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Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

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Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#21
post #8

After reading this, I feel the founders of Elph and myself have radically different ideas about what "Netscape" means.

I see Coinbase as "the Netscape of crypto". They're the company that is making it easy for ordinary people to get involved with trading or holding crypto assets, basically the on-ramp to the cryptocurrency world.

Ironically, Coinbase sees themselves as "the Google of crypto". Having worked at Google, this seems nonsensical to me. Google was built at a much later time in the dot-com boom, when the Internet had expanded so much that you couldn't have a single on-ramp to it, you needed a satellite overview (in this particular case, literally) to make sense of it all. IMHO the Google of crypto hasn't been invented, because the market for it doesn't exist yet. (Conventional wisdom is that currency is a winner-take-all market, in which case the market for "the Google of crypto" will never exist, because the industry will never get complex enough that you'd need one. I'm not entirely sure that conventional wisdom is correct in this case, though.)

Elph sounds much more like "The Macintosh of crypto" - both because of the app store they're building, and because their focus is on making things that are currently complicated point-and-click.

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#23
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize over time Netscape did quite a few things, but to me it is a company that made a web browser. They weren't a portal or an app store. Maybe if you accept that ethereum is somehow equivalent to the web...

Netscape launched a doomed portal in 1997 and relaunched in 1998 after they started losing significant browser share to IE. There were already plenty of better portals at the time (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, etc) and Netcenter's only real traffic came via Netscape Navigator users because it was the default home page. I don't understand the comparison to Netscape either. When Netscape wa…

Agreed, makes no sense to me either. So they want to be a first mover with the right idea, but poor execution and eventually lose out to all other competition? Sounds like a great business philosophy.

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#24
post #14
post #7

I bet they're not the only ones working on this.

Brendan Eich is working on something similar - https://brave.com/

Yep and it definitely makes sense for this type of product to start as regular browser like Brave and slowly incorporate both

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#25
post #14
post #7

I bet they're not the only ones working on this.

Brendan Eich is working on something similar - https://brave.com/

Not really, Brave is quite different. Not sure if you read the article, but what they mean by "Netscape for crypto" is more like "the first mass accessible way to use crypto" instead of "Chrome for crypto"

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#26

Everyone needs to stop using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency". I thought this article was going to be about cryptography, not more hype for dunning-krugerrands.

Yeah, I found the title very confusingly ambiguous. While we can't force the world to use language a certain way, can we at least have non-ambiguous title for HN posts?

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#27
post #8

After reading this, I feel the founders of Elph and myself have radically different ideas about what "Netscape" means.

After reading this, I feel the founders of Elph and myself have radically different ideas about what "Crypto" means.

:-)

Isn't OpenSSL the Netscape of Crypto?

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you see them succeeding?

what other apps do this?

This is a web browser with W3 tools built-in. It's nothing you can't do without Chrome/Firefox + Metamask (or Coinbase's future Metamask competitor). I do think it's a good idea, because you can reduce friction and polish the UI by integrating everything, but in the long run, if crypto is successful, I really think Firefox and Chrome will just adopt all these W3 technologies natively. It will be hard to compete.

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#29
post #14
post #7

I bet they're not the only ones working on this.

Brendan Eich is working on something similar - https://brave.com/

You almost got me scared there! I was going to switch to Brave on my tablet to get better power saving / faster experience via adblocking. However, having blockchain in the browser would defeat the whole thing, making everything much slower instead.

Luckily, they only seem to incorporate BAT, which is fully opt-in, and seems to have no overhead for regular users.

Re: Elph wants to be the Netscape for cryptocurrency

#30

Everyone needs to stop using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency". I thought this article was going to be about cryptography, not more hype for dunning-krugerrands.

yeah its not going to happen

and you'll need to learn what "context" means, because there isn't anything binary about a word's ability to be used for multiple purposes in different subjects

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