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Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

kong.cash

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Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#241

Post by darawk »

CosmicShadow wrote: post #230
darawk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some people believe that government control of the money supply is a form of theft. It's certainly a form of indirect taxation (via inflation), and it forces you to rely on the responsibility of your government. Some people believe that eliminating the need to rely on the responsibility of other humans is a terminal good.

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#242

Post by jakelazaroff »

ccamrobertson wrote: post #234
jakelazaroff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make any sense. Can only preordained organizations print the notes? Then we’re back to centralized cash. Can anyone print the notes? Then they can also print duplicates. Do we verify electronically when we transact to prevent that? Then we're back to electronic transactions. What am I missing? How is this not fatally flawed?

Today, Kong's printing is centralized to the Kong project (similar to a premine) because we cannot guarantee that someone else will use a secure element which conforms to section 2 of the paper (which would preclude the creation of duplicates). If anyone else wants to print Kong, and we can verify they source a secure element conforming to section 2 of the paper, then we'll share "printing rights" with them. The Kong…

Is this not strictly worse than cash, then? It’s still a centralized physical currency, but instead of a government with checks and balances that is ostensibly accountable to its citizens, Kong is controlled by an opaque organization accountable to nobody.

After reading the paper, I’m still not exactly sure how the lockdrop works. Could you elaborate on it?

As for verifying transactions offline, I’m skeptical of how useful that is. If you can lock down printing, the supply of fake or duplicate Kong should be low anyway. If you decentralize printing (or a lot of counterfeit/duplicate Kong gets introduced into the market some other way) then offline verification seems insufficient. What’s to stop me from printing and spending two copies of a note if I know the other parties won’t veriify the transaction online until much later?

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#243

Post by z2 »

skosch wrote: post #93

Can you comment on the history of the name, printed as 港 on the bills? For those unaware, the character means "harbour"; it's the Kong in Hong Kong – is there any relationship to the HKD?

The Chinese name 港幣 may be confusing for Chinese speakers as it's already common short hand for HKD, e.g. the "二十塊港幣" shown on the Kong illustration already means "twenty HKD bucks," not some new currency like "twenty Kong."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_dollar

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#244

Post by darawk »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #229
darawk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That flaw is mostly a non-issue with cash because printing it is difficult.

That depends entirely on how good your fake is. And it is most certainly not 'mostly a non-issue'. Counterfeiting happens all the time.

> Who prints Kong? I imagine prevalence of counterfeiting is more or less directly proportional to the ease of printing.

Nobody. Kong is printed algorithmically, like any other cryptocurrency.

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#245

Post by darawk »

arcticbull wrote: post #173
darawk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure but cash isn’t affected by water, freezing, bending, pressure, moderate temperatures above whatever the 70C limit is on these ICs, static electricity, ionizing radiation and microwaves. People don’t pass off counterfeit currency as real all the time either, that’s a false lead. Currently 0.01% of currency is fake and it’s actively sought out and removed from circulation [1]. That’s almost guaranteed way less tha…

I'm not sure what your point is. The comment I was responding to claimed that verification represented a regression in usability in relation to cash. This is not true, because cash also requires verification. I'm not claiming Kong is better in this regard, simply that it is equivalent.

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#246

Post by jen729w »

Jamwinner wrote: post #204
pedalpete wrote: post #41

Earlier 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?

Not OP, but I can vouch that this is a common occurrence now in Australia. Contactless payment is now so ubiquitous, when you go to pay with cash it's often received with surprise. The vendor has indeed already readied the EFTPOS machine for your payment, and has to cancel that and put the transaction through as cash.

Only last year I always carried cash. I like cash. Now, I have a $10 note in my wallet and I can't even remember where it came from. I've stopped actually carrying my wallet, thanks to Apple Pay on my watch.

(I live in a major metropolitan area. It might be different elsewhere.)

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#248

Post by jen729w »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #237
CptFribble wrote: post #225

If 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…

By that definition, any foreign currency isn't real. I might suggest an alternate definition: Money is a transferable record of debt valid for a period of time and amongst a network of peers. Generally we think of money as local to a country and its government. However, one could imagine a 'minimum viable money' that could work in a space as small as a table and with only a handful of people - and for the purposes of…

> By that definition, any foreign currency isn't real.

And that's why you generally can't pay for your eggs & bacon at the diner in Wisconsin using British pounds.

The difference here is that you can trivially go to your bank and exchange those pounds for US dollars. Good luck getting them to exchange your Kong.

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#249

Post by qwtel »

ccamrobertson wrote: post #206
the_pwner224 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it is an intriguing concept. But at the same time they seem to be ready to sell Kong for $$$. And they don't explain why there are three tiers of rarity to the cash - shouldn't 500 KONG == 500 KONG all the time every time? Seems like a mechanic to raise more money, just like 'rare' cosmetic items in video games.

The "tiers" are just bundle names. We could have been super dry but decided to make it more like collectable cards packs; our expectation is that most people will buy Kong since it looks cool (that's totally fine with us). Our margin on Kong is typical of other startup hardware projects; not great. We're not raking in cash from a digital token sale. We've made a physical product, we'll sell it to cover the costs of d…

I agree that they do look cool. They remind me of euro notes but turned up a notch or two.

But I'm wondering what made you decide to go with the generic greek bust heads? Missed opportunity to depict some cryptography and computer pioneers imo.

Re: Show HN: Kong – Physical Cryptocurrency

#250

Post by jakelazaroff »

darawk wrote: post #244
jakelazaroff wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That flaw is mostly a non-issue with cash because printing it is difficult. That depends entirely on how good your fake is. And it is most certainly not 'mostly a non-issue'. Counterfeiting happens all the time. > Who prints Kong? I imagine prevalence of counterfeiting is more or less directly proportional to the ease of printing. Nobody. Kong is printed algorithmically, like any other cryptocurrency.

> And it is most certainly not 'mostly a non-issue'. Counterfeiting happens all the time.

How often have you had any real-life issues with counterfeit money? How often has anyone you know? How often have you even heard of it happening, relative to how often you see and hear of cash being used? A sibling comment provided a source that said that only 1% of 1% of cash is counterfeit.

> Nobody. Kong is printed algorithmically, like any other cryptocurrency.

What? Notes and coins are a human-made physical items. They’re manufactured by someone.

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