this post was submitted on 01 May 2024

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Argentines are recruiting friends, strangers into Worldcoin’s cash-for-eyeballs scheme (restofworld.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago

"Brian takes a cut, which varies depending on the client. “I keep more from the junkies,” he said."

What a piece of shit, rips off some of the most marginalized people in society.

[–] just_another_person 34 points 6 months ago (1 children)

From the title, I thought people were actually selling their eyeballs for money.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

same, and only reason I even looked at the article. why cant crypto just die already? it's just a huge scam

[+] [email protected] -15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

How do you feel about government backed currencies?

[–] Beetschnapps 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The same as everyone else on the planet not desperate to sign up for a pump and dump scheme like crypto.

Same as my parents and your parents and their parents and everyone’s grandparents and the whole sum total of hundreds of years of human experience in what has been pretty much a prosperous economy.

But something tells me the whole internet couldn’t stop you from telling us all why we have it all wrong and should instead waste the energy output of Argentina on fake math problems to artificially create a coin…

[–] themeatbridge 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I agree with you that crypto is a hotbed for scams, schemes, and thieves. But let's be fair, our parents, our grandparents, all the people over the course of human history, they weren't prosperous because they knew what they were doing. Human history is a timeline of massive fuckups and exploitation. Just because "we've always done it" and "it's worked so far" does not mean it's a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Youre completely right! Yet crypto really doesn't seem like the right answer here either. Using more energy than several nations for an unstable currency is just not something thats gonna take off. Even if we had unlimited energy, crypto will continue to require more and more making it entirely infeasible.

[–] Beetschnapps 2 points 6 months ago

Totally agree with you. Didn’t mean for an appeal to tradition, or a “we’ve always done it” type of reasoning.

While history sure as shit isn’t pretty, there is some measure of stability and institutional knowledge that we have developed and shouldn’t be written off.

Kinda like that quote from the economist that goes something like “we’re not on the gold standard because it’s some new wild idea, we’re not on the gold standard because of everything we know across history about the gold standard.”

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Look, the problem with crypto is that while government backed currencies are somewhat abused by governments and financial firms, those two at least keep each other in check some of the time. Since crypto is completely unregulated, Wall Street can make it go up and down as it pleases. It's basically all Wall Street scrip.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

How is Worldcoin still a thing?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sam Altman

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don’t know why anyone would trust Sam Altman. He’s not, like, some noble visionary or great inventor. He’s just a business-side guy who seems to be able to network, raise a lot of money, and navigate corporate intrigue.

Which is perfectly fine. OpenAI needs someone who can network and raise loads of money. But I wouldn’t trust him any more than I’d trust a politician or car salesman.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah, he's pretty much going to sell humanity out to the machines and make Skynet a reality.

[–] LesserAbe 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My understanding is the premise of world coin is to provide identity verification somehow, but I don't get how is it supposed to work?

Also how does it benefit the network to have scanned irises for people who don't care about world coin or understand how it works?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

You're looking at it wrong. This is a scheme to collect mass amounts of biometric data. What's the end goal? No idea, but I doubt it'll be to the benefit of mankind.

[–] LesserAbe 5 points 6 months ago

I didn't say it was good or I support it. I'm trying to understand it. Which is usually an important step to effectively combat something.