Spain tells Sam Altman, Worldcoin to shut down its eyeball-scanning orbs
arstechnica.com
Cryptocurrency launched by OpenAI's Altman is drawing scrutiny from regulators.
  • Spain has moved to block Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, the latest blow to a venture that has raised controversy in multiple countries by collecting customers’ personal data using an eyeball-scanning “orb.”
  • Worldcoin has registered 4 million users, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Investors poured roughly $250 million into the company, including venture capital groups Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and, prior to the collapse of his FTX empire, Sam Bankman-Fried.
  • “I want to send a message to young people. I understand that it can be very tempting to get €70 or €80 that sorts you out for the weekend,” España Martí said, but “giving away personal data in exchange for these derisory amounts of money is a short, medium and long-term risk.”
  • Sharing such biometric data, she said, opened people up to a variety of risks ranging from identity fraud to breaches of health privacy and discrimination.
  • maynarkh@feddit.nl
    0·
    8 months ago

    Will this not kill the whole venture? Isn’t the eyeball scanning one of the fundamentals of their “business model”?

    The EU certainly has the means and will to fine this into the ground if they don’t comply.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      0·
      8 months ago

      Shutting down eyeball scanning for cash worldwide would basically turn Worldcoin into yet another cryptocurrency so… Yeah.

      Edit: looks like somebody thought it was worth real money at some point though. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/worldcoin-org/

      Anybody remember how cryptocurrency was supposed to democratize money or something? Or am I getting the slogan confused with AI

      • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        It did. With Bitcoin, anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access can send money globally in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). They can be their own bank without trusting any single third party. It doesn’t matter if their country has secure banking infrastructure and it doesn’t matter what their credit score is. There are countries on this planet where women aren’t allowed to open bank accounts. Bitcoin doesn’t give AF.

        It has promoted and maintained the exact same fiscal policy for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack: a limited supply and a guarantee of your ability to transfer your coin to somebody else. No bank holidays, nobody devaluing your currency by increasing the supply. No having your savings robbed by an unstable central bank. It gives anybody in the world access to a currency that is already as stable or more stable than most national currencies. And it gives any country in the world an option aside from using USD and, inherently, losing some degree of autonomy in the process. There’s a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.

        People underestimate how big Bitcoin really is. It’s market cap is 850 billion USD, that’s the size of Sweden’s GDP and puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On average, it has a trend of consistent growth year after year as adoption continues to increase. It is uncensorable, the US could decide to ban Bitcoin tomorrow, a gamma ray from space could blast half of the earth out of existence, and the next block would come regardless and the network would continue to function.

        It does all this for around 1% of global electricity usage, mainly from renewables and is powering a new green revolution by being a “buyer of last resort” for power grids. This makes electricity cheaper for all other users of the grid as it’s able to buy power when nobody else wants it, enabling power generation facilities to not lose money during times of low demand. This also makes it easier for grids to add renewable capacity. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense. Miners don’t buy power during times of peak demand for price reasons, so it doesn’t take power that anybody else would be using.

        • LWD@lemm.ee
          0·
          8 months ago

          15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack

          True, not a single hack… Just over $70 billion worth of hacks

          https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

          your currency

          Due to the instability of cryptocurrency, calling it currency and not something like “speculative assets” is very funny.

          It’s a nightmare to use as a currency.

          There’s a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.

          Argentina’s poverty levels hit 57% of population, a 20-year high in January

          Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense.

          I want the drugs you’ve got. Increased interest in cryptocurrency equals higher energy usage. Adoption leads to excess straining of energy without helping anybody except for, as you see in Argentina, the rich.

      • Ogmios@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        8 months ago

        Anybody remember how cryptocurrency was supposed to democratize money or something?

        Smokescreen to get people who don’t really understand computers to buy into a system which can be easily controlled by those who produce/own the physical devices involved, while hiding their tracks near perfectly.