Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.
Signing posts with a hash tied to a thing that might prove you are human instead of a LLM astroturfing might actually be a good value proposition for blockchain.
Why would I trust the entry on the blockchain? I'd rather just trust the government body issuing my ID. Estonia has had it for years, it's amazing that here in USA people send contracts over email and just click a button to "sign" it - Adobe at least allows actual PKI signatures but there's not really a registry to verify it against so useless in most cases.
Yeah, the US is a backwards economy and clearly isn't successful with all it's rules and that silly Bill Clinton era digital signature law isn't pulling it's weight. It's been solidly eclipsed by Estonian technical superiority.
I would trust a blockchain more than my government. My government has clearly been shown to be vulnerable to a < 51% attack. Blockchains don't change every 4 years and decide habeas corpus no longer applies to me because my skin is the wrong color either.
You don't need a blockchain for that, just cryptographic signatures and PKI. The EU is implementing a system for national IDs that would enable this, and could be done with perfect privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.
Yes, if every government was reliably incorruptible, they could also work together to build a global human verification network.
I predict that Worldcoin will get it done first, and will be more dependable than most countries. But it could turn out otherwise. In the end, services that need humanity verification will have multiple provider options and the market will decide.
Government solutions will be opt-out, and only in the most tedious way: Leaving the country, burning your passport and becoming a stateless person. Not recommended.
That doesn't really scale to the 3rd world as a form of identity validation. I'm sure there is more than one way to do it, I'm just saying it's a way to do it.
Initially I thought it's a bloody stupid idea, however at this stage I reckon we need it or a lot of boomers are going to be ones hotted into singing away all their wealth away.
Yeah same here. My dad has been talking about the End Times and the Mark of the Beast for 40 years now. Now, in addition to all that, it's Q-ANON and MAGA. Fun times. Liberal police are coming for your guns and your Bible, you heard it here first.
Also a plot point in Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day, where his eyeballs get scanned as a matter of course before transporting a VIP, (sign here, eyeballs here please, thank you) and later used to clone him.
I mean, on the one hand, sure, but on the other hand - the "anointed one" himself, DJT, is pushing AI, so I'm sure it will be fine. Unlike that heathen Joe Biden who attends more church services in a month than DJT in a year. And as I eventually learned (grew up similar to yourself, but german pentecostal in canada, also exvangelical now), if they are against helping people and against welfare/basic human rights/basic income/equality, they're truly christians in the eyes of those telegelicals. I guess somehow the "you will always have the poor among you, me you will not always have" quote from Jesus means that to be "a biblical nation", we have to ensure there are always poor people..
> It's also a hoot to just see LDS missionaries waiving their iPhones around with the Genesis Apple clearly visible.
To be fair, the LDS doctrine around the fruit from the Garden of Eden and the fall is quite different from the Catholic understanding, it’s seen as a necessary, even a good thing, in the overall plan.
To be honest, I would say that these signs placed by Apple Computer were done not out of malice, but by way of warning. To say, "Here Be Dragons!" To counsel those who may be ignorant, there are pitfalls ahead, and be careful, because you could lose your soul to these things, even though they are designed as morally neutral.
Computers are a tool, after all. The fruit depicted could just as easily be from the Tree of Life. It's all about how we use those tools.
Could also just be to show up first in the yellow pages
Also tools are not neutral, they carry the intent of their designer and make whatever they are designed to do easier than it used to be; if you want to be convinced please read Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
I would argue that it’s likely there was no Biblical reference intended, but that even if it was, it’s then more likely the apple is a reference to “knowledge” (as in, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) than a vague warning about using their products.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.