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Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

forbes.com

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Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#131

Post by blobs »

chx wrote: post #78

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…

> Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple.

I am afraid your thoughts are very(too) simple. End.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#132

Post by mosselman »

chrisco255 wrote: post #112
hudon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

transactions are “reversed” every time a chain is abandoned. It happened in 2010 when Satoshi himself called to abandon a chain, again 2013 when Luke and Pieter called miners to abandon a chain, and probably many times since then to fix various bugs. It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain versus how many were spent elsewhere (ie reversed)

Forks aren't abandonment. And at this point, the market determines which chains are abandoned, it's not a single actor that has any sort of control.

That is like saying that there are no back doors in open source software because anyone can have a look at the source.

'The market' is a handful of powerful miners anyway. As if your 1 vote could do anything about some fork abandonment or whatever. Also, do you monitor the whole network constantly? You have to sleep at some point. You know who does constantly monitor the flow of currency to a somewhat trustworthy degree? Banks and governments do.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#133

Post by Kuinox »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #120
jjeaff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless. The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient. Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.

Sounds like something where if you offered that as a service you would probably be legally required to Know Your Customer and to keep records...

These services does not require manipulating real money. To run the service, it requires a device connected to the internet, that all. You can find a lot of way to host it in a country that don't have these requirements, or to host it anonymously.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#134

Post by taurath »

baroffoos wrote: post #116
lemagedurage wrote: post #31

One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users. Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.…

Searchable groups are an antifeature to me. They encourage random strangers to come and go which prevents ever building any sense of community. One of the things I like about the group chats I am in are that the same people are there from years ago.

You can still have private groups. It’s nice to have “public” endpoints at least.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#135

Post by rolltiide »

chx wrote: post #78

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…

they are misnomers, which is the crux of one of your actual criticisms as they are not yet currencies although their peer to peer payment feature does work very well if you want to use it right now, I was curious if we would find common ground so I’m glad we did

But regarding using them I am very content using minuscule amounts of them to store computations on other people’s computers

I really like the redundancy and so many witnesses, but thats just my use case.

I find the excess holdings and speculative use cases are wrong, for most people, but without their greed the database and computational log wouldn’t be viable

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#136

Post by nikolay »

reilly3000 wrote: post #68
nikolay wrote: post #63

Kik, Telegram, and Skype has a spam issue. Until they solve it, they are doomed. I have "nikolay" on Telegram and get tends of messages from scammers daily. Same with Skype, and Kik. I don't get spam on Viber and Messenger and that's why I use those. All the rest are not worth my time although I love both Telegram and Skype more than the rest, but don't have the nerves to deal with their basic design issues.

It seems more appropriate to me to start punishing spammers rather than holding platforms accountable for their customer’s behavior.

Guess what happened - I kept blocking every offender and suddenly Microsoft locked me out of my account for more than 2 weeks. My Outlook, my Xbox, my Office, and many other paid services - gone! Why? Because, according to them, I had hundreds of blocked people! Well, there's no way to report for spam or scam - you can either delete a chat (they can message you again) or block them. At least these are the options on desktop. Skype has my contacts synced - why I don't have an option to block any contact from a person who's not in my contacts?! Or at least put them in second queue like Facebook Messenger does? Or allow messages only from people with verified phone? Of course, Skype is guilty as they don't bother to solve this problem.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#137

Post by neotek »

chx wrote: post #78

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…

Is it fair to call it a Nakamoto Scheme? "He" published a paper and wrote the earliest version of some software, wouldn't it be better to call it a Pincoin Scheme or similar?

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#138

Post by junipertea »

Lucadg wrote: post #130
unityByFreedom wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irreversibility of transactions is not a feature I want. If someone wants to rob you of all your bitcoin, they can hold a gun to your head until you give it to them. A bank, on the other hand, has transaction limits. If I buy something online with a credit card and soon after discover it's fraudulent (which has happened to me on multiple occasions), I can reverse that too.

You'd keep in yourself a small amount of Bitcoin. You'd keep at home a bigger amount. You'd keep in a safe place the rest. Exactly as with cash.

You put cash in a bank.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#139

Post by malux85 »

WA wrote: post #121
coralreef wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.

Calling them currrency is already a scam. They are not a currency. They are hardly money (look up the difference yourself), because you mostly can’t buy stuff with it. And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them. I read a great question here on HN a while back to enthusiasts: If you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them? So many comments can be traced to the idea o…

I buy heaps of stuff with bitcoin. Not drugs or anything illegal, but computer equipment, membership fees, server hosting, domains and 2nd hand goods from friends.

And you can pay your taxes with crypto: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/16/canadian-town-pay...

Nothing is going to replace fiat overnight, but crypto is far from "not a currency"

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#140

Post by feanaro »

WA wrote: post #121
coralreef wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.

Calling them currrency is already a scam. They are not a currency. They are hardly money (look up the difference yourself), because you mostly can’t buy stuff with it. And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them. I read a great question here on HN a while back to enthusiasts: If you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them? So many comments can be traced to the idea o…

> And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them.

This is a bad necessary condition for considering something a currency.

I definitely cannot pay my taxes in USD. Does that mean USD is not a currency?

Or did you mean that you have to be able to pay taxes with it somewhere? So, hypothetically, if someone founded a microstate which allowed paying taxes in Bitcoin, then it would become a currency? But that seems ridiculous given that it would have exactly zero impact on me unless I moved there so I don't think you meant that.

As a matter of fact, I often (read: most of the time) cannot buy things using USD in my country. Yet I am a holder of USD and spend it when buying things in my country quite often. How so? Well, I sell the USD in exchange for my country's currency at the point of sale, just like Bitcoin.

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