I honestly didn't think the grift could get any funnier, but here we are.
Sam Altman has apparently decided that since AI is ruining the internet, the only logical solution is to build a global database of human eyes owned by a VC-backed startup.
I took a look at their map just to see how far this plague has spread, and the fact that you can actively search for an Orb in shopping malls is pure comedy gold. It looks like a prop from a bad sci-fi movie about technocratic overlords.
Imagine explaining to your ancestors that in 2026, the peak of financial innovation is letting a silver sphere photograph your soul so you can claim a few "WLD" tokens that are currently "valued" at whatever the wash-trading bots decide today.
It’s actually impressive how they managed to combine privacy nightmares with Ponzi tokenomics. Has anyone actually seen one of these things in the wild? I assume the line is full of people who think this is the "future of identity" and not just providing exit liquidity for early investors.
Expect Palantir to buy them out once they get a decent sized database and that data will be incorporated into their biometric ID systems.
Meh. Iris isn’t a great biometric for surveillance. You can capture them from a distance but it is tricky, especially with the required NIR lighting. So an iris check will be close - a few inches generally like with The Orb (tm)
Face works fine for most villainous surveillance purposes and can easily be captured covertly compared to iris. I’m not sure palantir really needs irises.
Source: worked in biometrics for decades
I agree with you about the iris. But I assume this thing must be taking other biometric measurements as well. They would be crazy not to.
If they really wanted to they could capture GSP from metal door handles right?
No this was his old scam, that he's still doing on the side. He was doing this before ChatGPT blew everyone's mind and caused what I can only think of as an investment psychosis.
I actually find it infuriating that there is so little media attention on Worldcoin. It's such an obviously crap idea, and it really shows how little understanding everyone involved has.
But that doesn't matter anymore, because as head of OpenAI Altman must be a genius with impeccable judgement, and all his predictions are worth listening to, and we should rearrange our whole society accordingly, to untold destruction.
If you are not convinced, we can sell your shares to someone else. There are a lot of people that are waiting in line to buy your shares. Also, it is not right - his old scam is doing much more revenue than that when you annualize it using yesterday's revenue. /s
Oh wow, a new app in 2026 that uses...."THE BLOCKCHAIN".
Some people still haven't given up it seems lol
worldcoin is just a known low float high FDV cryptoscam nothing more project is a facade to sell crypto to gullible people and dump supply on them on higher lows created milking big names and AI even tho this has nothing to do with anything
Re: a database of retina scans, people have databases of passwords or passcodes already. A way to hack the process WILL be discovered and implemented eventually.
Could it be more secure and useful? Maybe. But this is another example of Silicon Valley failing to really change the world, and instead just make it suck more while they take more money.
I don’t think this think is useful but I don’t see it being dangerous either. Irises (not retinas) aren’t useful on their own.
Giving away some biometric data for 3 magic beans. No way this can go wrong 🤦♂️
Why is there no robot or scanner butt plug effort mocking this?
If I search "The Orb" then page one winds up being 100% the British ambient electronica group. That's good.
Yet page two wnds up being these scammers, when clearly page two should be 100% butt plug results. :(
Does it have to be my retina, or can I bring one from home?
Three dollars in imaginary money? The last time someone told me about this particular racket, the tokens were supposed to be worth forty dollars.
Ten years ago I’d scoff at this idea, but times have changed. I work in finance, and we deal with an issue called *wire fraud*. You’re about to buy a house and a scammer spoofs an email to look like it’s from the title company, asking you to wire them the down payment. With deepfakes, it feels like that will get even harder to prevent. Like to the point I wonder how people can safely do business online in the future.
Proving your ID with your retinas seems like it could be a valid idea.
I also feel like this type of thing could seriously mitigate bots, fake/spam/harrassment accounts, and the dead internet theory. You’d require a “retina ID” to sign up for a Facebook account (for example), and only one account per ID. So you can no longer flood social media with non-human accounts.
Seems like the crypto is just an incentive they made to get people onboard, not really a profit scheme (as if Sam Altman needs more money).
Or, or, or, you can use the retinas to train your AI to produce new, fake retinas that other AI think are real, to make up bots that can access those so called 'human-only' apps! And then you can auction that capability only to the largest bidder, so only the absolutely filthy rich get to scam and control you, not just any ol' random riff-raff!
Sure, trust a slimy cryptobro/aibro with your biometric data. They would NEVER use it in ways contrary to the stated purpose, ever.
Seriously now, this is bullshit. This is the same bullshit that cryptobros have been peddling for years, in which nefarious man in the middle attacks are stealing YOUR data, and impersonating YOU.
The real world does not work in this way. Man in the middle attacks are rare, because social engineering is easier. Why listen in to one guy's communication so you can insinuate yourself in the middle, when you can call 1000 guys, clain you're the 'password inspector' and steal their acess that way?
That's not how the orb works. The retina is scanned once to make your account, then never again to move your money.
Because it is impossible to integrate two factor authentication into blockchain.
I’m not talking about the blockchain (not really a believer in that). Like, you can’t sign up for certain “human only” services without proving you’re a human. To prove you’re human, you need a verified account through some universally accepted verification service (maybe not Orb but something similar). You need a retina scan on file to sign up for that service, because AI bots don’t have those. And they can also double as unique identifiers like a fingerprint.
It also sounds like they can basically use the FaceTime camera to verify a current picture of you matches your retina scan. So on a Zoom call, for example, they could integrate that service and make it so that everyone verifies their identity before they can join.
Maybe not Orb, but I do think we need something that can restore the trust that AI is costing us. The blockchain stuff is irrelevant to me lol.
Why would it be impossible?
Because two factor authentication requires a central trusted authority.
It's the reason 17 years later bitcoin still doesn't have two factor authentication to move criminal money.
It's impossible to incorporate the list five decades of advances in cryptography.
It’s iris, not retina. Retina biometrics used to be a thing but they are essentially obsolete outside of movies.
And as someone who worked in biometrics for decades, I would never trust a biometric presented “over the wire” for anything important. They would need to be in person to be trusted, which defeats the point.