No, no, he's advocating for a dreadful, sinister world where a bunch of high priests strip you of your freedom to decide how you conduct business...
How much "discrimination" will be good enough in the end? I'll tell you what the endgame is: no discrimination at all, everybody gets a loan. So, in other words, no loans at all because nobody would conduct business in those conditions.
This is how it should be:
"Max Profit. The most profitable, since there are no constraints. But the two groups have different thresholds, meaning they are held to different standards."
Here's the big fallacy: "the two groups have different thresholds, meaning they are held to different standards."
They are not held to different standards because they're different groups, but because of other reasons that indicate different loan default rates. So you cannot call this "discrimination". This is how things should be.
You need a ton of space and/or processing power for the zero-knowledge transactions. The anonymity isn't free!
In practice Zcash/zcoin (different tradeoffs) are of no use to you unless you are willing to go the extra mile to hide something (criminal activities and such). There's no point in paying for the extra effort for normal transactions.
Satoshi's paper is very concise and the best introduction to Bitcoin (or the damn "blockchain technology" bullshit used to raise money for ridiculous startups, if you want to call it that), particularly for the technical audience here on HN.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Yeah, the main reason, assuming you're a "ML-based business", is you want to validate your market and not spend a ton of money creating something that's not profitable.
Anyway, there are many more obvious use cases. Other apps/games/services that need to detect faces or filter out porn and so on. Imagine a dating site that estimates age and more based on photos, while also filtering out NSFW images.
Pre-processing and alignment are going to be way off. Even if it wasn't, then you have (for face recognition itself) eigenfaces or fisherfaces (bad) or maybe LBP(maybe barely acceptable). Your performance is going to be abysmal compared to serious face recognition technology.
They should have charged the idiot parents who gave him access to their bank account. But they did not only in order to save face and not be portrayed as an evil corporation by the media.
There are no mistakes here. The idiot kid wanted publicity at any cost, the idiot parents want to give the kid everything he wants and Google doesn't want any more hostile propaganda in Europe.