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Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

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61–70 of 141 posts

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I do think the currencies should be used for exchanging things. I mostly meant that they shouldn’t be viewed as an investment or a way to make money. More as an actual currency.

That already exists and is named complementary currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_currency There's no need for a blockchain, or distributed stuff, etc. The only thing you need is to convince people to accept it. You might as well make an app that transfers balance between rows on a database. And the reason why you never heard of complementary currency before, is that it's something done "just becau…

Nice, I've never seen that but I'm going to read that whole page. I think that's probably correct about complementary currencies, if they're just currencies. I wonder if it would be different if each of them had actually different properties?

The cool think about tokens is that they can be programmed to behave different ways. Can you imagine a world where each currency is programmed differently? For example, maybe one currency gets deflated with each transaction (gets multipled by 0.9), and another currency can only be sent a certain number of times before it disappears, encourage people to hold it. Can you think of use cases where that changes the utility of a complementary currency? I'm asking because I can think of a few, but it's so hard to tell whether or not they're good ideas.

The second part, outside of that, is that tokens are on a blockchain. Again, none of this is specific to us, but there are a few properties that any token gets. Namely: They are provably scarce, they can interact with smart contracts, and they can be traded for other currencies if necessary.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple answer, your centralized database can go away tomorrow, or be arbitrarily modified. That can’t happen with the blockchain.

Does that happen to your databases a lot? That's just bad engineering.

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#63
post #49

Everything you want to do can be done on a simple database. You can mint tokens / share it / explore other tokens / message people / view feed. It isn't clear why you want to forcibly put this on Ethereum blockchain and pay a fee to do every transfer (The transaction charge currently is ~ USD 0.5-1 per transaction)

Simple answer, your centralized database can go away tomorrow, or be arbitrarily modified. That can’t happen with the blockchain.

This is only useful if the bits are useful independently of the creators. For example, the gaming streamer, hiphop, and Discord tokens would be valueless without the promises of merchandise, giveaways, and upvotes.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, well actually we could do that regardless. The purpose of the giveaway is to source more ideas for what people actually want to do with cryptocurrencies, and to make sure our product can serve those use cases.

All of the examples you gave don’t need a decentralised cryptocurrency and I reckon could be done more easily with a regular database. Unless you can give a reason why those examples require decentralisation then, as much as I respect your attempt at finding an actual use for decentralised Merkel trees, I ultimately think it’s doomed to failure.

I can offer a few reasons, but they might not convince you. Tokens are provably scarce, meaning the supply is limited and can't be changed by the creator of the currency. They're easily exchangeable, which means they can move between platforms and communities. Finally, they can interact with smart contracts, meaning people can enforce the way the token behaves.

I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too. This is an incredibly difficult brainstorming exercise. So many ICO's have failed to justify their use-cases, but tokens are so interesting that I have to believe there are good reasons to use them. Is there any case that you do find particularly helpful?

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#66
All the use cases you mention could be more easily implemented on top of a more mature distributed ledger such as Datomic.

1. What's to stop a competitor from copying your app feature for feature and implementing their own features faster than you can keep up because they're using established distributed ledger technologies instead of blockchain?

2. Are there any features you have planned that make use of the one thing that differentiates blockchains from distributed ledgers (decentralization)?

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You charge 10 bitcoin as your fee which is around 80,000 usd in today's value!

That does sound outrageous, then again from the perspective of the cryptocoin world the first purchase with bitcoin was two Papa Johns Pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin which is around $80,000,000 today. When I launched bitcoin wasn’t worth what it is today...that said what would you pay for your own community cryptocoin anyway?

$0

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#69

Trying to check your app out, I got "Our security policy blocks MetaMask in Firefox. Please try Chrome, Brave, or Opera."

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. We have a CSP in place to keep our site secure, but Firefox enforces it differently than other browsers, which prevents MetaMask from working. To make it work we would have to relax our CSP to the point where it wasn't really secure at all, so for now we don't support FireFox. We put a bounty on Gitcoin for someone to fix it.
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