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CryptoKitties sales plummet in popularity
- vmlinuz 8y agopop goes the bubble!
- omarchowdhury 8y agoThat is an an underestimation of the technical, financial and social value of distributed ledger technology if Cryptokitties sales is your bubble barometer. Let's see what's going to happen to finance. The fiat-crypto infrastructure that has been and is continuing to be laid out by multiple varied parties is an indicator for the recurrence of another bull market, especially when the current market cap is compared to the the cash, stocks and commodities that are out there, each kind of which crypto assets are identical to. The best thing we can hope for is the next bull run to be based on actual use, working products that add benefit and value to market society. And who knows, maybe it'll all even become transformative.
- foepys 8y agoPlease enlighten us: what are real-world applications of blockchain technology that provide a benefit to anyone in any sector? Please remember that there are over 7 billion people in the world that want to potentially use it, so Bitcoin (or similar) are not working as a payment system.
- omarchowdhury 8y agoThe current real world application is a test to see how money or forms of value can be coordinated among distributed decentralized networks. Just the experimentation is a value and benefit for humanity. One should remove the idea that Bitcoin will be the winner as a payment system. It could be Bitcoin with its Lightning Network implementation, or it could be something better. As it seems scalability is your specific gripe here, there are competing distributed ledger technologies that are working towards or already have solved this to an extent better than Bitcoin. Understand that this goal of scalable, decentralized multi-nodal coordination is not an easy and simple problem, but it is a problem that market participants are working towards, and solutions are necessarily constantly evolving, because is that not what markets do?
- Blindedwino 8y agoIt's a very costly and potentially ruining way to do experimentation though.
- omarchowdhury 8y agoAnd out of that experiment are coming other experiments that work to solve for the issues.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoThis is my exact problem. I haven't been able to use any of these cryptocurrencies to do actual work so far. Everything has existed on the plane of theory and whitepapers so far. Nearly a decade after BTC's release and nearly half a decade after's ETH, shouldn't there be a few mainstream applications using them?
- dumbfoundded 8y agoI don't think they have to be mainstream enough for you to have actual value. I run a CBD store and it's extremely hard for CBD companies to get banking without exorbitant fees. For example, it costs ~2.5% for normal companies to process a credit card payment through stripe. For us, it costs >7%. Many of my competitors and suppliers are turning to cryptocurrencies for the lower fees and guaranteed certainty of payment. The impact of crypto is yet to be fully estimated but it seems as if there isn't any existing system crypto cannot replicate and there are many systems enabled by crypto that existing systems will fail to create.
- icebraining 8y agoAre you in the US? I think that's a particular limitation of your country's payment systems, with its over-reliance on credit cards. In most other places you can use payment systems which are less vulnerable to fraud (since they use a push-style system, not pull) and much harder to chargeback. Cryptocurrencies might have an edge for a while, but don't count on it long-term.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoI am in the US. Is there a form of internet commerce that doesn't depend on credit cards?
- icebraining 8y agoAbsolutely. Here in Portugal they don't even appear in the top 3, and in many other EU countries they're not the first. Many of them are developed by the local banking system (like iDEAL[1]), but SEPA transfers are used too, since they're usually free. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL
- garmaine 8y agoBitcoin as a settlement system would work just fine at that scale.
- dmitriid 8y agoIt wouldn't. At that scale it would cost hundreds of dollars and several days per settlement.
- raverbashing 8y agoBitcoin is every day making absolutely sure it scales less, costs more, is more dependent on centralization and alienates more people. It's not even funny. Go for ETH, BCH, Dash, or whatever, Bitcoin is proud to continually shoot themselves in the foot.
- lawn 8y agoSo your argument is since not all 7 billion people cannot use it it's not working as a payment system and therefore it does not provide any benefit to anyone in any sector? Geez.
- foepys 8y agoNo, you didn't comprehend what I said. I said that it doesn't work as a payment system, so they should name something else where it's good at. Can you name another application in any sector?
- lawn 8y agoIt works well as a payment system. Some other applications: provably fair gambling, decentralized voting and an uncensorable twitter (ex memo.cash).
- foepys 8y agoPayment system: The corresponding blockchain would nearly instantly overload and reach data sizes beyond good and evil for everyone to handle. The result would be middlemen (aka banks) that are able to save the whole blockchain and handle your trust requirements. Today's light wallets require trust as well and every user of those can potentially be fed fraudulent blocks without them noticing. Gambling: why is that better than a non-blockchain, regulated solution? The results have to come from somewhere, so that is a centralized point of trust you inevitably need. Unless you mean that the odds are decided "fairly" then I question why you would bet your money at a place where you can't trust the odds, or why you don't bet elsewhere where the odds are more in your favor. Decentralized voting: I don't know why anybody would want that. If you don't control who votes, you end up with rigged votes. Unless you mean that only the block producers (miners) vote, then you will end up in an oligarchy. Uncensorable Twitter: If by "uncensorable" you mean immutable: nobody sane wants that. Once somebody posts child pornography to the blockchain, you will have to explain to the police why you have child pornography on your computer.
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- anoncoward111 8y agoAgreed. It would be like saying Toys R Us going bankrupt is representative of the toy industry as a whole. Or that the Zimbabwean Dollar is representative of all fiat
- nikanj 8y agoI think the biggest scam in bitcoin is using the motte-and-bailey argument that ”blockchains have real-world use”, and ”already existing bitcoins are worth tens of thousands each”. The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them. Their immutability is their biggest selling point, after all.
- omarchowdhury 8y agoThe biggest scam in Bitcoin has been people with a vested interest in it throwing around price predictions since the beginning, and that being the only media narrative propelled. If the conversation is about how human society can evolve with this new level and kind of coordination, then we may fare better.
- john_moscow 8y agoThe real-world use is the transfer of value. From optimists to opportunists.
- meh2frdf 8y agoBest description yet!
- coralreef 8y agoAre you certain you understand blockchains and cryptocurrencies? Ex: The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them. You don't actually do anything with blocks. Blocks contain transaction data for the network, confirmed by miners who play hash games for block rewards. I think you mean the actual coins that come as block rewards, aka Satoshis / Bitcoin. Are you familiar with decentralization and developing apps on things like Ethereum? Or IPFS?
- Jdam 8y agoAre you familiar with the fact that _still_ , after years of hype and hundreads of billions of $ in the system, there is not a single app that has reached mainstream adoption? In fact, interest is fading without any major breakthrough achieved. I actually do run a {insert random blockchain based hyped decentral protocol here} app and I can see that absolutely nothing has happened or changed during the last year or so.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- john_moscow 8y agoI'm more wondering why would legit investors pour 12 mil into something that it obviously a short-lived gimmick. There are plenty of similar examples that perfectly illustrate how fast people get bored with something like this (e.g. flappy bird, pokemon go, fidget spinners) and yet the round got successfully closed [0]. I just don't understand what needs to be happening inside an investor's head to put their own money into something like this. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cryptokitties#section-funding-rounds https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cryptokitties#sectio...
- xiphias 8y agoIt's quite simple: the scammers who create the scams can't market a security to non-institutional investors, as they would have to go through strict regulations. They give discounts to VCs who can sell their tokens to retail investors in a week with huge returns after they ,,invested''.
- coolspot 8y agoGreed. Someone who bought cryptokitty early on sold it for 100x returns easily. Everyone on the hype train was reselling kitties to next bigger fool.
- raverbashing 8y agoBecause 12Mi is nothing for them. Now try to get 12Mi outside of SF and Bay Area for something with a more solid business plan, see how it goes.
- tedunangst 8y agoYou just don't understand the potential. You can buy more than just kitties. You can also buy hats for your kitties. And if you sell the kitty, the new owner can take the hat off. Infinite innovation! https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/zombies-eating-kitties/ https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/zombies-eating-kitties/
- jimjimjim 8y agocough tulips cough hucksters, swindlers and charlatans
- jasonwen 8y agoWhat i understood of this 12M investment was that it invested in its team, not CruyptoKitties, to explore this type of gamification using blockchains.
- Casseres 8y agoIt's the Beanie Babies of cryptocurrency. Of course it's going to plummet in popularity.
- baby 8y agoInterestingly, cryptokitties is behind the effort for standardizing the concept of asset or non-fungible tokens (where tokens, here kitties, have different prices). It's called ERC-721 (similar to RFCs) and it's quite controversial: see https://blog.citymayor.co/posts/why-the-standardization-of-erc-721-is-a-bad-idea/ https://blog.citymayor.co/posts/why-the-standardization-of-e...
- rdl 8y agoI assume most of the demand/volume was secretly subsidized by the company.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]