post. It's pretty clear that process of initial distribution of tokens is not open. Volunteers are likely contributing lots of private data to the company to get their hands on orbs.
The orbs are centralized either way. And I personally am less worried about someone having a hash of my eyeball data than my passport and everything else.
I don't see how the deterministic nature of retinal scanning hashes means they couldn't be forged randomly. If there's secret sauce or a secret key in the algorithm that generates the hash then it's not an open platform. And given the stakes, it's only a matter of time until that gets cracked.
>I think it will fail, because they are solving the problem that does not exist
Admittedly I never bothered to read about it but the problem they are solving is purely the distribution. Currently there's just no way to do a fair distribution where everyone gets equivalent amounts of it except perhaps with KYC but then they have to store way more personal data.
I'm much more comfortable with someone having a hash based on my biometric data than having my passport and other details.
> I'm much more comfortable with someone having a hash based on my biometric data than having my passport and other details.
Same here. My point is - fair distribution is just a means to achieve a goal of "more equality". As a mean it is an equivalent of giving man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. At most a PR stunt.
Well a passport can always be faked. If the world became a totalitarian dystopia and you were a freedom fighter that had to elude detection, you can always use a fake passport. Faking biometrics is much harder if they already have your data.
Yes. It’s very good for the project (and the NSA), not so great for users. I’m responding to the comment that prefers to give biometric data to some random private company
No biometric identifier is ever deterministic. Retinal scanning is no different. Your retina doesn't look exactly the same every time, every day, from all possible angles. Eyeballs swell, get infected, can be clouded. Retina signatures can even change over the course of a lifetime in somewhat rare circumstances, usually due to glaucoma or diabetes. Identification is always probabilistic.
Actually, the lowest state of the art false positive rates for biometric id is achieved by iris scans, so I have to wonder why they went with retinal scanning in this case.
Note that I'm not saying you can intentionally cause a false positive or false negative very easily. These are both highly reliable identification methods. But they're not deterministic, so if you're hashing the literal scanned signature, the hash output won't be deterministic, either. Presumably, what they're doing isn't hashing at all. Normally, for biometric id you just store the signature in a database and use a thresholding function to match against it when new scans comes in.
So… then why do they need retina scans? If the whole process has tons of checks and balances, it sounds a lot like the normal verification processes followed by governments for IDs/Visas.
> First, retina scanning output hash is deterministic - it is supposed to generate the same result for the same eyeball. So it can't be replaced with random number generation.
I don’t know much about retinal scanning. But for this use case, wouldn’t it be trivial to fake via something like different coloured contact lenses?
Here's my take on it: You can possibly replace their biometric device with a random hash generator.
* If it works, it means the currency is not fairly distributed, but anyone sending valid hashes to their network is issued tokens, irrespective of whether the eyeballs described by those hashes exist. This is called a Sybil attack.
* If it doesn't work, it means there is some secret or centralized check that the network performs, which means the currency is not open.
This is why we still use proof-of-work in spite of its energy expense: it is simple to understand, it can not be faked, and it can be openly verified.
So, do not support this biometric-gathering enterprise.