> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git.
> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.
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 a different story.
You know, my first foray into the world of Big Corpo people was when I met this guy studying at <pretentious arts uni in London>.
He was looking for ways to use blockchain to help regions with unstable currencies. Well, he was doing his Ph.D, actually on that topic.
So he would approach people and suggest they all meet up and have this think-tank somewhere in North London.
Now imagine you've got about 20-30 people sitting in the same room: and they are all engineers, regional managers, financiers. Not a single person has _any_ idea what blockchain is.
They were all meeting weekly to have this hours-long discussion about how they could possibly apply this thing blockchain to solving issues in the third world countries.
> 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.
One of his ideas was to create virtual money. But they forget that _secure_ proof-of-work-based money would require the same amount of initial investment (mining hardware) as if you simply went and bought several tons of gold and then issued a currency supported by that gold.
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 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 more money than they can leverage to attack it.
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.)
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.
Commodities can be sold and consumed for some real economic purpose. Cryptocurrencies can't. It's like gold except you can't see it or make jewellery from it or use it for anything.
It's an arithmetic consequence of there not being any intrinsic return. The money won from cryptocurrency trading can only come from other traders, because there are no coupons, dividends, or physical deliveries.
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 of becoming richer. Compare this to the Euro: When the Euro was introduced as a currency in the EU in 2001, people gave zero fucks whether they were first to exchange their old currency for the new one or the last.
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 ridiculous given that it would have exactly zero impact on me unless I moved there so I don't think you meant that.
As a matter of fact, I often (read: most of the time) cannot buy things using USD in my country. Yet I am a holder of USD and spend it when buying things in my country quite often. How so? Well, I sell the USD in exchange for my country's currency at the point of sale, just like Bitcoin.
> 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.
So then the various cryptocurrencies fit the bill because a lot of people are willing to treat them as IOU notes among themselves.
> 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.
But if some people are willing to treat a cryptocurrency as IOU notes, then that cryptocurrency is exchangeable for a currency like USD, EUR, etc, again allowing me to pay those taxes. This is no different than the case of me using USD to produce money for paying taxes to my own country which doesn't acknowledge USD, which you haven't addressed.
> 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.
I disagree. I agree with your initial point, though: money is just IOU notes. As long as there is someone willing to buy those IOU notes off of you, it's valuable.
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.
Cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies: They have no intrinsic value except what people collectively agree to pretend they do. It's paper money on a computer.
At least gold has real uses in jewellery and industrial applications to put a floor under its value.
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 boils down to whether you prefer your personal definition of currency over the one coming from central banks and laws.
Alternative currencies are the same as alternative facts or alternative truth. They can have the same effect as the real thing and be used successfully achieve the same purpose. But they shouldn't be confused.
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?
It matters because currencies, securities, and commodities are regulated differently and by different institutions. It may sound to you like they should be the same but they're not. They are different financial instruments, just like bonds and stocks are different from cash. What would you think if someone called an L3 cache "a CPU RAM", or an SD card a "micro hard disk"?
We're on a highly technical site so I would expect the same degree of accuracy when using terms from other fields as you expect when talking computers.
Well I think your expectations are wrong, but think of it like this, the end user doesn't care if the work is being done by an L3 cache or a "CPU ram", they could call it a "CPU cache", and as long as it does what they expect it to do they don't care for the specifics.
In this example, bitcoin can be exchanged for goods and services, much like an approved currency,so the end user doesn't care what you call it just that it works,and in that respect bitcoin does work.
Some people like Bitcoin and some people use it to pay for stuff, and they want to see more people like them, so they can transact in Bitcoin more.
Some critics seem to like making frankly ill conceived semantic arguments about the academic definition of a currency (or on your case, appeals to authority), but it really has no relation to whether Bitcoin is going to succeed or not succeed.
> Some people like [cigarettes] and some people use it to pay for stuff, and they want to see more people like them, so they can transact in [cigarettes] more.
Therefore cigarettes are currency. Liking something is not an argument.
> frankly ill conceived semantic arguments about the academic definition of a currency
My argument is ill conceived because it's "just" based on the academic (legal) definition of currency? We truly do live in a world of "alternative truths” and “alternative facts” where using the actual definition of something in a relevant context is frowned upon.
Actually, I felt your argument was not based on the academic definition of a currency, but rather on "a central bank said so in a Twitter thread".
The arguments that people usually make about Bitcoin not fitting the legal definition of money are ill-conceived because they are semantic. Apparently, money is: a means of exchange, a store of wealth, a unit of account. It is clearly all of that to some people, so it undoubtedly fits the definition. But just because it fits into the academic definition of money, doesn't it can't be considered an asset. It fits the definition of an asset as well. Coincidentally, Wikipedia says about the term asset: "It covers money [...] belonging to a business or person".
Of course, now we are talking about money, not currency? What's the difference between money and currency?
These are all very interesting questions for linguists. But if you want to have an actual argument about something other than semantics, your discussion has to be grounded in why you care about one term or the other being applied.
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 so to speak.
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).
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.
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.
Also because I noticed only now, whether currency is paper, electronic, or any other material is not actually what tells currencies apart. But while classic legal tender is backed by the goods and services of the country that uses it (I know this part is a bit arguable but let's go with it), crypto is more or less backed by nothing but the trust that the blockchain can't be hacked. One bad hack and the value of BTC becomes 0, something very hard to do with a classic currency but catastrophic if it happens. It's also very susceptible to volatile bouts, as seen before. BTC could be a "real" currency but it would be an overall bad one that could not replace the classic currencies in it's current form. It doesn't mean it can't become one but it would have to change in ways that would take it away from the current BTC.
Take a hypothetical CMU (Close04 Monetary Unit) backed by the value of my belongings. That's a token that goes up and down in value as I buy more stuff or my house gets more expensive, or as I issue more tokens (inflation). But it's only as valuable as the trust you have in me and the laws that prop up that trust. If I sell all my stuff and disappear your token is worth nothing and there's very little you can do. There are no protections, there's no legal mechanism that prevents me from selling my stuff. For a coin to become a proper currency it needs some of those props. Unfortunately most people are internet educated in these aspects so they only understand once they get swindled. Every time a cryptocoin is abused, an exchange goes bust, you see a lot of converts and crypto regulation starts to sound better.
They don't, you can use any medium for exchange. They have monopoly in deciding what is and what isn't an official currency.
As for the rest of your question, the people give them the power as part of the democratic process. Many people realized that whether they like it or not the little protection they get from a government is better than nothing. And it's enough to look at people's reaction when they get swindled out of their completely unregulated coin: ask the government to fix it and punish the swindlers.
Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week.
I usually don't go out of my way to pay with bitcoin, but recently needed to buy a PSN prepaid card and every website I tried either declined my 2 credit cards and paypal outright or requested some ridiculous verification (record myself on camera holding a passport to my face? To buy a $10 prepaid card? No thanks)
In the end I stumbled upon a shop that accepted bitcoin and got my PSN card in the time it took to get one network confirmation.
A couple of shops (jewelry places mainly) and most food delivery services around me accept bitcoin.
So I can use them as a currency. It's like duck typing. If it looks like a currency and behaves like a currency, it'd a currency! (Overly simplistic I know, but I'd challenge the idea that it outright can't be a currency)
The commodity being exchanged is the Bitcoin and the goods/services. If the business wants to hold the Bitcoin forever, they can. If they want to sell for USD, they can.
Paying in Bitcoin is the same way you just described as "paying in gold".
> if you were the last person in earth to receive coins, would you still like them and endorse them?
If I was the last person on earth, I wouldn’t care for gold, precious metals diamonds, stock, bonds, cash and a whole lot of other assets (+ other last person on earth issues)
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).
> 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 value. Because it's fixed in supply and has the maximum network security, it serves as a backbone of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Govts and pro-intervention economists don't like it, but Libertarians and (real) pro-free market economists love it. Even if you're the last person to receive bitcoin, it's still a better option because now you can save in a non-inflationary currency.
* Ethereum and other smart contract platforms allow creation of decentralized contracts between people, this facilitates creation of a system which isn't tied or dependant on the state to enforce it. Even if you're the last person to receive Ethers or Tezos or Cardano, etc, you're acquiring it in order to use the network. It's like asking would you like to be the last person to receive the arcade machine tokens.
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 with decentralized time stamping, sleeping-beauty hashed chaining. hmmm I wonder if there is anything like that...
Cheekiness aside, it's possible a node could ascertain whether or not transactions were replayed and definitely not impossible. The steel-man reply is: node software doesn't have great resources to do it.
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.
A)
>It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain
now it's
B)
>nodes don't know if re-org's are happening elsewhere in the network
Claim A is false as it is indeed entirely possible:
I have a chain of height 100. It is fully synced. I am sent a series of blocks diverging at height 80. I have all the information I need to ascertain which of the transactions in the two competing chains are being replayed or have been doublespent.
You're assuming in claim A that your node knows about all abandoned chains. Like I said, that's impossible because nodes don't have total information. I'll simplify and strengthen my claim for you: it's impossible to find all reversed transactions.
The comment I was replying to claimed that transactions can never be reversed. I'm just highlighting how this represents a poor understanding of how Bitcoin really works.
That is like saying that there are no back doors in open source software because anyone can have a look at the source.
'The market' is a handful of powerful miners anyway. As if your 1 vote could do anything about some fork abandonment or whatever. Also, do you monitor the whole network constantly? You have to sleep at some point. You know who does constantly monitor the flow of currency to a somewhat trustworthy degree? Banks and governments do.
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 back ETH or ETC or some mix of both. So, like any decentralized system, the network is monitored in a decentralized manner. The chains themselves have solved for consensus problems. That's the whole thing keeping blockchains going. No, banks don't constantly monitor everything (although admittedly, it's more than ever thanks to technology). Large amounts of cash still flow around the globe. And whether your government is trustworthy depends largely on which of the 195 nations you live in.
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)
Companies issue more stock all the time and it definitely has some impact on the market as it devalues a single share.
If a company simply turned each share into two shares, then the market cap would be the same but the fractions of the markteshare that can be traded are smaller.
If the company suddenly issued the entire stock on the market again, the price would plummet to half.
You don't have to monitor constantly, just some time after you make a transaction. Long chain reversals grow exponentially unlikely the longer the chain gets.
In practice, this does not seem like a large problem.
- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have
Bitcoin's public ledger is especially vulnerable to FBI "follow the money" investigation. Only one end is required to be known, and the entire trail is easily followed.
The federal agent who stole a portion of Dread Pirate Roberts' Bitcoin was quickly tracked and prosecuted.
Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless.
The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient.
Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.
These services does not require manipulating real money.
To run the service, it requires a device connected to the internet, that all.
You can find a lot of way to host it in a country that don't have these requirements, or to host it anonymously.
Until you want to make it into useful things and then the IRS will be asking how you bought that car and where the money came from. If it came from a laundering pool of bitcoins, tough luck convincing anyone you didn't do money laundering.
Exchanging Bitcoin for Monero or Zcash, making a private transaction, then selling it back for Bitcoin under a separate account would seemingly stop this dead in its tracks.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Bitcoin is obviously traceable by design, but I've seen claims this traceability is unbreakable, even by mixers or roundtrips to other currencies, which just sounds like FUD and nonsense to me.
"Scam" is a broad term. The technical basis of bitcoin can be 100% solid and it can still be a "scam" in the sense that it's been sold as a get rich quick scheme for speculative investors rather than an actual, day-to-day use currency (given transaction times it'll struggle to ever be that, but I digress)
Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP take up around 80% of total market cap and I’ll class those as legitimate enough to fall in the non-scam category. I’ll also ballpark half of the remaining 20% as not being scams (I know that’s a little debatable too, is a poor business premise a scam for example?), and I’d say that’s not too bad on the whole.
If we’re talking about number of projects then I can’t disagree, there’d be no argument.
Most of the activity taking place on them appears to be scams or scam related though, especially as many of the large exchanges appear to either be scams or at least be in on the scams.
What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams? That's the entire point of this argument: Bitcoin is a scam. I showed you an article about how there are no legit usages (aside from those that include it out of hype but could be implemented just as well without) and another which shows you it is a digital version of the chain distributor scheme.
> What makes you think Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are not scams?
Because they deliver what they promise, and I get from them exactly what they say they’re going to give me.
Bitcoin doesn’t advertise itself as getting rich. It says it’s a digital ledger and wallet. I can use it like that. Ethereum, a platform for creating tokens and contracts. I can use it to do that. XRP, well that’s one for the banks so I’m taking a punt, but they’re doing real settlement.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP aren’t scamming me. The guy asking for Bitcoin on telegram, yes.
Irreversibility of transactions is not a feature I want.
If someone wants to rob you of all your bitcoin, they can hold a gun to your head until you give it to them. A bank, on the other hand, has transaction limits.
If I buy something online with a credit card and soon after discover it's fraudulent (which has happened to me on multiple occasions), I can reverse that too.
Note that the property we're talking about isn't really irreversibility of individual transactions. We can come up with whatever policy about what can show up in a ledger, including "undo" transactions.
But what we want is that once transactions are recorded to a ledger, that it's not possible to remove that record.
This durability is a highly valuable property for financial transactions and other things where non-repudiation is desired. However, it's a possibly scary property, too (what if something copyrighted or illegal ends up in the forever-durable and public ledger?)
> Based on a cryptographic algorithm created by Adi Shamir, publicly known as Shamir’s Secret Sharing, Shamir Backup is a revolution in how you use, store, and protect the backup of your private keys.
A "revolution". They just applied SSS. Hardly rocket science.
<shrug> If you leave the keys in a safe and never use them? Yes, they're going to stay there.
But as soon as you make a transaction, in or out, the transaction history of those coins is exposed. And as soon as you make an infosec mistake, you're at risk of loss.
Is it fair to call it a Nakamoto Scheme? "He" published a paper and wrote the earliest version of some software, wouldn't it be better to call it a Pincoin Scheme or similar?
If you’ve ever needed to buy something that your government doesn’t want you to or get your money out of a country that doesn’t want you to remove your money you’d have a different view of cryptocurrency. Scam is not how I would classify all of them at all. I’d classify them more as a mechanism of freedom. You may find yourself singing a different tune when the current QE house of cards falls and you want somewhere, anywhere to put your money that is safe and untouched by the financial fraud and usury system we currently call banking.
Kin has more in common with banking than crypto. It was just a blatant money grab by a company with low enough morals and the stupidity to do so and think they were above the law and wouldn’t be punished for blatant disregard for securities law.
You're talking about the low morals of banks vs. cryptocurrencies, but I feel much safer depositing my savings in a regulated bank than I would converting them into any type of cryptocoin. Is my perception wrong?
I understand that in particular cases (e.g., hyperinflation), you may prefer cryptocurrency, but for the vast majority of people, official currencies and regulated banks are much safer and practical.
> I feel much safer depositing my savings in a regulated bank than I would converting them into any type of cryptocoin. Is my perception wrong?
I converted all my fiat back in the days to crypto. I didn't feel safer back then, but later on as the value skyrocketed and I diversified crypto gains to all kinds of assets my comfort level increased very nicely. I still have good stake of crypto, now I wouldn't feel safe not having some amount.
Do Cryptocurrencies provide value and do something that country backed currencies can't? They do have their own advantages and disadvantages, but it purely boils down to how many people trade in it.
Take gold for example, people believe that it has value and trade in it. The price of gold is decided on the basis of market forces of demand and supply. Similarly, a cryptocurrency's worth is decided by the demand for it. If enough people trade in it, then it can be used as a bartering currency. Heck, even if enough people decide to use eagle's feathers as a token to buy and sell goods in exchange for, it is valid currency for those set of people. The larger the set, the more accepted the currency.
It's funny to watch how these completely illogical arguments gain momentum in crypto community, I start to be suspicious that someone is pushing them on purpose to hype the herd.
Gold has superior chemical and physical features, quantum computers are built from gold. One third of the demand comes from jewellery which helps inflate the price, but even without that you hold some of industrial value, just the price would be 1/3 less.
No, cryptocurrencies are not a "commodity," "digital gold," "store of value" and they aren't valuable because "hey, dollar has no value." This is all nonsense.
When you have a humanitarian catastrophe or a conflict first thing enemy does is cut out the energy. Bitcoins are useless.
Physical gold can allow you to travel out with your family. Oil will have value, antibiotics, food, guns, jewellery like Rolex will have some value.
These are commodities.
Yesterday I had to wait one day for my transaction because my gas fee wasn't high enough. Lost 10% too. I get cross-border payments that are instant and without a fee and volatility.
While I see many interesting and even exciting use-cases for cryptocurrencies and even more for blockchain I'm not too bullish on the 'asset' part.
Crypto does have inherent value and that is the ledger. The ledger makes sure that the coins that are with you, are replicated on thousands of nodes across the world without a decentralized entity.
A dollar for example just represents itself. You can't easily find out how many dollars actually exist, have been traded or how many dollars will there be.
A crypto, on the other hand, is completely transparent. The ledger contains the history of all transactions which can be verified. Also cryptos are produced in a completely deterministic way.
>The ledger contains the history of all transactions which can be verified.
I'm probably late to the party here... but just how many transactions can be handled in current ledgers? I mean... let's say everyone on earth suddenly agreed to use some crypto. You suddenly have lets say 4+ billion people (let's ignore kids) doing transactions per day.. can that be anywhere near supported with any current cryptoscheme?
Your physical gold will be confiscated by soldiers at the border. Or by the government in the name of nationalization, like the US did in Executive Order 6102.
Semantically, crypto is a "commodity", its just digital. Some also behave like securities, so it get complicated, but BTC can be compared most to gold.
It's not clear how many people actually do trade in cryptocurrency. The sector is so rife with dodgy activities that any estimates of volume on exchanges should be treated as wholly false.
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.
You don't need byzantine fault tolerance within an organization. You need at most regular signing. For an example of how this works in the real world, consider the French NF525 system where immutable transaction auditing is legally required. Unsurprisingly, it's not done with blockchain proof-of-waste.
>You don't need byzantine fault tolerance within an organization.
Maybe you haven't encountered a need for BFT in organizations that you've observed but it would be fallacious to say "...and ergo no organization would need BFT" (round-trip fallacy). I agree that an org doesn't need BFT if:
-Their hardware never fails
-Their hardware never goes offline
-Their permission structure never changes / No (permissioned hardware or employee) ever become unpermissioned at the human layer.
-Their hardware is in critical time sync with other system all the time.
-...
I have yet to see such a system but do see many people who don't realize their DS needs. That's fine, most people don't understand the delayed costs in not properly auditing unstable logs. Someone's got to work for bitcoin in the future.
Cryptocurrencies are not a scam. Doubly double End. This is very simple.
But seriously, sure some people just push blockchain stuff to get money from investors. But I can buy drugs using Bitcoin. I can't buy drugs using git. So there's probably a difference between them.
It's amusing to see such an uneducated statement be the top comment in a thread on HN. Apparently the quality isn't what it used to be. It's blatantly disengenuous to say git gives you everything offered by blockchains.
they are misnomers, which is the crux of one of your actual criticisms as they are not yet currencies although their peer to peer payment feature does work very well if you want to use it right now, I was curious if we would find common ground so I’m glad we did
But regarding using them I am very content using minuscule amounts of them to store computations on other people’s computers
I really like the redundancy and so many witnesses, but thats just my use case.
I find the excess holdings and speculative use cases are wrong, for most people, but without their greed the database and computational log wouldn’t be viable
Another unregistered security disguised as an ICO. What did they expect? There was this mindset in the "crypto" community that they'd found a way to make "take the money and run" legal. They were wrong. SEC info on ICOs: [1] The SEC has been shutting down about one ICO operation a week, starting with the really sleazy ones.[1]
It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token.
The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land.
One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users.
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
Searchable groups are an antifeature to me. They encourage random strangers to come and go which prevents ever building any sense of community. One of the things I like about the group chats I am in are that the same people are there from years ago.
I don't know... It's sometimes nice to be able to meet random strangers instead of remaining in your own filtered little bubble. My formative years were spent on IRC like a few of the other commenters here and I would judge that as a strictly positive experience.
Searchable (history) and notifiable. Really that's all IRC would need right now to catch up. And a dead simple app, kik was actually pretty close, groups were even named #groups. All other features are gimmicks.
I'm not sure that response is as helpful as you think it is. I'm pretty sure irc has searchable public groups fwiw. Pretty sure irc is text based group chat.
If there's something that kik gets you beyond irc it's completely unclear from this discussion what that might be. Whether or not I'm delusional, and I sure I am as delusional as anyone about certain things, your response isn't useful, informative, helpful or kind. But YMMV.
I mean, they had a shiny app, marketing, and I'd guess similar features the young target group appreciated. A lot of things are like IRC but preferred by the new generation. People don't often select apps based on their backend stack.
Ok so I've used kik for years (I have a pen pall in Germany, we both went through the transition to and from university together.) Their app was delay tolerant and had decent read receipts which was amazing when I lived in the country side with my parents and had a worthless internet connection. That being said...
kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices.
Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid.
They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had.
discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.)
EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.
The lack of a desktop app really hurt it in my eyes, but to be honest I think it was really just killed by the fact that WhatsApp, Telegram etc are downright better (and most people are pretty happy just using Facebook anyway).
Sorry but it’s hard for me to believe an app with so many users is just going to close down for a reason that’s largely tangential to the strength of its core business.
It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.
But do those users actually make the app any money? If not, there may not be a lot of real value there? Or at least, not enough to interest the kind of buyers capable of taking on the technical and social maintenance required.
People are ridiculous about cryptocurrencies and the SEC's authority to regulate securities (and decide what a security is).
To have an enormously engaged platform with a moderation problem and a cryptocurrency with an SEC problem and to pick the SEC problem is ...
I'm sorry for the workers, their families, and their investors that they're losing their jobs and the work they put into the platform will just be gone because the founders have dreams about money laundering and securities fraud (and delusions about labeling what they are doing as something else).
It's text chat. They're sending strings between web browsers with a server in the middle. Google releases 5-10 new chat services a year. They don't have much to keep them afloat outside of moatless-popularity. Their position was always incredibly fragile.
A few small bumps is all that's needed by to take them out. They didn't recognize that and fell over.
Great point since it was a well functioning large messaging platform. That's not easy, a ton of work went into marketing, engineering, and strategy to get to this point. All that thrown away, yikes.
It seems like their plan for monetizing it had been going on a long time and failed to get them off the runway before it ended so now they're doubling down on the monetization but dropping the platform it was supposed to monetize.
> "Given two packages vying for the name kik, we believe that a substantial number of users who type npm install kik would be confused to receive code unrelated to the messaging app with over 200 million users."
So apparently the former Kik package would have outlived the company Kik despite its number of users.
Off-topic, but pretty crazy that the timestamp of that blog post doesn't appear until the end, so you can be reading an article from 2016 and not immediately know that this was a few years ago.
I don't really understand how they screwed this one up. I don't really think their closure has much to do with the child abuse stuff (Snapchat had their fair share of controversies), but rather their focusing on their nonsense ICO -- not sure if this was idealism, stupidity, or greed.
Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
>Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
Kik actually provided something WhatsApp (I'm not sure about Snapchat) didn't: the ability to chat fairly anonymously without needing to provide a phone number. It sure was full of bots though.
Kik, Telegram, and Skype has a spam issue. Until they solve it, they are doomed. I have "nikolay" on Telegram and get tends of messages from scammers daily. Same with Skype, and Kik. I don't get spam on Viber and Messenger and that's why I use those. All the rest are not worth my time although I love both Telegram and Skype more than the rest, but don't have the nerves to deal with their basic design issues.
Guess what happened - I kept blocking every offender and suddenly Microsoft locked me out of my account for more than 2 weeks. My Outlook, my Xbox, my Office, and many other paid services - gone! Why? Because, according to them, I had hundreds of blocked people! Well, there's no way to report for spam or scam - you can either delete a chat (they can message you again) or block them. At least these are the options on desktop. Skype has my contacts synced - why I don't have an option to block any contact from a person who's not in my contacts?! Or at least put them in second queue like Facebook Messenger does? Or allow messages only from people with verified phone? Of course, Skype is guilty as they don't bother to solve this problem.
Good luck trying to punish someone in Macedonia, Nigeria or whatever other place that has Internet but no legal support agreement with a Western state.
Kik is super common among certain online kink communities, it’ll be interesting to see where they move to. And given the underage problem those communities constantly have I wouldn’t find it at all hard to imagine Kik having some pretty grim stuff going on particularly in their new-ish group chats.
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 will suffice.
Step 2:
Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical
underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best.
However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the
dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever.
If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign
language.
Step 3:
Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares
for yourself, and sell the other share.
Step 4:
Have your partner buy that share for $100.
Step 5:
Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give
interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you
have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to
your day job; this system isn't for you.)
Step 6:
Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note:
avoid companies created using this system.)
Step 7:
Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it.
(edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)
The $1B valuation was for their last round which was a $50m investment by Tencent, the company behind WeChat. The investment was more about a partnership between the companies than the economics. At the time, Kik's CEO said: "Today, there are only five other companies in the world that see the future like we do: Tencent, Line, Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram. One of them owns the largest internet market in the world. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as we run this race."
I admired the way that for the TON offering, Telegram very specifically gouged only a few very rich investors who totally had all the knowledge and information they needed to know better, and nobody else.
I understand (from industry gossip) that most of the Telegram TON VCs have already written it off.
side note with the downfall of Kik, If anyone has experience with building group chat apps that scale, or is solid with react native, I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists.
Basic MVP with messing is already done, made with react native. Just need help with adding images, some login stuff, make it look a tad slicker, and most of all, the on going backend tweaking.
I am a regular HN reader. I just would prefer to not make it public just yet, hence the throwaway.
I am based in the Bay Area, happy to meetup with whoever thinks they might be interested in joining the project and has skills. (or skype if someone is outside the bay)
edit: I see two posts calling post/idea sketchy, I will maybe choose my wording better next time, and I promise it isn't.
> I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists.
Curious as to how you'll make the last point work. Seems a little sketchy to me
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 children will consume (and hence watch the ads on), which the abusers then leverage into contact (and from there abuse); there are plenty of examples).
Google researched this, it would take 30,000 employees to manage their communities against child abuse effectively (not watch all content; a mistake people always seem to make when I say this). This would be about a fourth of youtube's suspected profits, so of course that isn't happening. Instead relying on machine learning and other clever solutions which are either ineffective or make the problem worse (youtube heroes for example).
Tumblr had similar problems and got temporarily banned from app stores over it. They of course banned all NSFW content, which didn't actually fix the problem (notably the beacon posts, and their crappy design (click share on child pornography to report it), and the ease of access to children; problems that Kik shares as it happens). And lets not even get started on the easily accessible chat rooms and online games targeted at children (quick, how hard is it to make a chat app, download some shitty cartoon graphics, and access a webcam? what like a day of effort? yeaaa... search "kid" and "chat" see what comes up, go on, I'll wait).
I would say that this would be a way to disrupt the chat market, but I don't even think anyone cares (worse than that, it will probably come off as idiotic, "kids are early adopters" anyone?). People will care when it comes to invading privacy: "think of the children" will be used to introduce stricter controls like it always has. But children are being harmed by companies that actively invade our privacy already (and hence cooperate with the powers that be), they get a free pass because it was never really about the children. Of course the irony is that this app wasn't shut down because of child abuse problems, but because of financial/regulation problems and a pivot. Running a cryptocurrency actually probably does have less criminal risk (and for that matter moral hazard) than running a chat platform (which is an insane statement, but that's where we are).
The only sorta-workable solution I have (that isn't stricter regulation of tech companies and chat platforms) for this issue is federation. Creating local chat platforms backed by local moderators (who have a stake in a positive platform) tied to real people (removing anonymity at the local level, but keeping pseudo-anonymity on the broader internet, but then you also know your system admin), this should overall encourage better behavior. But also children can be restricted to the local community (where it is safe, and they also can't make a nuisance of themselves), the federation would bring them content they could comment on and discuss with their friends (e.g. they could watch and comment on their favorite youtuber's videos, but conversations would be kept local). And of course a parent could white list remote friends, and communities can have "penpal" or "sister" communities that they whitelist in their entirety because they have close ties. Mastodon and other open federated social media platforms are working towards things like this.
This of course comes back to the parental control issue (most notably that parents suck at using them). But the point I would make is that such systems would be community backed, and offer better parental controls. Mixing in things like community ran game servers, document clouds, and so on would also do wonders.
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 child predators can also access it.. so uh, child abuse or something. Lets just ban everything.
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.
IRC wasn't targeted at children. IRC required effort and understanding to access. IRC wasn't in your pocket all the time. IRC didn't include video and picture taking capabilities built in (one would have to work at it to send content like that). IRC had moderation (admins were often responsive to issues), decentralization (each server was it's own small social network), and local communities (one could figure out the difference between a legit and sketch server); worse come to worse, people could just go somewhere else (most modern social media is tied to your phone number - something difficult for children to change - and the app your friends are on is a limiting factor, there is no running away). IRC was easily anonymous, there wasn't reverse image searches, geotagging, or having friends in your social network leak information inadvertently.
> But yeah, you can see porn on there and child predators can also access it.. so uh, child abuse or something. Lets just ban everything.
That's a straw-man of my position. Nowhere did I advocate banning anything.
I clearly stated that my issue was the harm caused for the sake of profit. Google could hire 30,000 moderators. Tumblr could (have) take(n) the issue seriously and redesigned the moderation tools it has (and it's reporting system). Kik could have improved the privacy and anonymity they offer their users (and maybe work to do something about communities that actively - basically publicly - exploit children). The operators of the fly by night chat rooms should probably be investigated, have a strongly worded meeting with an officer and prosecutor (along the lines of "your service is being actively used for extensive criminal activity; here is a search warrant"), and be arrested if they don't shut down their offerings (or radically pivot away) now that they are aware of the criminal activity they are facilitating (or if that investigation turned up their knowing facilitation of criminal activity).
My preferred alternative of federation would fix the problem by simply being better in many ways.
Your description is also a straw man of what is happening. We are talking about coordinated grooming of children. People who make many accounts (backed by using proxies, buying untraceable phone numbers, etc.), host servers and develop custom applications (e.g. targeted apps like chat rooms, or to scrape social networks for victims), and then use these tools for targeted attacks on victims (armed with personal details, secrets gained from their close friends through social engineering attacks, pretending to be multiple people, and so on). Let alone some of the recent stuff like realtime deepfakes, which I can only imagine how that is going to be used.
The victims here are children. Do you realize how regularly trained adults fail simple social engineering tests? With alarming regularity. The adversary model here is a motivated persistent personal threat. The win scenario is compromising a single child, and they can easily choose their targets. The information available includes full access to a child's social media and friend network and basically an unlimited number of tries (phrasing it like that makes me realize it can effectively be brute forced). We cannot expect children to survive that threat model unharmed.
On IRC you could log out (or log into a different server!), walk away, and play with your friends. On kik if you log out you are alone, if you walk away your life is over, all of your friends are there.
That's a standard tactic. I mean, the FBI ran Playpen, a Tor onion site for sharing CP, for almost two weeks, while dropping phone-home malware on users' devices.
Edit: I forgot to include a link.[0] And this was just one operation. I suspect that there are teams at the FBI that specialize in CP operations.
I'm not sure if this is what OP meant, but a year is long time. It was literally some teams job to share CP on kik for a whole year. That's a long damn job.
Also, for normal people, hardcore amateur CP doesn't really come across as sex. It's mainly about punishment, humiliation and touture. So in that sense, I suspect that it's easier to live with.
Everything old is new again, the crack epidemic was fueled by the CIA[0] and they killed one of the whisteblowers (Gary Webb) and the FBI has recently been involved with the Jeffrey Epstein cover up[1]. Those institutions have little to none accountability which makes them extremely attractive to the wealthy to put them in their pockets; and even when those institutions have the best intentions such lack of checks and accountability sometimes makes them equal or worst than the criminals they aim for.
Too many people sharing nudes (their own and not their own) and other pornography; for those normal people who stay 50+ miles away from the "chans".
Also, I agree with other that spam is cancerous in these messaging apps. Think about how much spam your email client filters; "publicly addressable" apps need the same logic.
Forbes is totally unreadable. Even when you ignore the side-bar ads, you then get a new one 30 seconds into the visit that slides in over-top the text you are reading. What has the internet become.
The weird thing about Kik was that everyone I met that used it thought it had some sort automatic message deletion like Telegram, but I don't think it did. Old messages would stay forever.
So Kin, according to Kik, is not a security, but a utility token. Now that Kik is dead, what's "utility" about it? They should have stuck to calling it a security.
> "While we are ready to take on the SEC in court, we underestimated the tactics they would employ. How they would take our quotes out of context to manipulate the public to view us as bad actors. How they would pressure exchanges not to list Kin. And how they would draw out a long and expensive process to drain our resources."
Anything you say, can and WILL be used against you in a court of law. Without good lawyers you are screwed. Careful what you say publicly and to officers or anybody like the SEC. Bring a lawyer, discuss your battle plan.
If a cop says only guilty people need lawyers you pay no attention to such ignorance. Lawyer the hell up.
Maybe my reading comprehension could improve, but somehow I didn't have the loud "SCAM!" alarm going off in my head the whole time I read the blog... unlike TFA.
[EDIT]: Also, "Moving Forward Boldly"? That seems like it would be #2, right below "Our Incredible Journey" on the list of this-must-be-irony titles for startup failure posts.
Yeah, they had better relaunch with a similar platform immediately, preferably slimmed down and not susceptible to gross stuff, or it will really go from product into vaporware which is a funny transition to say the least
Not to diminish the importance of the child abuse but the real problem seems to be "securities fraud" not child abuse, so I'm not sure why the title and the article bring up the child abuse as if it's the reason for the closure?
Unfortunately from a ex-LEO perspective, it has been very popular with children and heavily hunted by sex offenders, at least in the communities I served in. Doing digital forensics, almost every police officer in a child protection case would be asking "can we get the kik history off that phone?"
Not be cause they were guessing but based on experience or admissions by the victim.
Part of the seedy underbelly that 75% of the community don't get exposed to.
People found it hard to believe when these sort of network-related offences occurred in churches too. Some religious groups are/were more prone to it than others, often based on opportunity or expectations.
If anyone reading this works on Forbes’ web team: Your page hijacking ads and modals begging me to “sign up” are just destroying the reading experience. Please, fix your shit before you ask people for money!
Oh it's horrendous. Slide up notification appears from the bottom, then 1 second later blue IBM ad covers screen (no X button as far as I can tell). Then another popup appears above the IBM ad with an ad. I close the bottom and popup and the IBM goes by itself, and a video to the left starts autoplaying (thankfully muted!). I scroll down and some animated ads dynamically appear on the right, followed by the big blue IBM ad covering the screen again. To the URL bar I march... https://outline.com/djgeH2
I am a bit concerned by how I didn't even notice reading the article through only four exposed lines on the page while blocking out 80% of the space that had been taken over by ads popping in from all sides. It's become so commonplace that I've developed some kind of subconscious process to deal with it.
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 it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git.
> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.