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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#121

Post by pavlov »

kirillseva wrote: post #103
fourstar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you pay to post a comment on HN? Normal people will never hold an ethereum wallet and pay for transactions.

HN comments are free but the platform is owned by YC and YC enforces certain rules as they see fit. In Ethereum there is no owner, but looks like you have to pay for that

The entire value of HN is that it’s owned, guided and actively moderated by YC.

An Ethereum-based alternative would lose that aspect while also costing money and being very slow. I can’t imagine paying for what is effectively negative value.

The test for blockchain “dApps” is this: is someone so desperate to have thing X decentralized that they’ll pay for it in both real money and usability inconvenience? If so, it’s a dApp candidate.

In the real world, the only thing that seems to pass this test is some types of inter-company ledgers.

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

#122

Post by cloudhead »

pavlov wrote: post #32
numbers wrote: post #19

Hi, just a general question for tokens that you might be able to answer: let's say I create a token and I want to programmatically give those tokens to people as a reward. Think of it something like "kudos" so let's say I'm at work and I want to give my coworker a thank you and for that, as a token of my gratitude, I want to send them one of my tokens. Is this do-able at all or am I just thinking of this the wrong wa…

You could just make a Google Sheet called "My Friend Tokens", make two columns "name" and "amount", and put each friend on a row. Then enter your rewards there and share the sheet in read-only mode with everyone. What's the actual difference between this and an Ethereum token? Except you don't need to pay for the Google Sheet, of course.

This made me laugh. In case it’s a serious question: the excel sheet doesn’t transfer ownership of the tokens to the friend. It would be like writing it down in my notebook.

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

#123

Post by onion2k »

hyprCoin wrote: post #87
fourstar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you pay to post a comment on HN? Normal people will never hold an ethereum wallet and pay for transactions.

There will be plenty of people willing to pay to convey a message, it's the entire field of advertising.

No one pays to "convey a message". People pay for advertising to access an audience. As soon as HN started charging to post comments most people would stop posting. If they charged to post a submission the quality of the links would drop through the floor. The idea that HN has enough value that people would pay to comment here (while other free websites exist) is nonsense.

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

#125

Post by kerkeslager »

hyprCoin wrote: post #97
PKop wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards? What's the need for decentralized crypto token (given the costs complexity and friction)?

Gift cards are very limited. The tech behind gift card usage is extremely insufficient. Things like checking balance is often not even possible with a public API layer.

Tokens are very limited. Things like checking the balance is often not even possible for a nontechnical user (i.e. the vast majority of users), who doesn't care about API layers. You can implement software to make this friendlier, but you can do that with gift cards too, and the gift card technologies are already mature.

Not only is this a solution in search of a problem, it's a solution which hasn't found a problem, and is being shoehorned onto problems it actually exacerbates. If you're running a business, the last thing you want is for your business' systems to be decentralized, because that means you don't have control over them. There's literally only downsides for the business.

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

#126

Post by kowdermeister »

woah wrote: post #49
anilshanbhag wrote: post #27

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.

I've heard about a thing called backups. If arbitrary modifications is your concern, you could hash a certain state or records for easy checks. Also, secure logging is an easy way to record changes.

I don't say that the blockchain is useless, but it's hard to come up with use cases where it's clearly superior than databases.

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

#127

Post by philipodonnell »

will_brown wrote: post #29
it_learnses wrote: post #14

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?

Jacksonville, FL shout-out!

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

#128

Post by philipodonnell »

bringtheaction wrote: post #120
streulpita wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have to pay gas because it is on the main chain. We are working on a way to make this free in the future.

Speaking of ways to make transactions free for the user, is it possible to run a full node that verifies transactions and have it look at the type of ERC20 token in addition to the amount of gas and choose to always verify those ERC20 tokens that were made with Hexel even though they pay 0 gas? Rather, I mean, I think that the above would be possible, but would those transactions be accepted by the rest of the networ…

- I seem to recall something about the execution of every single smart contracts happening on all full nodes in the network but that seems strange

Your understanding is correct. All code runs on all nodes. That's why it costs $0.50 or so every time.

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

#129

Post by zdfjkhiuj »

Given that your goal is to make toys, the tradeoffs of cryptocurrencies are unacceptable. The whole architecture of cryptocurrencies is based around extreme security and trust. Who needs that level of security for a toy? Why would I tolerate high fees, slow transactions, and a clunky user experience if the token isn't worth anything? Why would I use a globally-distributed power-guzzling network of thousands of GPUs to make something as silly as TallCoin? This has all the downside of cryptocurrencies with none of the upside.

Databases aren't trendy, but they'd solve the same problem better with less waste.

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

#130

Post by ascendantlogic »

kowdermeister wrote: post #126
woah wrote: 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.

I've heard about a thing called backups. If arbitrary modifications is your concern, you could hash a certain state or records for easy checks. Also, secure logging is an easy way to record changes. I don't say that the blockchain is useless, but it's hard to come up with use cases where it's clearly superior than databases.

Any single time you don't want a central entity to control modifications and or the safety of those backups. Voting records immediately spring to mind. Any sort of civic spending and accounting also immediately comes to mind.
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