Kik Messenger App Debuts Own Digital Currency Amid Bitcoin Boom | Hacker News Reader

Kik Messenger App Debuts Own Digital Currency Amid Bitcoin Boom

bloomberg.com

127 pointsrayuela117 comments

Am I the only person who finds this kind of depressing and scary? I thought cryptocurrencies were supposed to be about democratization and decentralization. Now if you want to make money on Kik, you apparently are going to get paid in Kin, a currency Kik controls for which there is no standard conversion to USD. How is this different than getting paid in Walmart Dollars.

It's good for Kik.. You are free to make your own messenger app so you can create your own cryptocurrency!

This concept has always existed, and you can compare it to e.g. steam credits. People found ways in the past to trade "virtual money" for real money, and this will be no different. The fact that it's a cryptocurrency adds a layer of transparency on top of it, and it looks like they're using it as an excuse to add additional value to their coin.

In reality, though, market forces will probably figure this out, and if it's not practical to trade for "real" money, it will not be worth much to app developers.

Let's not forget the enormous in-built demand for fiat currencies via taxation.

> Let's not forget the enormous in-built demand for fiat currencies via taxation.

I understand that the whole libertarian-hipster-goldbug thing is in vogue right now, but what does this even mean?

>> Let's not forget the enormous in-built demand for fiat currencies via taxation. > I understand that the whole libertarian-hipster-goldbug thing is in vogue right now, but what does this even mean?

If an in-built currency for fiat taxation is on the cover of Vogue (psst, it's Bloomberg), then what does this even mean?

It's like an in-game currency for a MMORPG.

...at least that is how I read it.

They use Tokens on top of the Ethereum Blockchain which is decentralized just as Bitcoin is.

There's a lot of things wrong with this statement. For starters, Ethereum's development is controlled by a single entity. Even if Ethereum was decentralized, you can still program whatever tokens you want on top of Ethereum. In this case Kik chose to program a token attached to a token-printing machine that they control. They also designed user-to-user transactions within the Kik economy such that you first have to deposit your money at Kik before you can send it to another user. This means that Kik is at liberty to freely confiscate money deposited to them or censor transactions within the Kik ecosystem. This is a centralized virtual currency by a private corporation, made on top of Ethereum for marketing reasons.

This is democracy and decentralization -- allowing private entities to issue their own currencies. It is much better than the single monopoly of the government-issued money.

There are many reasons why a single currency may be preferable to many in a single market. The biggest is company scrip[0] but there are others, like the fact that this just creates more market speculation and that vendors have the option to not accept any currency they aren't required to by law.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Company scrip is a problem because the tokens are usually artificially priced by the issuer above their market value. If Walmart tokens in Mexico were traded freely, they would have had non-zero value (the ability to buy something at Walmart is better than nothing), but less than their face value. The same thing happened with government money many times, so there's nothing new here.

Having a law to always accept some currency in some jurisdiction is convenient, but non-essential (given the availability of exchanges and overall liquidity).

At least in the United States, a vendor isn't required to accept U.S. dollars for sales. Only to settle debts. If you have a shop, you are free to only sell your wares for loonies. If you're a restaurant, however, and collect payment after the meal, i.e. after issuing credit, then you must accept legal tender.

That's really interesting and makes sense. However, given how common credit is, the fact that you must accept USD as payment in the US means that USD circulation is going to be really high, and therefore vendors that don't accept it for sales are going to be demolished by others that do. As opposed to BTC, where if you don't accept it, so what? and if you do, you're at least a little unusual.

> allowing private entities to issue their own currencies. It is much better than the single monopoly of the government-issued money.

Please elaborate on this.

Why is it better for the people to have dozens of currencies that they can only use for a very limited selection of stores and have to trade for other uses?

The only incentive for "private currencies", that I heard of, is to confuse customers and make them forget that they are, in fact, using real money and not only digital tokens.

There is an entire classical book on it, available for free:

https://mises.org/library/denationalisation-money-argument-r...

I downvoted this comment because I don't think telling someone to go read an entire book effectively contributes to the discussion. Could you summarize the main points/arguments?

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

> According to Hayek, instead of a national government issuing a specific currency, use of which is imposed on all members of its economy by force in the form of legal tender laws, private businesses should be allowed to issue their own forms of money, deciding how to do so on their own.

> In 1978 Hayek published a revised and enlarged edition entitled Denationalization of Money: The Argument Refined, where he speculated that rather than entertaining an unmanageable number of currencies, markets would converge on one or only a limited number of monetary standards, on which institutions would base the issue of their notes.[2]

> Why is it better for the people to have dozens of currencies that they can only use for a very limited selection of stores and have to trade for other uses?

It isn't necessarily better to have dozens of different currencies, but it is better to have the ability to issue your own currencies rather than be dependent upon a single monopoly which may (and does) abuse its power.

Second thing is, there is no real way to determine how many currencies/tokens are consumers ok with, other than to really try it out in the market. Let me use an example.

Today if you have Amazon prime TV, then they have a whole section subscriptions for channels where you can subscribe to Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, CBS, Showtime, Scifi, History Channel etc, services. Initially it started out with just Prime, Netflix, and Hulu, but now there are so many options, you can't just watch Homeland if you have these three subscriptions. The problem isn't just that you need to pay more, but rather that you have to subscribe to so many services.

This is too confusing, but this also means that this is a problem to be solved. In future (and I think some company has already started) to build a package subscription. Maybe another solution would be to have every show a pay-per-view basis (which Amazon already does).

The idea is, that the reason why different subscription services exists because of some other, unavoidable business reason. But this can be solved from the user experience point of view differently without resorting to a govt monopoly on entertainment.

Same thing goes with these cryptocurrencies. They exist for different, unavoidable business reason, but it is also annoying to have to deal with different currencies, so I believe in future there will be more basket of currencies solution (like ICONOMI) which allows people to hold 2-3 cryptos at max, and from their POV, the conversion and payment to the native currency happens seamlessly.

The problem is volatility. If the amount of people that are speculating >>>> than people willing to sell other things to buy "your coin" in a bad market. You could collapse the currency.

But that's the whole point. We have solved this problem for over 2000 years now using financial derivatives.

A farmer in ancient Rome did not want to undertake the volatility of grain prices when his crop eventually comes to the market, so what he did is sells his future crop to a fixed current price to someone who wants to undertake the risk of price fluctuations, and this way a speculator got the profit which came out of correctly predicting the future grain prices and farmer got a fixed predictable price.

Same goes with these currencies. A speculator might provide enough liquidity to your crypto, in return he gets a better deal for your coins.

Volatility is not as important when you have real-time exchanges. You can choose to instantly convert any currency to any other currency of your choice - you can choose your volatility tolerance . In the past, that was an ardous, fee-laden process. Now it is becoming more free & seamless due digital tokens. ERC20 should continue making it easier.

"You obviously don't know enough about Bitcoin to argue the way you did." -- foepys

Bitcoin has nothing to do with this. This is solely about national economy.

But I'm not surprised that a cryptocurrency account doesn't understand that. The cryptosphere is so deep in their "crypto is the future" mindset that they lash out on everything they deem negative towards cryptocurrencies.

Even if this had something to do with Bitcoin, I'm not surprised that you don't try to bring any arguments. Every time someone says something critical about the fundamentals, you guys stick your finger into your ears and sing "lalalala I can't hear you".

Listen to yourself dude. Troll. Go to reddit

Pretty sure money ends up becoming a monopoly/oligopoly. The more people you can trade with the better. Also, the more people that use it lower transaction fees. Why use something with higher transaction fees. Convenience it's on your phone.

But if I can't transfer my money out, how is that any better?

If I don't like how the US government does things, I can move to another country that will have me, and I can convert all of my dollars to that country's currency.

With this, it doesn't appear as if I can take that money out of the system. So that's at least a huge step backwards from what we've got now.

You're misunderstanding Kin. Kin is not "controlled by Kik" it is an asset that will be exchangeable in and out of the Kik ecosystem. Furthermore, Kin balances will be kept on a public ledger and any other company could build extensions and uses of the currency.

It would be as if your Walmart dollars actually had an exchange for other currency. I would see this as a good thing. Then the poor worker who is being paid in Walmart dollars can know exactly how much they're being paid.

Without reading the whitepaper (so I don't know the rules of the currency), if they are able to issue/withdraw coins as they wish, I doubt it will become a trusted coin. So people won't be willing to pay too much for it, nor will they want to build apps with it as a base currency....at least I won't

The currency is based on Ethereum, so it's doubtful they'd be able to modify the supply of coins at will.

You can program any token you want on top of Ethereum. In this case they did indeed program a token with a money-printing machine that they control.

Kik is holding onto the majority of said asset, which has no demand - so no real value. They're hoping to create demand and so there is is value - because demand seems to dictate the cost. That will make the portion they are holding have value - that will give them buying power that they wouldn't otherwise have, I'm not sure that is fair or a good thing.

Its a validation and transition in the right direction. That said - I much prefer https://status.im/ -- focus on decentralization and which will be community governed.

At what point does a premium virtual asset become a "currency"

For example, if Clash of Clans has gems that you purchase to purchase items and such inside the application, is that a currency?

'...sells tokens that can be used to buy services on its platform. The idea is that as more and more people use Kik, the value of those tokens, called “Kin”, will rise in value.'

But how is this different than buying premium currency in a free to play game? The "Kin" can only be used inside Kik, how does the value increase?

IANAL but I imagine their are legal boundaries that come in place the second they become transferable, the second they cross international borders, etc. Personally I would argue the first time they are used to buy drugs has a cultural significance. I wonder where bitcoin would be without the Silkroad.

That was exactly my thought process. A cryptocurrency only has value if it's seen as valuable in multiple contexts. There's no indication why value would increase externally of Kik for Kin.

At this stage ICOs which have a sufficient hype factor have an upward ramp in trading after launch, which attracts a lot of unsophisticated libertarian investors ("suckers"). Kik seem to have decided to get in on this action, as it's sufficiently distinct from plain Ponzi to appear legal.

Respectfully, I think you and others in this thread defining "Kin" too narrowly by thinking of it exclusively a premium virtual token for use inside of Kik.

Yes, that's obviously the first use-case. But thinking bigger, the combination of anonymous identity / mobile messaging + bona fide cryptocurrency can lead to something way more significant for Kik's users (who are primarily teenagers & pre-teens - people don't have access to credit and find it difficult to participate in the economy).

Assuming some level of mass adoption / easy FX to Bitcoin or traditional currency... Kin could represent a new way in which these users could meaningfully participate economically.

Kin will be tied to their anonymous Kik identity; it's managed through Kik which is always-on always-with-them (smartphone); it's the lingua franca for buying stuff inside of Kik with their friends & fav brands. And if they can eventually use Kin outside of Kik (either directly or via simple FX mechanics) - could be a game-changer.

So from Kik's POV it's definitely worth the extra headaches and effort to try to do this as a cryptocurrency vs. just internal tokens. Worst case, it doesn't really work and they've over-engineered a token system. Best case, they're a major player in the next-gen of cryptocurrencies.

Note: I just came across this: http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/

Much better detail on the what's / how's / why's. Including link to the whitepaper.

This makes much more sense. I thought it was just currency that needed to be exchanged from real USD. You can earn it as a reward. It just might be a game-changer.

"The Kin Rewards Engine is an innovative cryptoeconomic structure intended to promote the use of Kin as a common currency. Through the Kin Rewards Engine, Kin will be introduced into circulation as a daily reward,"

Grow the economic volume every day... Sounds like UBI

Neither you nor the white paper explain why it would lead to mass adoption by players unaffiliated with Kik- it's the biggest assumption here and why its looking like an over-engineered in-app currency. Moreover, Kin as a reward given out by an algorithm... that's controlled by the Kin org? Centralization much?

Can you expand on how it can be used outside of Kik? It seems to me that's the critical step for this to be anything other than "sticker buying" currency.

There's a similar phenomenon going on in World of Warcraft. Activision/Blizzard allows you to buy with real currency a token equal to a month of subscription playing time that you can then sell on that virtual auction house. Someone in the game then exchanges their in-game currency (gold) for the token, freeing themselves from having to use real money. And the purchaser of the token now has in-game currency. Essentially, time has transferred from one person to anothet--the auction house buyer spent their time to collect the gold, which the original token purchaser traded real life money for. "Time is money, friend."

This is also exactly how EvE Online has worked with PLEX for years now.

> At what point does a premium virtual asset become a "currency"

When you can convert it to other currencies i suppose? Apparently thats not the case here, oddly.

Then it's not a (good) currency. Convertibility is an important requirement. Otherwise you don't really have the means to determine its value, and you can't trade it for anything outside. Essentially it would just be circus pizza tokens.

my understanding is Kin is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network, which would mean they are all convertible. Facilitated by crypto exchanges offering trading pairs. Coinbase just published a good article on Ethereum tokens and seems like they will soon offer them

https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-ethereum-toke...

Yep, it's an ERC20 on Ethereum: http://www.coindesk.com/icos-going-mainstream-chat-app-kik-l...

There are several emerging projects for exchanging ERC20 tokens via smart contracts on chain.

Most premium game currencies are untradable between users.

For the few that are, then the difference would be the ability to trade the currency for real world goods or services. Most games explicitly disallow trading in-game currency for real world goods/services where Kik's currency would not just be allowed but encouraged.

Kik is launching their own digital currency as a token on the Ethereum network. Multiple tokens run on top of Ethereum. One of these tokens is called ETH. It's Ethereum's native and most widely accepted token. Why is Kik launching their own token instead of using ETH? Typically the answer to this question is about creating additional features that the native token ETH doesn't have (Ethereum tokens can be programmed to follow arbitrary rules). No, Kik's token will not have any additional features. The sole reason they are creating their own token instead of using ETH is to have a money printing machine that they control. It's in their white paper after several pages about decentralization and fairness. Search for "Kin Rewards Engine".

ETH is not a token that runs ontop the network, it is the asset that powers the network.

ETH is a token just as Kik's Kin will be a token. You are correct that it is built into Ethereum, rather than on top of Ethereum. I tried to make that distinction by calling it "native".

I have nothing good to say about Kik. I just want to remind anyone who is thinking about giving them money that they are the same litigious assholes who forced node and npm to give them (and not just deactivate) the namespace kik.

They are obviously shitty people and everything they touch is shit.

IIRC, it was npm (not node) that rolled over and gave it to kik just because they felt like it would be "confusing."

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm

https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...

This ^

Arguably one of the best things to come out of that whole incident was NPM's realization that the (then) entire system of dependencies had a huge issue; that is, the fact that one pissed of developer could break a massive amount of production codebases.

IMHO the incident was a good learning experience for the JS community as a whole and really shouldn't be framed so negatively all the time.

I think a lot of it was much ado over nothing, but I agree that if you didn't already mistrust tiny, anemic modules written by single developers in your production code that it was a good lesson.

Exactly :)

A lot of larger companies affected needed a wake up call regardless.

The issue to me isn't the deletion of modules but rather the reassignment of modules. I'm completely ok with deleting modules. I am not ok with taking a name that used to exist and just giving it to someone else. That is the crime here not the deletion of modules. That should be the wake up call.

> They are obviously shitty people and everything they touch is shit.

Thoughtful and a high quality statement, the world is black and white and most issues have no grey areas at all

(/s)

> They are obviously shitty people and everything they touch is shit.

I think this is considered praise nowadays. As long as money flows, all rest is secondary..

(Btw, I have no notion of the back story, I just found your phrasing amusing).

There is a reason why you shouldn't adopt the e-mail address or phone number your cable company _could_provide to you: it ties you closer to their network and increases your dependence on it. I doubt that Kik's "core competencies" are anywhere near what it would take to launch and maintain a digital currency.

So, don't call it a digital currency and call it for what it really is, a "customer loyalty" program where hard money and attention is traded for scrip that never... ever... leaves the "company store."

Why does Kik need a decentralized cryptocurrency to handle payments for digital goods? They can do it with virtual credits on their own servers a million times more efficiently.

Because they can have an ICO for their coin and basically have other people fund the development + probably make money on the side.

It's a change of business model. Instead of ads they're making a bet on cryptocurrency as a way to profit.

Sort of, but not really. The whole kik points system model is to allow you to earn stuff for watching ads.

Yes, but the difference is, with the currency approach they are trying to raise their value through the coin price. They may employ ads and other "tactics" to make money in the process, but that's fundamentally different from previous approaches where you just give away everything for free and hope to get enough eyeballs to monetize via ads. And ad driven businesses are going through difficult times, and probably not the future of the Internet.

They gotta start from somewhere, and the only business model that's familiar enough is the model you mentioned, and that's why they start out this way. It can succeed or it can fail, but if it succeeds they will probably branch out to other ways of making money outside of ads.

Because doing it as a decentralized cryptocurrency would allow it to one day be more significant than just an internal token systems. There is power in the combination of anonymous identity / messaging + bona fide cryptocurrency.

But, and this is the important thing, how does that help kik make more money?

By owning 90% of a digital ecosystem

There are very rarely technical justifications for creating a new cryptocurrency. For starters, even if you need a token for technical reasons, you can always use a proof-of-burn token creation mechanism, and that proof-of-burn mechanism can enable two-way-trading(1) to ensure the coin doesn't become a separate asset.

Another major problem is that we frequently see perfectly good ideas whose technical architectures are wrecked by the need to add an inefficient and unscalable consensus system to support a new cryptocurrency. For example, the original Ripple concept is a really good one, proven by the success of the analog equivalent, Hawala. Ripple could have continued on that basis - found investors for the standard open-source business model - and made a potentially useful system that at minimum would have represented good accounting software for banks (international banking is not unlike a very large scale, regulated, Hawala).

Instead they decided to raise money via a token, XRP, and because of that token they needed to add a global consensus blockchain. The result was a system that had all the scalability problems of Bitcoin, and since they didn't use proof-of-work, an ill-defined consensus model that's secured in practice by a handful of private keys, all Ripple-controlled servers(2). If we're going to go down that route, why not just do it properly and have an actual legal contract with the people in charge? And with that legal contract, why do we need XRP? Why not just pay for the service with an existing currency?

Frankly, I think most of these ICO's are transparent attempts to raise money while avoiding securities regulations. I'm sufficiently libertarian to have a mostly "buyer beware" attitude to that, but I sure as heck wouldn't want to be closely involved with one - very high risk the SEC will put a lot of people in jail over this, and the ethics of many of these schemes are very dubious.

1) https://petertodd.org/2014/setting-the-record-proof-of-publi... (read that URL link as 'Myth: Proof-of-publication needs “scamcoins” like Mastercoin and Counterparty'

2) https://github.com/petertodd/ripple-consensus-analysis-paper... Written by me under contract for R3CEV (they were considering buying Ripple apparently, and I was doing due diligence for them and their members).

For VCs.

It's trendy. I don't see any reason why a chat app like Kik should make a crypto currency, other than "it's trendy and hip".

This is all starting to feel awfully similar to the time shortly before the last major bitcoin crash.

I've had 2 people who know absolutely nothing about technology tell me of their plans to take out 401k loans to buy in over the past couple weeks. Both refused to hear it when I pointed out how bad this decision could turn out. Both had fully bought in to the stories being pushed by "$100k by the end of the year!" type crazies/pumpers on reddit.

Are any of the cryptocurrencies out there with a "monetary policy" aim of fised exchange rates, IE a digital derivative of USD or EUR? I know this is sort of heretical in that it abandons some of the lofty, revolutionary goals of digital currency but...

Currencies like e-pesa or the simpler share-able phone credit pseudo-currencies, give their users stable values. It's hard to imagine a neigborhood shop in Manilla dealing with bitcoin's volatility.

I think you need either (1) very fast, cheap & easy ways of converting to hard currency or (2) price stability.

I was hoping that bitcoin would develop the first. That way bitcoin could work as a sort of infrastructure, with most people thinking in fiat currencies but the actual transaction taking place in bitcoin. That hasn't really happened.

^Oh, and I generally like the idea of bootstrapping up to full fledged currency from an embedded, toy currency base. Good luck Kik.

Tether is a cryptocurrency that attempts to have a fixed exchange rate with the USD. It does this fairly okay-ish. There were a few moments when its price dropped well below $1 because of insolvency fears but it seems to have rebounded.

Below is the whitepaper:

https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/Whitepapers/Tether-White-Pap...

ok, so you mint coins proportional to increases in price in order to match your target price.. you distribute those coins equally among all coin holder proportional to their holdings.

assuming you can mint coins continuously, you are able to keep the price fixed... Until the elephants (biggest holders) realize that they can buy at $1.01 to ensure they keep getting minting payouts which eclipse the $0.01 premium they are paying to float the market.

It's a runaway feedback loop for them until... the the price drops below $1.00. What is the mechanism to deflate the currency? a greek style haircut seizure? welcome to a flash crash as all rational parties move their value to other currencies...

so to prevent the former feedback loop, you can impose a sufficient transaction fee. to prevent the latter feedback loop you can implement bank-style currency controls, a technical limit on withdrawal rates..

so you end up with a currency which is subject to the exact same (perpetual inflation) negative performance of its fiat counterpart, but with higher fees and stricter controls in place... So it's got the worst of both worlds

a group called "MakerDao" is working on a token on Ethereum called Dai, which is backed by collateral in the form of a variety of different tokens, and is set up so that the price will target some multiple of something called "Special Drawing Rights", which is a basket of national currencies.

I think eDollar is (was?) going to be (is?) something backed with Dai, which would target the value of USD . (I have not kept up with it, so I don't know what the state of eDollar is.)

There is also Digix which plans to issue Gold backed tokens. https://www.dgx.io/

I'd guess they probably kept a few thousands or million coins for themselves. This way if this takes off, they'll have millions of dollars worth of coin to trade for real money.

Or else they'll act as an exchange, which seems to be a good business too, as long as you have enough capital to get it going.

s/trade against/trade for/

edited, thanks

Someone should work through the mechanics of doing this as a form of IPO, without running afoul of applicable regulations.

The is already happening en masse. Look up "initial coin offerings" (ICO's)[0]

[0] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/initial-coin-offering-ic...

there will be 10 trillion coins and they plan to keep 9 trillion of them. So more like a few thousand million, not thousand OR million :)

For clarification, Kin is a token using the Ethereum blockchain. There is a straight forward tutorial how anyone can create their own currency/rewards program/token.

https://www.ethereum.org/token

Not sure the cryptocurrency boom and gift certificate utility are super-correlated -- Target has been trying to trap me and my USD with those checkout cards for ages. Usually the incentive is social shame for not just giving straight cash to my friends as gifts -- here, I'm not so sure?

I guess it's about as viable as Dogecoin.

You know "ML" throw that word around. I've seen some ehem sites where you get paid a fraction of a cryptocurrency for explicit photos.

I was thinking for training an ML to recognize "acts" in explicit videos, you'd need a lot of data haha... so you'd need a way to pay people for their photos... but also the whole age thing... and why not regular money. But Kik... their own money... I don't know. Easier said than done obviously... I was also thinking about running a bitcoin node, watching transactions and providing an API analyzing sales for "patterns' but not sure... ahh...

I wanted to cry when I bought Amazon gift card to convert my bitcoin to a "safe currency" and a few days later it grows by $700 whyyyy oh well.

HN threads on anything related to Ethereum (not Bitcoin) seem to really stir up a lot of junk and hate comments. So weird.

I'm just a web dev that thinks Ethereum is really cool technology (and have made some great money from ETH), but there are a lot of naysayers here.

Educated guesses when regulators will comment on ICOs, and the impact of that on the crypto market?

Kik releases interesting features about every 6 months, then promptly abandons them. They had a cool 'webapp' feature with a JS library for people to write browser apps that ran and integrated inside of kik. They dropped that and launched the bot store. Before this they had Kik Games, which were dropped for the browser.

Not sure why they do this. They still haven't monetized bots (I'm guessing this is how they will). Games and webapps could be monetized from the start as embedding ads was easy. I don't know what Kik is doing.

Maybe they don't either? Looks like a lot of test pivots?

Not a single ICO has delivered its promised product or service. The only returns have been from new investors or speculation.

I think it's still early to completely write them off as just pump and dumps

Have you ever heard of Ethereum? These Kik tokens run on top of Ethereum which had an ICO a couple years ago.

Define "delivered" please

Here's the whitepaper that actually discusses what they are doing (much better than this article IMO):

https://kin.kik.com/Kin%20Whitepaper%20v1.pdf

Also here's Fred Wilson's write-up (he's an investor in Kik): http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/

The whole 'earn points for this' system seems like a good idea in general, but I wonder how appealing it will be for advertisers to buy coins that wind up having such an unstable price. By the time they make it to the consumer they could be worth half of what you paid for them. I imagine a simpler system would be more practical but the prospect of making tens of millions off of an ICO was just too appealing to pass up.

This system is designed to make advertisement obsolete

Please see https://kin.kik.com for more info, https://reddit.com/r/KinFoundation, and http://slack.kinfoundation.com for discussion.

Why did the submitter add "amid bitcoin boom" to the title here? Or did Bloomberg change it?

Aren't these the guys behind the npm fiasco? Wouldn't use them.

Here's a short video that explains what Kik is doing:

https://vimeo.com/218866968

this is hilarious, Facebook can just launch their own coin if needed if you want to compete with them that way by giving users coins which will give them monetary incentives to use your service, hell Kik is laying the playbook for FB to copy them

Why not just use bitcoin?

Because they want to cash in on the cryptocurrency hype.

10-minute block times make Bitcoin unusable as a transactional currency in it's current state (don't shoot the messenger).

What currency isn't transactional? I'm not following; are you suggesting bitcoin is not well suited for any purpose?

From my understanding, and what I can read from what they said: They're suggesting Bitcoin is not practical for what the current average rate of transactions on other payment networks would require of it, should it even take on a lesser portion of those transactions (eg. X-thousand transactions per second).

It is useful however for a value store. Eg. You can't rightly trade units of gold 50,000 times per second, but it's a good bet that if you buy some and stow it that it will at least hold or even appreciate in value.

Believe it or not, Bitcoin isn't actually transactional these days. A new feature called "replace by fee" was introduced that allows coins that were used in a transaction which is still in queue for processing (hasn't yet been included in block by the miners) to be spent in a different transaction as long as the spender pays a high enough fee to jump to the front of the queue.

I was under the impression that that had always been allowed by the protocol, it's just an implementation detail on if a node will relay the tx and which tx the miner will choose.

Imagine if your visa card took anywhere from 10 minutes with high fees to 30 minutes with "average" fees. It would be fairly annoying to use on an everyday basis.

Bitcoin is failing to scale. Whenever network is jammed, only the the high economic value transaction is sent through it.

If you want to transfer the payment for your home, then it makes sense to use bitcoin, but today most people sell their btc for daily expenses, convert it into a faster crpyto (like Ether or litecoin etc) and use that instead.

Bitcoin maximalists don't want that, but I am quite comfortable with this scenario.

"Jammed" is a inaccurate way of describing the status of the Bitcoin network.

Transactions are included in blocks in an auction system, where people bid for the limited amount of blockchain space available. If your bid is high enough, your transaction is included immediately.

There have always been far more people who want to get transactions mined than there is blockchain space. You can find gigabytes of valid transactions that people have broadcast for various reasons, including deliberate DoS attacks, and extremely low-value applications like inefficient timestamping protocols. Any website that makes claims like the mempool is "100MB" is simply incorrect.

The supply of space fluctuates randomly, as block creation is a poisson process, and demand fluctuates for other reasons. So if you have a lower bit you might get lucky in the future. But that's no different than the prices of any good subject to natural supply and demand fluctuations.

> But that's no different than the prices of any good subject to natural supply and demand fluctuations.

You're just explaining my point in more detail, but not disagreeing with it.

My point was, "Bitcoin can't be used for kik tokens because it has limited space and kik transactions are not justifiable for this purpose (via the high fees)".

Not booming today, dropped 500+

Over a 24 hour period it's down 1.2%

Silly.

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