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Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
221–230 of 395 posts
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#222I don't get it. Is it some sort of concept art? What's the point? Sure, it can be used as money (assuming what authors say is correct). Virtually any physical items that are hard to fake can be used as money, as long as people believe it's worth something. And if we are okay with complicated and rather expensive manufacturing process (since Kong isn't something you find in the forest), it really is a non-problem to c…
Kong has the useful property of peer-to-peer validation. Most paper currencies printed in your basement don't. Tokens loaded onto Kong Cash instruments and exchanged ephemerally in person between party A and party B are more anonymous than tokens sent directly from party A to party B electronically which will be recorded for everyone to see forever. It's programmable money. It's cooler than non-programmable money. We…
> We're putting it out there as a toy.
And that right there is the honesty that the rest of this thread is missing.
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the usability nightmare that is cryptocurrency yup. with you so far > FPC lasts about 6,000 But, how tests are done differs from what bills face: Large curve radius, slow curving, nothing sharp poking at it in the middle. Basically the opposite of what is going on in tight pockets/purses. > NFC chip bears most of the brunt here and not the secure element. Unless the dielectric over your secure element is some previ…
The 6,000 number is creasing the kapton 180º over the course of half a second with the 6mm curve radius. Copper breaks but not the lines critical for validation. Our goal wasn't to make this thing indestructible, it was to figure out where the bar was for "good enough". USD benchmarks are roughly: 4000 folds 2 years lifetime (low denomination) 8 years lifetime (high denomination) 30 transactions before decirculation…
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Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#224Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#225If I can't take your space money down to the diner and buy a plate of bacon and eggs with it, then as far as I'm concerned it's not real.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem that I think goes missed or unmentioned by all these crypto startups trying to piecemeal a "solution" to the centralized banking problem: in the monetary system, individuals have absolutely no power, because we're at the bottom of the hierarchy of spending.
Joe Schmoe's dollar has value because he can buy a soda at the diner with it. The diner takes the dollar because they can use it to pay their staff and buy more supplies. The supplier takes the dollar because they can pay their staff and and buy raw materials. And in between every layer, the banks store the excess operating capital and profits.
Decentralized currency can only work if it can occupy every layer at once, across the world. Anything less is just straight out worse than regular money from a usability standpoint, and that's before you mention that now we're all responsible for our own money security.
Yes, people out there have been wronged by the current system, but the average modern human's relationship with money can be essentially summed up as follows:
1. Perform labor
2. Receive paycheck
3. Deposit in bank
4. Purchase food, shelter, and netflix
So what is this kind of pseudo-money-computer-chip-paper for? No matter the fancy technology thats woven into its fibers, if I pay the Kong people for 10 Kongs, how do I, Joe Schmoe, turn 10 Kongs into a pizza? How do I, Jane Pizza-Maker, find a supplier that will sell me tomatoes and flour for 10 Kongs? How do I, Rachel Dough-Maker, find a wheat farm that will accept Kongs?
All of this has to happen simultaneously, because business owners are busy and don't have the time or the energy to incrementally work space money into their cash flow.
Yeah sure, centralized banking has issues. But a bottom-up approach is doomed to failure because we don't live in barter-based villages anymore. Every transaction is part of a hierarchy of money-transfers that extend from the local diner through dozens of entities across the planet and back again. Are you making enough Kongs for all of them?
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bills are intended to be spent hand-to-hand in meatspace with cryptographic validation. See section 2.1 [1] The innovation of Bitcoin was decentralized electronic peer-to-peer cash. Kong does not remove any of those elements and makes the overhead of the peer-to-peer bit easier. Physical cash is still the dominant form of payment. The advancement here is figuring out how to issue physical cash without needing a c…
> The bills are intended to be spent hand-to-hand in meatspace with cryptographic validation. See section 2.1 [1] When I accept a physical note, do bits move on the Ethereum blockchain? If not, how do I know that it's really mine? This reminds me of when people sold Bitcoin private keys ("paper wallets") on eBay. I've heard some people do OTC trades by swapping private keys when they don't want the transaction record…
Nothing is moved on chain when the bills are transferred between parties.
Token is stored in an escrow contract. The self-generated, non-extractable key stored on the note is the only key that can be used to claim funds out of that escrow contract when it matures.
This is basically a smart-contract implementation of how promissory notes issued by goldsmiths (the predecessors to modern cash) worked in the 1600's. A big difference is that every note has its own contract. It's possibly more correct to say every bill owns itself and people transfer those bills.
Section 3 of the whitepaper[1] expands on this.
[1] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRNRCocj4PwKMXrd1jeUGw7ASQSuEk7BDJu5Ks...
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are so rarely encountered than many people don't think that they are a denomination actually issued.
Correct, they aren't issued by anyone but cool grandpas and uncles in my experience.
You must not live in a state where pot is legal; in such places $2 bills floating around everywhere, I use them all the time. The reason: cash businesses use them heavily to reduce the amount of physical cash they need to maintain and move around. Pot shops occupy a gray area legally and banks don't like to deal with them so they often operate old school: cash businesses.
I have a few in my wallet most of the time, like to use them for tips when I eat out.
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you expect to get this into the market? And what market do you expect to get this into? Cash has an inherent agreement as to locality. When I'm in Australia, I use Australian dollars, when in the US, they have US dollars. Though you may be solving this problem, I can use Kong everywhere, you need to somehow seed the market. How do you see that happening? As you state, crypto is mostly a store of value atm. The…
I use almost exclusively cash and never get that response. Usually a smile as I sail out of the cashiers way faster than our abrtion of a chip+pin system customers possibly could. What part of the world are you in?
Pay with a card at a busy bar in the UK 15 years ago and everyone would sigh as the barman reached for the card terminal, did his thing, waited for you to type in your pin, etc etc. Paying with cash was far quicker.
Pay with cash at a bar now and everyone will sigh as the barman counts it up, puts it in the till etc etc. Contactless is so fast, the barman will be pouring the next drinks while you're tapping the machine.
Also anecdotally, many London cafes/restaurants are entirely card payments now. They just don't do cash.
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right but asking people to verify every single note they receive is a regression in usability. It also makes the notes less reliable to store than a gold coin or a paper note, which can't be damaged by things like water, high-voltage or microwaves.
You could make this same criticism of cash, though. It's not a usability regression, they just both have the same flaw. People pass off counterfeit currency as real all the time.
That flaw is mostly a non-issue with cash because printing it is difficult. Who prints Kong? I imagine prevalence of counterfeiting is more or less directly proportional to the ease of printing.
Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The problem is how to make a sound cash instrument backed by cryptocurrencies. It matters because cash is the dominant form of payment worldwide In what way is cash failing that it needs to be replaced by your type of cash? The "it's decentralized and doesn't rely on a state level actor" argument has been thoroughly lost at this point.
Cash is controlled by a central authority. Governments can print as much or as little of it as they want. Kong does not have this property.
Isn't that what you want, Macroeconomics 101? Control inflation, interest, growth by creating or limiting the currency floating around your system?
I mean yeah you could roll this out to places that perhaps didn't understand this and/or fucked up real bad like Zimbabwe, but otherwise who cares?
If you can't trust your government so bad that your cash no longer works, you've got bigger problems and whatever system you build via the Internet is probably going to also be blocked and/or the infrastructure will be in tatters.