Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 262 posts

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

#201

Post by leereeves »

close04 wrote: post #198
leereeves wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cigarettes are currency, according to my economics professors.

Yes, a good example of prison currency. Another form of currency (in prison but also outside) is sex. And it perfectly fits GP’s “argument” that “some people like it, some people pay with it, some people want more” and all that. We can either take the “everything is a currency” route but that gets us nowhere, or accept the official, legal, and recognized definition. The “ill conceived” argument based “only” on facts…

What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"?

The definition used by economists includes much more than just fiat money. The definition in most dictionaries includes anything used a medium of exchange. Paper money isn't even the most common form of currency these days (beaten by credit cards, checks, and electronic funds transfer).

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

#202

Post by DINKDINK »

zaarn wrote: post #180
chrisco255 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you seem to be addressing bitcoin in isolation and not crypto in general. What forces do you think make Bitcoin worth more than ETH or more than Bitcoin Cash? Market forces. Supply and demand. Just like all commodities. These are invisible hand forces that no single person controls at this point. Even if there are varying levels of centralization in the chains themselves, the market decides whether to b…

The worth of a cryptocurrency is a bit of a weird thing to me since the decision where the decimal point is arbitrary, the different cryptocurrencies aren't that different in value, they just use different decimal points. If ETH decided to shift the decimal point by two digits, it would suddenly be twice as much "worth" as bitcoin.

If a company issued twice as much stock, would it have a market cap that's twice as high as it's 1x issuance? If Amazon offers 100 AWS-Bux for every euro/yen/dollar would they bring in 10x as much revenue if they offered 1000 AWS-Bux for every euro/yen/dollar[1]? No, to suggest otherwise would be economic delusion; economic literacy doesn't seem to be the ETH's community's forte.

The quantity is irrelevant, the exchange rate that reaches equilibrium is what is relevant

[1] There are marginal second order effects with human psychology (people feeling like they got more of something)/ brokerage arrangements (1 share being the smallest divisible portion of ownership that a SE will clear causing share subdivisions needed to be cleared by a broker)

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

#203

Post by Fnoord »

pentae wrote: post #108
SolarNet wrote: post #13

Most apps have child abuse problems. Of all the examples of how modern corporations externalize risk and internalize profits, I think the child abuse for ad revenue on content is particularly egregious (one example link here is that the children are the viewers and consumers of the ads (advertising to children being worth more money in many contexts), and the child abusers post massive amounts of content that childre…

I don’t see how any of these chat apps you described is any different to IRC which I frequented as a kid. It had wll the horrors you describe but navigating that jungle made it exciting and fine tuned my radar against scammers and dodgy people. Without it, i wouldn’t have formed life long friendships, learned how to code and had a huge positive contribution on where I am today. But yeah, you can see porn on there and…

As someone who grew up in the 90s as kid and IRC (and ICQ, and chats) I disagree.

The first time I used IRC I used mIRC. It was in 1997. It asked for my real name. I filled it in. Fast forward a few days, I get into an argument with someone, and they call me by my real name. I was flabbergasted. How do they know my name? I never knew that the real name was shared with IRC networks; I assumed it was shared with mIRC only. I had the same on ICQ, including my phone number, which was once abused to stalk me. Did I learn from this? Hell yes, I got more private and careful. And it isn't as if I already wasn't. I never gave people my hometown or last name. Heck, I met strange people who wanted to cyber on a web chat when I was 14 years old. But I never gave them my PII (oh and I found it more funny than that it got me horny as I could not take it serious). Only thing was my first name which is a common one. My mistake was to trust the software.

The reason I disagree is the following: in the 90s I did not have a webcam or camera. I had a mic but it was not connected 24/7, and I could not use it to make a phone call. I did not even have my own cellphone yet, let alone a smartphone. I did have a walkman and discman, I'll admit that, but I don't see how such devices were harmful. Nowadays teenagers have smartphones, and they willfully share personal information with the Internet; that is, with companies, with the government (as a result of that), and with strangers and family & friends alike. Because of the snowball/network effect, many of them are being on these networks (Facebook, Snapchat, etc). The papertrail / records are more permanent than ever before. And it isn't just sex-related. It is also bullying-related ie. cyberbullying, making videos of bullying and putting it on YouTube. The point is, we created a monster. The monster is called data.

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

#204

Post by close04 »

leereeves wrote: post #201
close04 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a good example of prison currency. Another form of currency (in prison but also outside) is sex. And it perfectly fits GP’s “argument” that “some people like it, some people pay with it, some people want more” and all that. We can either take the “everything is a currency” route but that gets us nowhere, or accept the official, legal, and recognized definition. The “ill conceived” argument based “only” on facts…

What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"? The definition used by economists includes much more than just fiat money. The definition in most dictionaries includes anything used a medium of exchange. Paper money isn't even the most common form of currency these days (beaten by credit cards, checks, and electronic funds transfer).

> What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"?

Most (important) national central banks as mentioned in my original comment.

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

#205

Post by leereeves »

close04 wrote: post #204
leereeves wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"? The definition used by economists includes much more than just fiat money. The definition in most dictionaries includes anything used a medium of exchange. Paper money isn't even the most common form of currency these days (beaten by credit cards, checks, and electronic funds transfer).

> What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"? Most (important) national central banks as mentioned in my original comment.

Has any national central bank ever declared "ours is the only currency" or "Bitcoin is not a currency"?

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

#206

Post by close04 »

leereeves wrote: post #205
close04 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's your source for an "official, legal, and recognized definition"? Most (important) national central banks as mentioned in my original comment.

Has any national central bank ever declared "ours is the only currency" or "Bitcoin is not a currency"?

As an example the ECB (European Central Bank, central bank for the Eurozone) declared exactly that [0], as I said in my original comment. The ECB, the Fed, the SEC (as you can read from the current HN article) all see crypto as securities and way too volatile at this time (something you don't want in a currency). This may change in the future but it doesn't change the current state of fact. Another important aspect is that accepting it as an official currency means it will have to be regulated like a currency, rather than a security or (mostly) unregulated like today.

The only major central bank that is truly dabbling in crypto is the PBC (that's People's Bank of China) and I think the consensus among people in the sector is that it's really a speculative move, just like most ICOs.

Edited for courtesy. It initially felt like one of the classic methods of arguing a fact on HN: request citations worthy of a PhD thesis for every single word. It's unfortunately all too common here to deter anyone from contradicting.

[0] https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2019/eu-central-bank-s...

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

#207

Post by DINKDINK »

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…

Do you have a background in distributed systems? In the same why the common advice with cryptography is, "one can build cipher unbreakable to the creator but not the world", the same way too "one can create a 'blockchain' that's unbreakable to the creator but not the world".

Git cannot provide byzantine fault tolerance. The fault tolerance it can provide is costly in human time.

Senior Engineer: Hi, I'm new here and have built a better blockchain. Let's use a chain of hash digest. It's way more efficient than PoW. It only costs .001/tx

CTO: But we need decentralized time stamping not the smaller set of always-online tamper detection.

SE: It's ok we'll be able to tell if the state updates change by monitoring the chain of hash digests. :>

[Months Later]

SE: Well, some attackers knocked our machines offline.

CTO: How do you know that the state updates between when the attack happened and when you got back online are valid and uncontested? You built some stupid slashing mechanism and if we publish invalid state our business goes under.

SE: We'll I'll have to go in to audit the logs, hopefully find some other people who have logs, and write software to see if maybe we can detect anything.

CTO: Isn't that going to blow up your transaction costs?

SE: I estimate 30k in total costs to do the audit.

CTO: so over our 800k customers that'll increase your tx costs to .038/tx, your hash-digest solution doesn't seem to be a cheaper alternative.

SE: I'm quitting to launch an ICO

CTO: Thank god.

Basically all the ICOs --Kik included-- are fraud: they won't be able to achieve what they claim to be able to do (governed by unavoidable physics, CS, cryptography, DS constraints) and punters have a myopic belief of what they can do. They gain market share by publicizing Bitcoin's very specific limitation. Bitcoin continues to chug along, is very clear about what it can and cannot do.

It's painful to have an appreciation for DS and a view into the cryptocurrency space, in the same way it's painful for a IETF network engineer to have the internet ossify around TCP and UDP. Yes there are drastically better CS primitives to engineer these systems with but the switching costs (social and economic) of transitioning a network are higher than the benefits.

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

#208

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

feanaro wrote: post #140
WA wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ridiculou…

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

On the contrary!

'Money' is just IOU notes. What gives these IOU notes value is that governments use them for paying welfare and civil servant salaries, and in turn take them back when collecting taxes.

> So, hypothetically, if someone founded a microstate which allowed paying taxes in Bitcoin, then it would become a currency?

Yes. But with a caveat: the wealth of a government's welfare/civil servant class and the threat of its tax collectors is what gives currency value. The blockchain here is entirely superfluous, this hypothetical currency would be just as valuable regardless of whether a cryptocurrency scheme is used.

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

#209

Post by leereeves »

close04 wrote: post #206
leereeves wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has any national central bank ever declared "ours is the only currency" or "Bitcoin is not a currency"?

As an example the ECB (European Central Bank, central bank for the Eurozone) declared exactly that [0], as I said in my original comment. The ECB, the Fed, the SEC (as you can read from the current HN article) all see crypto as securities and way too volatile at this time (something you don't want in a currency). This may change in the future but it doesn't change the current state of fact. Another important aspect i…

Sorry, pressed for time. But I don't think missing an unsourced comment from earlier in the thread and asking a question about it deserves that kind of response.

I asked the question hoping to learn something, and I did. So thanks for that, if not for the attitude.

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

#210

Post by repomies691 »

DagAgren wrote: post #193
michwill wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion. There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work. Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is…

Sure, if you want to do that, Bitcoin is one of the very few working solutions that have been found. But do you actually want to do that? Who are you providing a service for by doing that? We know the answer: Scammers and criminals, by and large. Everyone else is better served by a centralised service.

I know a handful of people who benefited a lot from Bitcoin by just speculating with it. They got wealthy, some even rich and now they have much better living standards. That group fits into the niche that were quite well "served" by Bitcoin.

Just pointing out that "scammers and criminals" is clearly not the only ones benefitting from Bitcoin, and I would suspect it is also minority.

Post reply on HN