Kodak shares up as it announces KODAKCoin cryptocurrency
kodak.com
kodak.com
There is no use case that KODAKCoin meets that other cyrptos don't, except that it's owned in house by Kodak. I really hate this trend of companies trying to create their own nonsense currency and then justifying it with "blockchain is great!". If blockchain was the reason you could just transact in almost any currency that isn't bitcoin (because fees). There's no new technology here, it's just Kodak trying to ride the free money wave of cryptocurrency speculation.
Pulling rights fees automatically could be accomplished via smart contracts, and without the mess of 'debt' being involved.
Smart Contracts are never going to be as popular because they are neither very smart or the same as regular contracts - and have more overhead and larger vunerability anyhow.
EDIT: [1] Actually, it's pretty weird that this is even a thing given how interested we (as effectors of "tech") SHOULD be (but aren't) in how all of this has gone before. Granted, blockchains are a relatively recent invention, but just because it's technically doesn't mean that it's actually meaningfully different in effect/politics/etc.
(I'm sure most a'y'all got ma drift, but ya know. 'plogies, m'am)
However I don't think cryptocurrency (at least how it's pitched now) is where it will end up being useful. Bitcoin/etc hype is basically the same as the early 90s hype over the internet - broadly accurate about the possibilities but utterly misapplied and misdirected.
So if Kodak has a standing offer to register stock photos and do rights clearance and licensing forever for X Eastmans, and I have a standing offer to exchange software development services for Y Blammos per day, the computing power that people offer in exchange for Hypotheticoins cranks through an arcane and unspecified algorithm, then spits out a result where I get what I want, and I have to do some work for an ex-dental-hygienist that once worked for my dentist. And I also get some change for it. For doing the job, I not only get the Kodak service, but I also get a medium 2-topping pizza from the nearest Domino's, an oil change and brake inspection from my regular mechanic, and 3 weeks of lawn-mowing from a kid on the next block.
To my knowledge, Bitcoin can't do this, and an assortment of fragmented unitasker coins can't do it without an array of attached service businesses like Coinbase and BitPay.
I'm really keen on a future where cryptocurrency enables a gift-barter economy, where you can make wishes, and grant other people's wishes. The more you grant to others, the more you get in return. I think that's a kind of thing that most people can really support, but it hasn't happened already, because the administrative overhead is a nightmare. With human matchmakers in the loop, you can only reasonably handle big wishes, and so you can't pay people back for helping to grant them. And so the recipients are kids with terminal cancer or rescued animals or something, so the givers get paid with warm fuzzies, or a kind of pay-it-forward IOU that might possibly go all the way around the world and come back. With an automated and distributed system cranking away on it, you can get that jar of homemade pickles for calling up a complete stranger to wish them happy birthday, or get a free beer for reciting one line at the right time in someone's bizarre public performance art. Or maybe you can finally get that pothole filled in front of your house, and all you have to do is reduce 300 MB of traffic survey data to determine the 85th percentile of traffic speeds.
You can't stop everyone from making their own coins. Might as well try to make them all work together.
The harder part, as with regular currencies is convincing people to use it. At least with regular currencies usage is enforced by the state, which guarantees a number of users. Even if confidence in that currency has collapsed, you still have to pay your taxes using it.
XRP: can't find, maybe you can provide it for us?
Solving the blockchain scalability issue by creating more blockchains makes no sense since limited supply is the very feature that makes blockchain unique.
Solving the double spend problem is synonymous with limiting supply (double spending is fine if you’re not trying to limit the supply of something).
Our company made a massive push last year for developers to be "using blockchain technology, now." No real direction as to what exactly needs to be solved with it, just that we need to be seen using it.
This was before several months before the whole Long Island Blockchain fiasco. Apparently, last year, "block chain experts" were meeting with CEOs of major companies and explaining to them that the blockchain is going to change the world and they need to start using the tech, lest they be forgotten.
Low-and-behold, six months later, there's a massive influx of companies announcing blockchain technologies (that don't make any sense). Makes me wish I asked who these "experts" were when I was told about it.
I’m more curious why alternative governance models are not achieving more traction. The corporation as a way of governance is obsolete compared to a DAO.
Oh, "blockchain" is not a proper name or an uncountable noun, btw...
Can we blame them? Their stock is up 125% today [1]. 44 million shares traded on the NYSE on 43 million of these shares outstanding (Kodak has a weird cap structure). Literally every owner of Kodak Common New had the opportunity to cash out, simply on the coattails of management penning a press release. (Including management!)
[1] https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AKODK&ei=2yJVWuiB...
Bullshit is shameful.
The stock market is not about giving companies capital anymore, it's about concentrating funds to the back accounts of the right people.
Explaining this nonsense to a judge is going to be the highlight of my year.
Edit: Oh my god the background is an Adobe stock photo complete with watermark.
Edit2: No, Kodak you don't get to just take the site down. The internet never forgets. https://imgur.com/a/LtI2s
It's the next step beyond the Xerox photocopiers: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_m...
Immutable history is not always a compelling requirement, in fact sometimes it is at odds with many a use case.
Good point. Perhaps the technology will account for this somehow, and thus be distinguishable in some way from other blockchain technologies . . . ?
Who cares? More concretely, how many professional or semi-professional photographers care?
> Bottom line though, everyone knows Kodak and no one knows Ascribe
But Ascribe is building useful technology while Kodak throws around buzzwords.
Like, the first problem I see here is a troll just importing images from all over the Internet and claiming ownership. If something like this happens, would it be possible for the actual artist to ever regain "ownership"?
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the blockchain and tell lies?
On the other hand, it isn't clear how they're going to solve the oracle problem of deciding who has the canonical rights to a given photograph.
Photographer licenses image on KodakONE, receives KodakCOIN as payment. KodakONE uses blockchain to sell and protect the image from theft down the line. KodakONE uses lawyers to DMCA those who don't attribute or pay for the image.
The killer feature is "lawyers armed with DMCA", not the crypto-themed CRUD app.
But that's already a crowded marketplace, and it's not clear to me why Kodak announcing they're going to enter a crowded marketplace would push their stock. Especially given that the announcement is paired with an up-front admission that they're accruing lots of useless technical debt at the beginning of the project.
I would be more inclined to invest in Kodak on the basis of this announcement if it didn't mention cryptocurrency at all.
I'd replace 'the' with 'any'.
Cryptocurrency allows us to avoid capital and other controls to fund a venture which would be impossible to fund otherwise.
But most ICOs are blatant scams trying to justify their useless tokens, Kodak included.
We issue dividends which is more than you can say about SNAP.
P.s. if you get the securities regulatory stuff wrong, even if the governments don’t go after you your investors have almost perfect leverage to force you out of business at any time they wish, turning that 5% investor into a 51% controlling interest, simply because you screwed up your securities offering.
Quote from one of them: There is no such things as extrajurisdictional, unless you're on the moon. My reply: If our opsec is good, we may as well be. Tor's latency even makes it feel like being in space.
If our opsec fails and I am unmasked, I will be unhappy at being caught. Successors will recover the system from backup keys and continue on. Small comfort.
P.s. if you did talk to lawyers about this, your “opsec” is probably already blown or partially blown. Attorney-Client privileges only click in if you’re their client, which you aren’t. They will remember you and connect the dots if and when the time comes for anyone to care who you are.
Communicating with a lawyer anonymously is not much more difficult than communicating with someone on HN anonymously.
Here is an article discussing some of our opsec, server-oriented: https://medium.com/@PinkDate/pink-app-trading-latency-for-an...
At least I am doing something ethical, to benefit people. This is more than I can say about working on adtech and privacy-invasive data software.
Do I get to vote? Do I get dividends? I'm personally a big fan of securities regulation. Are you going to have open financials and reporting? Why is this better?
Voting, we are uncertain how that would work but very much open to it. Dividends, yes, that is the entire point of us selling equity. This is considerably better than what you get from some publicly traded companies these days!
Open financials: We will have a certificate-transparency-style audit-log of our revenue and we will release limited financials and can discuss concerns if the revenue numbers and profits are too far apart.
This is better because before anonymity tech and cryptocurrencies...It was very difficult to invest in or even run a global escorting platform. This is due to the laws in many countries that we can now work-around. And investors can participate while maintaining their complete privacy. This is difficult with traditional government-regulated equities.
This is leveraging Ethereum, to create a currency, to address a market need: photographers getting appropriate renumeration and accreditation for their work.
Picture this: you snap a photo, its hash is on a decentralized public record. If someone uses this photo, you're aware of it and can be rewarded/credited appropriately.
We can scoff at the blockchain-ization of all these applications, or realize that they really do have far-reaching implications. Whether the investors are patient enough to wait for the benefit to become actualized, though, is a whole 'nother matter.
Except if that someone changes a single bit in the photo data (which will result in a completely different hash).
That right there could be a pretty expensive system to maintain and it isn't ideal to distributed across a bunch of blockchain participants, it probably has to live in a Kodak server farm somewhere.
What’s the point of a decentralized system if a trusted third party decides which images are visually equivalent? Just use that third party to register the image with in the first place, rather than in a blockchain, since that party gets to invalidate your image-hash in the chain anyway (in case your image is deemed visually equivalent to an image earlier in the chain).
How will you be aware of it? And what prevents someone from tweaking one pixel by one bit, changing the hash of the new image?
I suspect this would be solved by visually comparing the two images and noticing that they are one in the same. Than you can just see which had their hash published on the block-chain first to see which is the real one.
Just identifying the images are the same doesn't prove which was the original though. The hashes being publicly available is the key, because you can easily tell which came first.
Hashes don't verify the date that something was created. The blockchain provides a date for the hash, but it provides no guarantee that the hashed item didn't exist long before when it first appeared on chain. If I simply modify the image metadata to say that my knockoff photo was taken at an earlier date and flip some bits, I can still claim that mine is the original and that I didn't submit it to the blockchain when I created it.
So they wouldn't necessarily naively hash an image file, but they could possibly create a hash from features that are extracted from the image and remain consistent even after manipulation or transformation.
Or they could hash the original bits in the file naively then insert that hash into the original image as a digital watermark that would survive manipulation of the image.
It seems that the Kodak name is just being used by a company called WENN Digital for this cryptocurrency. More importantly,
“This is a WENN digital currency,” Kodak said in a statement. “Eastman Kodak Company will not be an issuer of the ICO, will not receive proceeds on the ICO.”
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-boards-the-blockchai...
I'm not saying these ideas aren't cool, but implementation of them sucks. If you look at the Kodakcoin, it seems the Kodak name is only being used and the company itself isn't involved in the project.
“This is a WENN digital currency,” Kodak said in a statement. “Eastman Kodak Company will not be an issuer of the ICO, will not receive proceeds on the ICO.”
"Today Kodak and WENN Digital, in a licensing partnership, announced the launch of the KODAKOneimage rights management platform and KODAKCoin,... WENN Digital, in partnership with Kodak, is the creator of the KODAKOne platform and the KODAKCoin cryptocurrency." [2]
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-boards-the-blockchai...
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-and-wenn-digital-par...
So there's a coin called Peakcoin. Real lack of awareness in the branding.
We are there.
https://finmedia.net/zhitel-simferopolya-nazval-sy-na-bitkoi...
1 photographer uploads photo;
2 photo consumer (e.g., magazine) pays USD to Kodak for photo usage;
3 Kodak pays KodakCoin to photographer;
Then it looks like a cash grab and the chances of success may be limited because there is no demand driving the price of KodakCoin.
If the cycle is:
1 photographer uploads photo;
2a photo consumer buys KodakCoins from exchange;
2b photo consumer pays KodakCoins to Kodak for photo usage;
3 Kodak pays KodakCoin to photographer.
Then it may be viable because requiring the consumer to purchase coin creates demand for the coin.
The fact that this wasn't called KODAKoin seems like a major oversight.
Brand guidelines are important especially at a company like Kodak.
As they have barely anything left, I agree.
The only benefit Kodak has done for it's hometown is foster a entrepreneur hub in Rochester as all the people who once worked for them left to form their own companies.
Sounds like hot garbage.
It looks like an easy short but you could easily get burnt.
Kodak is basically licensing their brand to a company that using another company's technology. Sounds like a safe bet /s
The microstock sites have spent the last several years driving the value of an image down to the point where you're lucky to get 25 cents (only because it's currently the guaranteed minimum), so it's already in reach of places with low cost of living. Those are the same places where buying stock from people based in already heavily-developed places is complicated by transaction fees and anti-fraud measures.
To all those wondering where the value added is, there is none. If you want to know how they solve the oracle problem, they don’t. This is a pyramid scheme, they even use the marketing language word for word.
Is this fairly common now? Most of the ICOs I've read about before were basically open to everyone.
Of course they got yelled down by the gold-rushers... but it was nevertheless true.
Reason is they want to avoid SEC Wrath for sketchy shit.
Definitely starting to feel that way with solution(s) looking for problems that don't need this complexity, reinvention of the wheel, not invented here, or hype train (FOMO).
I'm actually pleasantly surprised they're moving forward with some innovation and I guess the stock rise reflects that.
OTOH yes, I'm pessimistic they'll actually accomplish something, but who knows? I don't know if the market will discount this soon.
Is that use worth 44% of their stock? Doubtful.
Why would you give something up when there are pools of dumb money willing to take nothing?