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Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

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101–110 of 141 posts

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#101
post #82
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple answer, your centralized database can go away tomorrow, or be arbitrarily modified. That can’t happen with the blockchain.

How would this be different than the person issuing your Hexel-based tokens disappearing? The value is still tied to the single issuer.

The person receiving the token isn't the customer, the issuer is.

As an issuer, you do not have to worry about Hexel dissapearing. Presumably, the website doesn't make this clear.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#102
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards? What's the need for decentralized crypto token (given the costs complexity and friction)?

Gift cards are very limited. The tech behind gift card usage is extremely insufficient. Things like checking balance is often not even possible with a public API layer.

This would also enable seamless gift card exchanges. Currently secondary markets exist for gift cards, but they take ~10% margin to account for the high fraud risk, holding time, etc.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USD 0.5-1 per transaction This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.

So do you pay to post a comment on HN? Normal people will never hold an ethereum wallet and pay for transactions.

HN comments are free but the platform is owned by YC and YC enforces certain rules as they see fit. In Ethereum there is no owner, but looks like you have to pay for that

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#104
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the troubling case. The troubling case is the company hosting the DB shutting down, and therefore the entire system becoming worthless. This is what prevents you as the customer from trusting such a system.

That is preventing you to trust a system where "a gaming streamer is rewarding his most loyal viewers with tokens they store in their own database and you can redeem for shoutouts or merchandise."? I would somehow think that the database technology is quite secondary to the creditworthiness of the gaming streamer when people decide whether to trust or not a token system of a gaming streamer.

It's the streamer who's trust you need. Whether they have their patron's trust is a separate issue.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#105

Everything you want to do can be done on a simple database. You can mint tokens / share it / explore other tokens / message people / view feed. It isn't clear why you want to forcibly put this on Ethereum blockchain and pay a fee to do every transfer (The transaction charge currently is ~ USD 0.5-1 per transaction)

I think it's interesting to standardize these things as ERC20 tokens. It's still very early days, but that allows you to leverage the entire ETH econsystem which is still growing. For example, I could store those ERC20 tokens on my hardware wallet, or phone wallet, send them to others without using a platform's website, etc. Also, your comment reminds me somewhat of the infamous Hacker News comment when Dropbox poste…

There are two parts:

- Is the idea interesting ? Yes possibly. The idea of making it easy to create tokens is interesting. I can see twitch streamers giving away tokens to their subscribers / viewers.

- Does it need to be on blockchain ? For all the use cases described, the answer according to me is no. It is easier to simply have a frontend through which users can interact vs maintaining a wallet, installing metamask, etc. This is going in the direction opposite of the Dropbox example - making things harder for users.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's interesting to standardize these things as ERC20 tokens. It's still very early days, but that allows you to leverage the entire ETH econsystem which is still growing. For example, I could store those ERC20 tokens on my hardware wallet, or phone wallet, send them to others without using a platform's website, etc. Also, your comment reminds me somewhat of the infamous Hacker News comment when Dropbox poste…

There are two parts: - Is the idea interesting ? Yes possibly. The idea of making it easy to create tokens is interesting. I can see twitch streamers giving away tokens to their subscribers / viewers. - Does it need to be on blockchain ? For all the use cases described, the answer according to me is no. It is easier to simply have a frontend through which users can interact vs maintaining a wallet, installing metamas…

It’s harder now but it’s going to get there! You gotta believe! We’re chasing something interesting and hoping we can keep making it easier and more useful. Right now, we do know it’s harder and people are still choosing to try it for fun! I agree with all your feedback above though and it’s actually really helpful to keep those realities in mind.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now you would need to send these tokens to your co-workers using an Ethereum wallet, and you would need to pay gas. However, we're working on a way for you to programmatically send tokens.

I think this project is well done, and I love how easy you've made it to just do up a concept, and get a group of people moving into tokenizing their value stream. I am working on a token for storing genomic data in UPort or Civic wallet, and will integrate with Ocean Protocol and Openmined and other data marketplaces. In looking at the compliance of issuing the tokens, I've found that it is essential to actually emb…

The following quote from a recent Coinbase article has me wondering about the recent round of amazing crypto-art tokens and the speculative market that has emerged for buying and selling them. While the proposed eth721 standard makes a distinction that attempts to seperate these tokens from the ones used in ICOs, it appears as if the SEC and FinCEN don't really care about intentions, rather how these tokens end up being used. As a YC startup, with access to some well-seasoned sources of advice, I'm wondering what you've heard on these issues as they relate to your project? "The U.S. Treasury Department's FinCEN division recently declared that any developer that sells convertible virtual currency, including in the form of ICO coins or tokens, in exchange for another type of value that substitutes for currency is a "money transmitter" subject to proper registration with the Treasury Department, anti-money-laundering rules, and other regulatory and licensing requirements -- requirements that, if not satisfied, could result in imprisonment." from https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchanges-ico-teams-brain/

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#108

My favorite coin so far is the TallCoin: "I will issue 1 coin to any person who is taller than me (I'm 6'7")". https://www.onhexel.com/token/bb571299-e19a-4671-9036-7b3e73...

I like WednesdayCoin, a coin that can only be transferred on wednesdays. https://wednesdaycoin.io/ (not a hexel coin, but another ERC20)

Agreed! Also one of my favorite coins. I was blessed to receive some a few Wednesdays ago.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the examples you gave don’t need a decentralised cryptocurrency and I reckon could be done more easily with a regular database. Unless you can give a reason why those examples require decentralisation then, as much as I respect your attempt at finding an actual use for decentralised Merkel trees, I ultimately think it’s doomed to failure.

I can offer a few reasons, but they might not convince you. Tokens are provably scarce, meaning the supply is limited and can't be changed by the creator of the currency. They're easily exchangeable, which means they can move between platforms and communities. Finally, they can interact with smart contracts, meaning people can enforce the way the token behaves. I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too…

If you think your users are smart enough to figure out all you've mentioned, then they are smart enough to use databases for their usecases.

Re: Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community

#110

Trying to check your app out, I got "Our security policy blocks MetaMask in Firefox. Please try Chrome, Brave, or Opera."

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. We have a CSP in place to keep our site secure, but Firefox enforces it differently than other browsers, which prevents MetaMask from working. To make it work we would have to relax our CSP to the point where it wasn't really secure at all, so for now we don't support FireFox. We put a bounty on Gitcoin for someone to fix it.

If the user agent shows that the browser is Firefox, serve a relaxed csp policy, and a large warning banner explaining what you just explained.
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