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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

#231

Post by maneesh »

tgv wrote: post #163
criddell wrote: post #10

What was the $1B valuation based on? It seems absurd.

I've discovered a foolproof way to make billions of dollars and take controlling interest in the major corporation of your choice. I'll share my secret with you, since I'm all done using my system (hint: if you want to buy any corporation known by three capital letters... forget it.). Step 1: Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster wil…

How do you go public so easily?

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

#232

Post by asjw »

spurdoman77 wrote: post #173
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…

If you were the last person on earth to receive USD banknotes, would you still endorse them?

Of course.

They are soft at touch, you can make origamis out of them or even eat them

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

#233

Post by imustbeevil »

saalweachter wrote: post #223
spurdoman77 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin didnt require initial investments of mining hardware, initially it was mined with normal computers. Mining hardware is more like a running cost that goes up with usage/value.

The specialized mining hardware is a red herring. The security of the Bitcoin network isn't a function of its hashrate or the number of nodes, though these things correlate; it's a function of the cost of running it . Regardless of whether the network is run on specialized hardware, old desktops, or TI-83s, the network is only secure so long as it costs enough to run that any motivated attacker would have to spend mo…

There is even a site that tells you how much money you'd need to run 51% attacks on different cryptocurrencies. (It looks like the site used Nicehash payouts as a data point but Nicehash is down/being updated so those values are no longer there, but I found an article with a screenshot from May last year.)

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/05/30/heres-how-much-it...

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

#234

Post by asjw »

paggle wrote: post #158
splintercell wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstood the question. He said "last person on earth TO RECEIVE bitcoin", not "LAST PERSON on earth".

Well if I was the last person on earth to receive USD I wouldn’t be happy because that means I’d never be able to spend it on anything (if I did, that person would become a later recipient of USD).

You can easily convert them to another currency though

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

#235

Post by asjw »

splintercell wrote: post #149
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…

> If you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them? Are you being serious when you're asking that question? That question seems to be a product of an echo chamber. Anyways to answer your question, yes, why wouldn't you still receive and endorse them? The idea behind cryptocurrencies is follows: * Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency which is aimed to be the perfect store of v…

Sorry, but even believing in God makes much more sense.

Bitcoin was a product made to make rich people richer like Ponzi schemes or multilevel marketing.

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

#236

Post by paggle »

asjw wrote: post #234
paggle wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if I was the last person on earth to receive USD I wouldn’t be happy because that means I’d never be able to spend it on anything (if I did, that person would become a later recipient of USD).

You can easily convert them to another currency though

How? Then someone else would receive my USD.

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

#237

Post by celticninja »

close04 wrote: post #155
malux85 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> I buy heaps of stuff with bitcoin You're bartering for heaps of stuff. I get heaps of stuff by offering services or other stuff in exchange. Yet my services or other stuff are not a currency. And some towns accept taxes in form of community work for example which is also not a currency. > crypto is far from "not a currency" It's explicitly called "not a currency" by both Fed and the ECB as far as I know. Now it all…

But I'm bartering if I use £/$/€ too then. I barter my work for tokens, I exchange the tokens for goods. Does it matter what the tokens are if I can exchange them?

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

#238

Post by chx »

neotek wrote: post #141
wmp56 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin Now I have a suspicion who was that mysterious Satoshi who had remarkably good industry-grade software skills.

This timeline is batshit insane enough without Satoshi Nakamoto turning out to be Linus Torvalds.

The Paul Le Roux theory is extremely plausible.

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

#239

Post by hudon »

DINKDINK wrote: post #200
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)

Chain reorgs and double spends are two different sets. IIRC the 2010 reorg didn't have any double spends >It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain To detect if transactions were double spent, you would need some sort of database. Like a data base with _really_ good integrity. Maybe with periodic and limited deltas. Increase the some of the integrity…

No, it's literally impossible. That's the whole point of a decentralized blockchain: nodes cannot (and don't want to) have total information about the network. That is, nodes don't know if re-org's are happening elsewhere in the network and don't know if they are about to get re-org'd. Every re-org is an opportunity for the actors involved in the re-org to send BTC elsewhere on the new chain and thus make transactions on the old chain "reversed".

Nodes in Bitcoin do not care if these transactions were reversed across chains, they only care about the transactions on the one most work valid chain, where "valid" is a set of rules expressed in the software binary that node is running. Two nodes can disagree on validity rules and literally never find out. Or a block can trigger a fork in the 2 nodes and then we need developers to tell us which chain is valid Bitcoin (see 2017 fork). While this is happening, transactions can go from being settled in a valid most-work chain to suddenly being considered invalid because everyone else is rejecting that chain.

It's a faulty design for a global payment network. We'd expect it to be predictable in how it handles transaction reversal and for human entities to be held accountable for ruleset changes.

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

#240

Post by coralreef »

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…

Why should governments have monopoly over the medium of exchange that its people use? Why should that power belong to them?
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