13 ms·

At the Bored Ape restaurant, your ApeCoin is no good now

181 points by quantified 4y ago

syspec 4y ago
Broke Ape Yacht Club
rvz 4y ago
> “Yes, ethereum is a currency in a way where you can exchange [non-fungible tokens, or] NFTs and stuff … but as far as buying food and all that, maybe not,” one crypto-enthusiast diner, Marc Coloma, said as he munched on fries outside the restaurant. “People want to hold onto their ethereum. They’re not gonna want to use it.” Then what is the point then? Apecoin and Ethereum certainly cannot be used for payments and holders don't even want to spend their ETH or APE crypto. They have either been terrified with the 10,000 BTC pizza purchase to never spend it or they are scared of the gas fees that will eat up the transaction cost if the chain gets congested again. It is a loss of confidence that is so bad that they have no choice but to use dollars for payments instead. That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  It didn't take a crypto crash, crypto has been a failed currency since BTC hit a dollar... Extreme deflation is arguably more deadly than hyperinflation. If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Likewise, once Bitcoin went from fractions of a penny to a dollar, what incentive was left to spend it? You could argue an ideological want force it as a currency... but how many people's morals hold up at 10x returns? 100x returns? 1000x returns? If BTC (or any major crypto) had become the official currency of a country, it'd be a failed state by this point.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    BTC is official in El Salvador.
    - iostream24 4y ago
      And Bukele has locked up more than 2% of the population in inhumane conditions… Hardly a promotional asset…
      - el-salvador 4y ago
        2% of the total population. It must be higher when other variables are added to the calculation. - The % of male population imprisoned. My guesstimate is 4%. - The % of male population between 18 and 29 y/o imprisoned I don’t have the raw data to calculate it at this moment. But it must be higher once gender / age / income are considered.
    - grey-area 4y ago
      https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-president-bukele-human-rights-crisis/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-p... https://www.cato.org/commentary/el-salvadors-road-currency-chaos-economic-collapse https://www.cato.org/commentary/el-salvadors-road-currency-c... https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-el-salvador-with-no-easy-exit-worsening-crisis-2022-05-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-e... President Bukele’s government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, following a spike in homicides allegedly committed by gangs, which has since been extended twice....Despite a drop in the homicide rate in recent years, El Salvador continues to be one of the most violent countries in the world....The government's financial problems are not because of bitcoin, but they have gotten worse because of bitcoin. QED
      - rscnt 4y ago
        The president doesn't care about the issues that concern his position. There was an intiative by the treasury to try and have people use a single document to deal with taxes, where we previously used two, this is something important for most people, the guy hasn't even mentioned on his social networks. They also build a public vet that was supposedly financed with the earnings of BTC - when the price dropped the president mentioned that he hasn't sold any meaning all the money spent to promoto chivo or crypto has come from our tax dollars.
  - fortzi 4y ago
    BTC is an official currency in San Salvador, which is arguably indeed a failed state. I’d argue, though, that it’s just another symptom of the reasons which made it a failed state in the first place (populism, corruption, etc.)
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      I largely agree, I mean the president that got it through last year also violated their constitution to get another term and was upheld by his own puppet court... But BTC hasn't helped at all. It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds. While all this goes down the president is still making noise about a "Bitcoin city". A very "meta" commentary on cryto I feel.
      - el-salvador 4y ago
        >It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds. And its day to day usage is very low. There was a spike in use after $30 sign up bonus and during the 2021 bitcoin conference and following months which attracted tourism from bitcoiners though.
    - dhosek 4y ago
      San Salvador is a different country from El Salvador, just for the record.
      - kgwgk 4y ago
        San Salvador is not a country - it’s a city. The capital of El Salvador.
        el-salvador 4y ago
        Yup! That's correct. I would say that being able to differentiate between El Salvador, Salvador and San Salvador is a shibboleth for those familiar with El Salvador. They are easy to confuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
  - MichaelBurge 4y ago
    > If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Does that mean if you can find a non-defaulting bond that pays higher interest than inflation, the US dollar will completely collapse? Because why would anyone spend $1 when they could get $2 of goods in N years...
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      First off, if the 5 year treasury rate ever approaches 1000%, I assure you the Fed will collapse. Second, problems with hyperdeflation and hyperinflation are both rooted in the hyper. If you can buy a pizza today, or have $10 million dollars in a few years, why buy a pizza? Third, the issue isn't just deflation, it's specifically deflation of a currency. If you invest $100 in a company, there's a chance it will be $1000 next year. But your $100 will circulate in the meantime and generate value. Now if instead there was just as good a chance you could put $100 under your mattress, and next year it'd magically have become $1000 despite never having left your grasp... why would anyone ever invest again? You get to keep your money and have it increase in value, there's no incentive to invest or spend any more than you absolutely have to. But then as people spend less and less, there's less and less economic activity being generated. You stop wanting to pay people so jobs disappear. Eventually you end up in a game of chicken where everyone is scared to spend money. A BTC based country (fully BTC based, not El Salvador's lip service) would be an utter hellscape devoid of any economic output other than people waiting for their currency to appreciate. Not unlike the real thing...
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > and it just took one crypto crash I'm mostly crypto-skeptic, and appreciate your insights, but this part is to be expected with any market: when the value of something is up, certain business models become profitable and start manifesting. When the value goes down, they stop being profitable and those models vanish (or become sustained externally). It's easy to see in high profile markets like resource extraction, real estate, venture capital availability, etc So of course the business model of "use crypto as a currency" will vanish/diminish when the currency value of a coin is substantially down.
- mojomark 4y ago
  > That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash. Disclosure: I hold virtually no crypto (a few thousand XRP) As I watch this show from the sidelines, I wonder if the latest crash (and no doubt future crashes) isn't exactly the force needed to distribute crypto more widely into more hands, normalizing to some roughly steady state value. After several swings of the pendulum, you end up at some more or less stable value with many more users, making actual marketetplace purchases with crypto more ubiquitous. I guess time will tell, eh?
  - clpm4j 4y ago
    Who does the distribution? The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. The people who hold most of the BTC, ETH, SOL, and whatever other major coins were already rich before they got into it. Maybe single digit thousands of people went from non-rich to rich through buying and holding crypto, but that's a tiny fraction.
    - rglover 4y ago
      > The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. You can buy fractions of it, meaning the affordability is relative to the individual and what they can spend.
      - clpm4j 4y ago
        That just means poor people are dividing their already limited resources to buy a fraction of something that they can't use to pay for rent, food, and clothing. If you can only afford to buy a fraction of something, then you can't afford it.
        rglover 4y ago
        That's rapidly changing. Considering that Bitcoin has the potential to help more than it hurts (developing countries don't have to plan growth at the barrel of a Western gun), there's an incentive to start moving in the direction of making it a standard. See Central African Republic and El Salvador. Countries are waking up to the mafia operation that is the IMF and its favorite weapon, the dollar. Because it's still early in the adoption cycle, critics will continue to be "correct" until one day they wake up and find they've been left behind.
- eknkc 4y ago
  Why would anyone want to buy food with crypto anyway? Can’t understand that. It is not faster. It is not cheaper to transfer. It is not even as anonymous as cash I’d say. I can see why would someone buy stuff online using crypto but this does not make much sense.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions. It was based on a lot of ignorance about how money actually works, but that was the claim way back when. I had a manager back in 2007–8 whose wife had a bakery that accepted Bitcoin as payment and he was a big crypto advocate. I could tell back then that all the claims made no sense. What amazes me is that crypto still hasn’t gone to zero a decade and a half later. Although as John Maynard Keynes said: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
    - cypress66 4y ago
      > But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions. Some fanatics may have claimed that. But the bitcoin whitepaper itself says that traditional payments are good enough for most cases (and then enumerates cases where it's not, such as if you want non reversible transactions).
      - quantified 4y ago
        Some fanatics have pushed their views far though. They get the reporters who need a story and write things that get clicks. Fanatics are major proselytizers for any movement.
  - nikanj 4y ago
    If you got cryptos from selling contraband, and would rather not pay taxes/leave a paper trail from converting to fiat
    - 4y ago
walrus01 4y ago
How many really tiny violins can I buy with one apecoin?
- kobalsky 4y ago
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Fewer than you could last week.
choward 4y ago
> Perhaps that was what Nguyen was thinking when he spent more than $330,000 on the various ape NFTs on display at his restaurant. Wow. I can't imagine what anyone is thinking when they pay that much to brag about some random blockchain that says they own an arbitrary URL that may or may not link to an image.
- foogazi 4y ago
  Reminds me of that service that would let you “name” a star
- raylad 4y ago
  That actually doesn't apply to Bored Apes. With those NFTs you get copyright ownership of the image.
  - pueblito 4y ago
    No, with copyright law you get ownership, the nft is just a public receipt
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      The copyright holder is free to write up a license that says the current holder of the NFT may use it as if they hold the copyright, though. Many NFTs don’t, but it’s possible.
      - knorker 4y ago
        But nothing guarantees that the seller of the NFT, the current holder of the NFT, is also the current copyright holder. It's basically completely disconnected, so while the transfers may traditionally be done at the same time between the same entities, that's not a contract. The NFT just gives you a Blockchain url. If you didn't sign anything else then you got nothing else.
NoGravitas 4y ago
I wonder if you can right click on the burgers and get them for free.
- koolba 4y ago
  No they probably disable right click to prevent hackers. You have to be a true l337 to replace the onclick handler first.
yieldcrv 4y ago
These merchant adoption and abandonment stories are always implementation issues with no inspiration or education. A) Point of Sale systems have handled this "volatility" issue for an entire decade. Use an implementation that shields the merchant from volatility. They usually liquidate for you. B) Why would you list the prices in ApeCoin or Ethereum? Just show dollars and accept whatever, because A) handles whatever proportion you want to keep in dollars or some other crypto. C) If nobody wants to use that payment method, who cares its free. How often are you getting UnionPay customers, going to make an article about that too?
- roywiggins 4y ago
  If a crypto-themed restaurant doesn't think it's worth it, I can't see how anyone else would either. Like, this is their whole brand!
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    This crypto-themed restaurant didn't research a single thing, I wouldn't use it as validation or invalidation
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  If a crypto-themed restaurant can’t get it right, what hope do the rest have?
- burnished 4y ago
  re: C, it was also a restaurant review and a pretty ringing endorsement. When I got to the end all I could think was "weird yelp review". I really enjoyed it.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Yeah honestly I might hop down to Long Beach for this theme and burger, not my favorite part of LA
rejor121 4y ago
Nobody could see this coming! Lol Seriously, crypto has yet to solve any real world problems I’ve faced. And NFTs are just the worst. Money laundering schemes at best. If I can’t buy an apple easily with crypto, it’s useless.
- nikanj 4y ago
  Fully anonymous global ransomware would be really hard without cryptos. Monetizing hacked boxes would be much tougher if you could not turn them into Monero miners.
  - doopy1 4y ago
    It's not fully anonymous even WITH crypto. They have call centers. Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom.
    - giaour 4y ago
      > Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom. That must be why ransomware demands were so much higher in the pre-bitcoin era. Unless you're including the cost of sending a cargo jet full of cash or gold halfway around the world?
      - doopy1 4y ago
        Before bitcoin was still the early days of ransomware. It existed mostly as tech support scams. Now that the floodgates have been opened ransoms will go back to being high-risk western union payments and will be much higher. You can't put the cat back in the bag.
        giaour 4y ago
        This is laughably naive. Western Union payments are high-risk for the ransomer, since they have to go pick the money up. Also, Western Union has pretty low limits on how much you can send ($10K for US->US transfers, less for international transfers). Getting a million dollars (a low ransom in today's ecosystem) via Western Union would require at least 100 pickups, each of which comes with a risk of getting arrested. There is a reason ransom amounts skyrocketed when cryptocurrency entered the picture, and no, it's not because it was "the early days" pre-bitcoin.
gkoberger 4y ago
I dislike crypto, especially NFTs. But here's my best attempt at understanding. BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought. It's not just a picture of the ape on OpenSean; you can use it. There's something really fascinating about this. It's one character, but it's also broadly part of the larger ecosystem. We're so used to, say, Disney owning IP. But what if you could spend $300k and have a restaurant themed like Mickey Mouse? And you're not a cheap knockoff... you're expanding on the lore and the You could have a community of built in people or, like the guy in the article, maybe they just thought the vibe was cute and didn't know what BAYC was even. I think it's really interesting that people are building and creating and expanding this universe. Imagine something like Pokémon, where everyone was able to create and consume games/content/etc. Here in HN, the sentiment tends to be against Disney-style copyrights. The crypto community is playing with what community and intellectual property actually could mean.
- remram 4y ago
  You can mostly use any and every one of them for a lot of purposes under fair use. I have seen a lot of Apes around the net, way more than I would have liked. You can't make, say, a cartoon featuring one of them, but would you want to do that?
  - pornel 4y ago
    The apes were algorithmically-generated, and copyright applies only to human work, not program outputs (so that you can't run a program that generates all possible images and claim you own then all), so the kitsch apes are probably free to use for everyone anyway.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  among a lot of other things: > It's one character no, it's one picture. some one else might own the rights to functionally the same character but with a smile instead of a frown or even just a different background color.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  > BAYC transfers ownership of IP. Does it, though? > Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Bored Ape leaves the website/application. That's not IP ownership, just a conditional license, despite their talk of "owning" and "purchasing".
labrador 4y ago
Crypto, web3 and NFTs are social movements. They are the crowd that knows things. As the hippies used to say about LSD and counterculture, "You're either on the bus, or off the bus." Crypto, web3 and NFTs are spiritual tech that is throwing off the shackles of corporate control and making a new society. It's an identity. It's a brand. It's a community. If I was in my 30's I'd probably be into it. I would know damn well there was a lot of hype, but so what, it's fun and maybe something amazing will come out of it. Meantime, it's a party, and we can all take turns at the mic making deep pronouncements about how we're empowering the forgotten poor of the world. What's not to like? Who cares if we lose money. It's the price of entry to the party. Edit: This isn't what I believe. This is me trying to see it through the eyes of a young enthusiast
- heyitsguay 4y ago
  Yeah but the hippie movement was about realizing the untapped potential for social freedoms locked away behind a repressive and outdated society. (Before it burned out and dissipated) Crypto is about shallowly co-opting the patterns of discourse of genuine social movements to try and get rich quickly.
  - labrador 4y ago
    I agree with you. I was just trying to see it through the eyes of a young enthusiast
- soared 4y ago
  Yeah, it’s koolaid flavored like money with an anti establishment label on it.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > throwing off the shackles of corporate control The entire crypto industry is built on the back of VC money. And I fail to see how Opensea is not the epitome of corporate control when it has ~80% market share in the NFT marketplace space.
jboggan 4y ago
Reminds me of a time that I played a Bitcoin poker game at some Google VP's place up in the hills with Charlie Lee and a few other early crypto luminaries in 2014. It took us over an hour to figure out sending BTC to the "buy-in" pot because most of us had 2FA enabled on our Coinbase accounts and the cell reception was so bad at that we couldn't get our confirmation texts. We ended up writing IOUs on a sheet of paper. I thought, "if the people in the vanguard of this movement can't figure this out, maybe it isn't all that it's cracked up to be".
- elif 4y ago
  the first man to ever build and sell a car, recounting his critics in the transportation industry: “There’s nothing the matter with me. It’s you! You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.”
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Do you have a citation for that?
  - 3a2d29 4y ago
    Ahh the classic “people were wrong once about a technology, therefore all potential technologies are good.” So if I found a quote about someone saying nuclear energy would power cars…would that disprove crypto? I guess so
  - outworlder 4y ago
    The contraption actually had some utility.
- bhtru 4y ago
  That's more on simply poor cell service if anything at all though no? The tech even then seemingly worked for you then. Your anecdotal is comparable to saying students at a college not being able to add one another on Facebook in it's early days, because the campus Wi-Fi was on the fritz.
jansan 4y ago
You need to try harder to find the greater fool.
wnevets 4y ago
Like the old saying goes if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, you’re it
m3kw9 4y ago
The “am I a joke to you?” Meme can commence on ape owners?
branon 4y ago
https://archive.ph/gHyY7 https://archive.ph/gHyY7
spullara 4y ago
Coupa Cafe was early on this trend. They got 2 BTC in a month for about $200 worth of coffee: https://99bitcoins.com/coupa-cafe-sells-coffee-to-the-silicon-valley-pros-in-exchange-for-bitcoins/ https://99bitcoins.com/coupa-cafe-sells-coffee-to-the-silico...
krapp 4y ago
But I have a bottle of vintage slurp juice on reserve! I can't pay for it now, all I have is real money.
phabricator 4y ago
What are the numbers here? This was intended as a 90-day pop-up, and they reported there were few crypto transactions even before the crash. ApeCoin already wasn't a huge part of this. The entrepreneur plans another restaurant and is already selling NFTs for it. Their involvement with Yuga Labs was minimal. Bun B paid for the burgers. Is it possible the entrepreneur still turned a healthy profit? Or that was killed in the crash?
annoyingnoob 4y ago
If Nguyen really believes in ETH and APE wouldn't he want to pull in more of it when its down? Obviously he needs cash flow to run the business but most are not paying with crypto. I'm reading this as Nguyen lost faith in crypto.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
One thing maybe missing from the many good comments here is a separation of digital currencies from crypto coins. We would do well to start separating the mechanism that stores value from the mechanism of exchange. That's why I think something like GNU Taler backed by ordinary dollars is a much better way for selling burgers and pizza in any foreseeable time-frame.
mproud 4y ago
I feel like this article is trying to blow up a story that isn’t particularly intriguing.
kishore032 4y ago
How long will a BTC retail transaction take for this to a viable payment method?

181 points by quantified 4y ago

Broke Ape Yacht Club

rvz 4y ago

> “Yes, ethereum is a currency in a way where you can exchange [non-fungible tokens, or] NFTs and stuff … but as far as buying food and all that, maybe not,” one crypto-enthusiast diner, Marc Coloma, said as he munched on fries outside the restaurant. “People want to hold onto their ethereum. They’re not gonna want to use it.” Then what is the point then? Apecoin and Ethereum certainly cannot be used for payments and holders don't even want to spend their ETH or APE crypto. They have either been terrified with the 10,000 BTC pizza purchase to never spend it or they are scared of the gas fees that will eat up the transaction cost if the chain gets congested again. It is a loss of confidence that is so bad that they have no choice but to use dollars for payments instead. That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash.

BoorishBears 4y ago
It didn't take a crypto crash, crypto has been a failed currency since BTC hit a dollar... Extreme deflation is arguably more deadly than hyperinflation. If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Likewise, once Bitcoin went from fractions of a penny to a dollar, what incentive was left to spend it? You could argue an ideological want force it as a currency... but how many people's morals hold up at 10x returns? 100x returns? 1000x returns? If BTC (or any major crypto) had become the official currency of a country, it'd be a failed state by this point.
- djbusby 4y ago
  BTC is official in El Salvador.
  - iostream24 4y ago
    And Bukele has locked up more than 2% of the population in inhumane conditions… Hardly a promotional asset…
    - el-salvador 4y ago
      2% of the total population. It must be higher when other variables are added to the calculation. - The % of male population imprisoned. My guesstimate is 4%. - The % of male population between 18 and 29 y/o imprisoned I don’t have the raw data to calculate it at this moment. But it must be higher once gender / age / income are considered.
  - grey-area 4y ago
    https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-president-bukele-human-rights-crisis/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-p... https://www.cato.org/commentary/el-salvadors-road-currency-chaos-economic-collapse https://www.cato.org/commentary/el-salvadors-road-currency-c... https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-el-salvador-with-no-easy-exit-worsening-crisis-2022-05-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/crypto-crash-leaves-e... President Bukele’s government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, following a spike in homicides allegedly committed by gangs, which has since been extended twice....Despite a drop in the homicide rate in recent years, El Salvador continues to be one of the most violent countries in the world....The government's financial problems are not because of bitcoin, but they have gotten worse because of bitcoin. QED
    - rscnt 4y ago
      The president doesn't care about the issues that concern his position. There was an intiative by the treasury to try and have people use a single document to deal with taxes, where we previously used two, this is something important for most people, the guy hasn't even mentioned on his social networks. They also build a public vet that was supposedly financed with the earnings of BTC - when the price dropped the president mentioned that he hasn't sold any meaning all the money spent to promoto chivo or crypto has come from our tax dollars.
- fortzi 4y ago
  BTC is an official currency in San Salvador, which is arguably indeed a failed state. I’d argue, though, that it’s just another symptom of the reasons which made it a failed state in the first place (populism, corruption, etc.)
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    I largely agree, I mean the president that got it through last year also violated their constitution to get another term and was upheld by his own puppet court... But BTC hasn't helped at all. It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds. While all this goes down the president is still making noise about a "Bitcoin city". A very "meta" commentary on cryto I feel.
    - el-salvador 4y ago
      >It's not even _the_ official currency, just one alongside USD, and yet it's already accelerated the country towards defaulting on their bonds. And its day to day usage is very low. There was a spike in use after $30 sign up bonus and during the 2021 bitcoin conference and following months which attracted tourism from bitcoiners though.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    San Salvador is a different country from El Salvador, just for the record.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      San Salvador is not a country - it’s a city. The capital of El Salvador.
      - el-salvador 4y ago
        Yup! That's correct. I would say that being able to differentiate between El Salvador, Salvador and San Salvador is a shibboleth for those familiar with El Salvador. They are easy to confuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
- MichaelBurge 4y ago
  > If you know that by holding a dollar today, you can get 2 dollars worth of goods tomorrow, why are you going to spend a dollar? Does that mean if you can find a non-defaulting bond that pays higher interest than inflation, the US dollar will completely collapse? Because why would anyone spend $1 when they could get $2 of goods in N years...
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    First off, if the 5 year treasury rate ever approaches 1000%, I assure you the Fed will collapse. Second, problems with hyperdeflation and hyperinflation are both rooted in the hyper. If you can buy a pizza today, or have $10 million dollars in a few years, why buy a pizza? Third, the issue isn't just deflation, it's specifically deflation of a currency. If you invest $100 in a company, there's a chance it will be $1000 next year. But your $100 will circulate in the meantime and generate value. Now if instead there was just as good a chance you could put $100 under your mattress, and next year it'd magically have become $1000 despite never having left your grasp... why would anyone ever invest again? You get to keep your money and have it increase in value, there's no incentive to invest or spend any more than you absolutely have to. But then as people spend less and less, there's less and less economic activity being generated. You stop wanting to pay people so jobs disappear. Eventually you end up in a game of chicken where everyone is scared to spend money. A BTC based country (fully BTC based, not El Salvador's lip service) would be an utter hellscape devoid of any economic output other than people waiting for their currency to appreciate. Not unlike the real thing...
swatcoder 4y ago
> and it just took one crypto crash I'm mostly crypto-skeptic, and appreciate your insights, but this part is to be expected with any market: when the value of something is up, certain business models become profitable and start manifesting. When the value goes down, they stop being profitable and those models vanish (or become sustained externally). It's easy to see in high profile markets like resource extraction, real estate, venture capital availability, etc So of course the business model of "use crypto as a currency" will vanish/diminish when the currency value of a coin is substantially down.
mojomark 4y ago
> That is a complete failure and it just took one crypto crash. Disclosure: I hold virtually no crypto (a few thousand XRP) As I watch this show from the sidelines, I wonder if the latest crash (and no doubt future crashes) isn't exactly the force needed to distribute crypto more widely into more hands, normalizing to some roughly steady state value. After several swings of the pendulum, you end up at some more or less stable value with many more users, making actual marketetplace purchases with crypto more ubiquitous. I guess time will tell, eh?
- clpm4j 4y ago
  Who does the distribution? The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. The people who hold most of the BTC, ETH, SOL, and whatever other major coins were already rich before they got into it. Maybe single digit thousands of people went from non-rich to rich through buying and holding crypto, but that's a tiny fraction.
  - rglover 4y ago
    > The vast majority of people in the world can't afford to buy crypto. You can buy fractions of it, meaning the affordability is relative to the individual and what they can spend.
    - clpm4j 4y ago
      That just means poor people are dividing their already limited resources to buy a fraction of something that they can't use to pay for rent, food, and clothing. If you can only afford to buy a fraction of something, then you can't afford it.
      - rglover 4y ago
        That's rapidly changing. Considering that Bitcoin has the potential to help more than it hurts (developing countries don't have to plan growth at the barrel of a Western gun), there's an incentive to start moving in the direction of making it a standard. See Central African Republic and El Salvador. Countries are waking up to the mafia operation that is the IMF and its favorite weapon, the dollar. Because it's still early in the adoption cycle, critics will continue to be "correct" until one day they wake up and find they've been left behind.
eknkc 4y ago
Why would anyone want to buy food with crypto anyway? Can’t understand that. It is not faster. It is not cheaper to transfer. It is not even as anonymous as cash I’d say. I can see why would someone buy stuff online using crypto but this does not make much sense.
- dhosek 4y ago
  But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions. It was based on a lot of ignorance about how money actually works, but that was the claim way back when. I had a manager back in 2007–8 whose wife had a bakery that accepted Bitcoin as payment and he was a big crypto advocate. I could tell back then that all the claims made no sense. What amazes me is that crypto still hasn’t gone to zero a decade and a half later. Although as John Maynard Keynes said: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
  - cypress66 4y ago
    > But that was the original promise of crypto currency, that it would replace cash and checks and credit cards for all transactions. Some fanatics may have claimed that. But the bitcoin whitepaper itself says that traditional payments are good enough for most cases (and then enumerates cases where it's not, such as if you want non reversible transactions).
    - quantified 4y ago
      Some fanatics have pushed their views far though. They get the reporters who need a story and write things that get clicks. Fanatics are major proselytizers for any movement.
- nikanj 4y ago
  If you got cryptos from selling contraband, and would rather not pay taxes/leave a paper trail from converting to fiat
  - 4y ago

walrus01 4y ago

How many really tiny violins can I buy with one apecoin?

kobalsky 4y ago
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Fewer than you could last week.

choward 4y ago

> Perhaps that was what Nguyen was thinking when he spent more than $330,000 on the various ape NFTs on display at his restaurant. Wow. I can't imagine what anyone is thinking when they pay that much to brag about some random blockchain that says they own an arbitrary URL that may or may not link to an image.

foogazi 4y ago
Reminds me of that service that would let you “name” a star
raylad 4y ago
That actually doesn't apply to Bored Apes. With those NFTs you get copyright ownership of the image.
- pueblito 4y ago
  No, with copyright law you get ownership, the nft is just a public receipt
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    The copyright holder is free to write up a license that says the current holder of the NFT may use it as if they hold the copyright, though. Many NFTs don’t, but it’s possible.
    - knorker 4y ago
      But nothing guarantees that the seller of the NFT, the current holder of the NFT, is also the current copyright holder. It's basically completely disconnected, so while the transfers may traditionally be done at the same time between the same entities, that's not a contract. The NFT just gives you a Blockchain url. If you didn't sign anything else then you got nothing else.

NoGravitas 4y ago

I wonder if you can right click on the burgers and get them for free.

koolba 4y ago
No they probably disable right click to prevent hackers. You have to be a true l337 to replace the onclick handler first.

yieldcrv 4y ago

These merchant adoption and abandonment stories are always implementation issues with no inspiration or education. A) Point of Sale systems have handled this "volatility" issue for an entire decade. Use an implementation that shields the merchant from volatility. They usually liquidate for you. B) Why would you list the prices in ApeCoin or Ethereum? Just show dollars and accept whatever, because A) handles whatever proportion you want to keep in dollars or some other crypto. C) If nobody wants to use that payment method, who cares its free. How often are you getting UnionPay customers, going to make an article about that too?

roywiggins 4y ago
If a crypto-themed restaurant doesn't think it's worth it, I can't see how anyone else would either. Like, this is their whole brand!
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  This crypto-themed restaurant didn't research a single thing, I wouldn't use it as validation or invalidation
ceejayoz 4y ago
If a crypto-themed restaurant can’t get it right, what hope do the rest have?
burnished 4y ago
re: C, it was also a restaurant review and a pretty ringing endorsement. When I got to the end all I could think was "weird yelp review". I really enjoyed it.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Yeah honestly I might hop down to Long Beach for this theme and burger, not my favorite part of LA

rejor121 4y ago

Nobody could see this coming! Lol Seriously, crypto has yet to solve any real world problems I’ve faced. And NFTs are just the worst. Money laundering schemes at best. If I can’t buy an apple easily with crypto, it’s useless.

nikanj 4y ago
Fully anonymous global ransomware would be really hard without cryptos. Monetizing hacked boxes would be much tougher if you could not turn them into Monero miners.
- doopy1 4y ago
  It's not fully anonymous even WITH crypto. They have call centers. Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom.
  - giaour 4y ago
    > Banning crypto won't make ransomware go away, it will just increase the cost of ransom. That must be why ransomware demands were so much higher in the pre-bitcoin era. Unless you're including the cost of sending a cargo jet full of cash or gold halfway around the world?
    - doopy1 4y ago
      Before bitcoin was still the early days of ransomware. It existed mostly as tech support scams. Now that the floodgates have been opened ransoms will go back to being high-risk western union payments and will be much higher. You can't put the cat back in the bag.
      - giaour 4y ago
        This is laughably naive. Western Union payments are high-risk for the ransomer, since they have to go pick the money up. Also, Western Union has pretty low limits on how much you can send ($10K for US->US transfers, less for international transfers). Getting a million dollars (a low ransom in today's ecosystem) via Western Union would require at least 100 pickups, each of which comes with a risk of getting arrested. There is a reason ransom amounts skyrocketed when cryptocurrency entered the picture, and no, it's not because it was "the early days" pre-bitcoin.

gkoberger 4y ago

I dislike crypto, especially NFTs. But here's my best attempt at understanding. BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought. It's not just a picture of the ape on OpenSean; you can use it. There's something really fascinating about this. It's one character, but it's also broadly part of the larger ecosystem. We're so used to, say, Disney owning IP. But what if you could spend $300k and have a restaurant themed like Mickey Mouse? And you're not a cheap knockoff... you're expanding on the lore and the You could have a community of built in people or, like the guy in the article, maybe they just thought the vibe was cute and didn't know what BAYC was even. I think it's really interesting that people are building and creating and expanding this universe. Imagine something like Pokémon, where everyone was able to create and consume games/content/etc. Here in HN, the sentiment tends to be against Disney-style copyrights. The crypto community is playing with what community and intellectual property actually could mean.

remram 4y ago
You can mostly use any and every one of them for a lot of purposes under fair use. I have seen a lot of Apes around the net, way more than I would have liked. You can't make, say, a cartoon featuring one of them, but would you want to do that?
- pornel 4y ago
  The apes were algorithmically-generated, and copyright applies only to human work, not program outputs (so that you can't run a program that generates all possible images and claim you own then all), so the kitsch apes are probably free to use for everyone anyway.
Avshalom 4y ago
among a lot of other things: > It's one character no, it's one picture. some one else might own the rights to functionally the same character but with a smile instead of a frown or even just a different background color.
crooked-v 4y ago
> BAYC transfers ownership of IP. Does it, though? > Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Bored Ape leaves the website/application. That's not IP ownership, just a conditional license, despite their talk of "owning" and "purchasing".

labrador 4y ago

Crypto, web3 and NFTs are social movements. They are the crowd that knows things. As the hippies used to say about LSD and counterculture, "You're either on the bus, or off the bus." Crypto, web3 and NFTs are spiritual tech that is throwing off the shackles of corporate control and making a new society. It's an identity. It's a brand. It's a community. If I was in my 30's I'd probably be into it. I would know damn well there was a lot of hype, but so what, it's fun and maybe something amazing will come out of it. Meantime, it's a party, and we can all take turns at the mic making deep pronouncements about how we're empowering the forgotten poor of the world. What's not to like? Who cares if we lose money. It's the price of entry to the party. Edit: This isn't what I believe. This is me trying to see it through the eyes of a young enthusiast

heyitsguay 4y ago
Yeah but the hippie movement was about realizing the untapped potential for social freedoms locked away behind a repressive and outdated society. (Before it burned out and dissipated) Crypto is about shallowly co-opting the patterns of discourse of genuine social movements to try and get rich quickly.
- labrador 4y ago
  I agree with you. I was just trying to see it through the eyes of a young enthusiast
soared 4y ago
Yeah, it’s koolaid flavored like money with an anti establishment label on it.
threeseed 4y ago
> throwing off the shackles of corporate control The entire crypto industry is built on the back of VC money. And I fail to see how Opensea is not the epitome of corporate control when it has ~80% market share in the NFT marketplace space.

jboggan 4y ago

Reminds me of a time that I played a Bitcoin poker game at some Google VP's place up in the hills with Charlie Lee and a few other early crypto luminaries in 2014. It took us over an hour to figure out sending BTC to the "buy-in" pot because most of us had 2FA enabled on our Coinbase accounts and the cell reception was so bad at that we couldn't get our confirmation texts. We ended up writing IOUs on a sheet of paper. I thought, "if the people in the vanguard of this movement can't figure this out, maybe it isn't all that it's cracked up to be".

elif 4y ago
the first man to ever build and sell a car, recounting his critics in the transportation industry: “There’s nothing the matter with me. It’s you! You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.”
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Do you have a citation for that?
- 3a2d29 4y ago
  Ahh the classic “people were wrong once about a technology, therefore all potential technologies are good.” So if I found a quote about someone saying nuclear energy would power cars…would that disprove crypto? I guess so
- outworlder 4y ago
  The contraption actually had some utility.
bhtru 4y ago
That's more on simply poor cell service if anything at all though no? The tech even then seemingly worked for you then. Your anecdotal is comparable to saying students at a college not being able to add one another on Facebook in it's early days, because the campus Wi-Fi was on the fritz.

jansan 4y ago

You need to try harder to find the greater fool.

wnevets 4y ago

Like the old saying goes if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, you’re it

m3kw9 4y ago

The “am I a joke to you?” Meme can commence on ape owners?

branon 4y ago

https://archive.ph/gHyY7 https://archive.ph/gHyY7

spullara 4y ago

Coupa Cafe was early on this trend. They got 2 BTC in a month for about $200 worth of coffee: https://99bitcoins.com/coupa-cafe-sells-coffee-to-the-silicon-valley-pros-in-exchange-for-bitcoins/ https://99bitcoins.com/coupa-cafe-sells-coffee-to-the-silico...

krapp 4y ago

But I have a bottle of vintage slurp juice on reserve! I can't pay for it now, all I have is real money.

phabricator 4y ago

What are the numbers here? This was intended as a 90-day pop-up, and they reported there were few crypto transactions even before the crash. ApeCoin already wasn't a huge part of this. The entrepreneur plans another restaurant and is already selling NFTs for it. Their involvement with Yuga Labs was minimal. Bun B paid for the burgers. Is it possible the entrepreneur still turned a healthy profit? Or that was killed in the crash?

annoyingnoob 4y ago

If Nguyen really believes in ETH and APE wouldn't he want to pull in more of it when its down? Obviously he needs cash flow to run the business but most are not paying with crypto. I'm reading this as Nguyen lost faith in crypto.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

One thing maybe missing from the many good comments here is a separation of digital currencies from crypto coins. We would do well to start separating the mechanism that stores value from the mechanism of exchange. That's why I think something like GNU Taler backed by ordinary dollars is a much better way for selling burgers and pizza in any foreseeable time-frame.

mproud 4y ago

I feel like this article is trying to blow up a story that isn’t particularly intriguing.

kishore032 4y ago

How long will a BTC retail transaction take for this to a viable payment method?