Atari Is Jumping on the Crypto Bandwagon

Generally what happens is as follows. Some business MBA type people watch a TED talk or read in the FT that blockchain is the next big thing, so they go out and look to hire "blockchain evangelists". Evangelists is the word they often use, and that sounds about right because it is just like a religion sometimes. Then I only end up talking to the business people about these projects, because that's all the people they have. I won't name them, but I've had conversations with huge firms or startups that both equally talk utter nonsense. One large firm told me that they're working on "permissionless and permissioned blockchains for everything from auditing to wine". While for a small startup I once asked: "why are you using a blockchain for this instead of just having a database?". The answer I got was "well... our customers aren't really technical people...". I told them perhaps they should look at something like Google's certificate transparency rather than blockchains, and they echoed back to me "Oh we are definitely looking at certificate transfer!" (Transfer, not transparency.) It's astonishing.

To summarize, huge firms tend to have people who just want to get paid so they always say yes to whatever the clueless MBA person asks, while startups tend to mostly know it's bullshit but go along anyway because there is a lot of $$$ involved, particularly with ICOs. I would love to go undercover and write a book about what's actually happening.

2.) Sell coins for USD

3.) Hope the SEC doesn't mind

4.) Sell stock (via a secondary offering) for USD

5.) Give USD to executives

6.) Build a cheap MVP to pay photographers or whatever

7.) Give more USD to executives

8.) "We're shutting down photopay because we couldn't get traction. Your coins still exist. Let's pretend they aren't worthless."

9.) Give still more USD to executives to pursue machine learning for squirrels

I am not a Finance guy, but that is the only argument that made some sense.

For the companies, at least the honest one, at least for now its cheap money with not too many strings. But regulation will come whether you like it or not.

Tokenization may enable small or medium companies to be partially owned by outside investors and traded.. but there are many things to happen before we get there.

This is the company (Infinity Networks LTD) they have a 15% stake in (names cited here http://inpublic.globenewswire.com/releaseDetails.faces?rId=2...)

* Daniel Doll-Steinberg runs Virt-U ( https://www.virt-u.io/team/ )

* Ron Dimant runs http://www.mumbojumbo.com/online-games

* https://www.virt-u.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/One-Pager-V... -- Atari CEO is an advisor to Virt-U -- Google Cache cause they deleted that: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kgfTZn...

* Virt-U did an ICO recently -- https://medium.com/virt-u/virt-u-network-token-sale-a-virtua...

Separately, they also have some sort of partnership with http://www.pariplayltd.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_SA

Many people have wasted entire summers or entire university courses playing video games. I am sure everyone here knows someone has had a little bit of remorse in their time for that.

But wasting a summer mastering and completing a video game is relatively harmless compared to online gambling.

It seems that this Atari company (who are not really Atari) want to do more than sell 'harmless' sweets, they want to sell not just cocaine but crack, fully moving into online gaming for the company future.

Imaginably the crypto coins is the right technology for this. However, in all the years I have played standard video games I have never needed mathematical proof that I really do have however many gold stars/lives/experience points etc. Having the block-chain for that would not really help.

With all crypto currencies there is a lot in a name, 'Kodak' coins and 'Atari' coins are fakes in their own special way, being borne from fake versions of once legendary and innovative companies. Companies that now run on brain-farts.

I do know that there are a lot of banking fees and transaction costs for online gambling - background checks do have to be made and money does get lent to gamblers based on risk assessments, crazy as that seems. It has been a while since I have spoken with anyone that has industry knowledge but I believe transaction costs can be double what you would expect in ecommerce as far as bank fees go. Therefore there is a perceivable value in some crypto-coin that magically makes it easier. Once you are in the world of Atari coins it will only cost bigly on transaction fees once you cash out.

At the moment, if you are a gambler, then the bookies do not offer you a sideline in banking, in the future this fake Atari company will offer you those services.

I wait to see it...

But, what if instead of bitcoin things being mined as per the usual dumb, planet trashing way, what if completing games was the 'proof of work'?

Except what they plan to do with that money is often very unclear, there's often very little in the way of any kind of guarantee or accountability and you'd be correct if you assumed they probably don't even have a business plan!

If you're lucky you might be able to do some kind of blockchain related stuff to enforce voting, if they allow you to do such. Or you might be able to trade those tokens to someone else. Maybe.

The first category is uninteresting to me, but the second is a species of behavior we've seen time and again. Company that is struggling or is worried about The Future(tm) catching them unawares hears about "new trend" via media and resorts to cargo cult attempts to be trendy.

The problem is that by the time they've heard about it, this trend is already on the decline (the media channels they consume tend to be notoriously late to the party) or the trend in no way matches what the company does or offers. Examples of the missed-the-trend variant are plentiful... think "iWhatever" naming in the late 90s, adding "cyber" and "e-" to anything, promoting a new MySpace social initiative when Facebook was opened to everyone and was hitting critical mass. Examples of misfitting trend with company/product includes big social media efforts for things like laundry detergent or corn flakes, but my favorite recent misfitting exercise was "mobile app all the things!"

I think Kodak is in the misfitting category, because they know the future is bleak and they lack the internal vision to pivot and commit to a new path but they do know that "cryptocurrencies" are The Future(tm) and so they must do that, even if they don't actually know what any of the words mean.

Personally, I don't really see the value of using a crypto currency over normally funded wallets, but it's the most interesting thing I've seen thus far.

I haven't looked into them in detail, but given the relative lack of reference to them in the sector I'd imagine Kodak and Iced Tea fall into the former group. Given Atari are a long established company I wouldn't be confident about the odds of them falling into the latter either, but we shall see.

I'd definitely recommend reading https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series... for more information if you are interested.

I still have no better idea what the general point is than you.

I'm actually wishing that I had been asking "but why blockchain?" at the end of each talk, or more accurately, rephrasing it in to a less dodgeable question. However I'm pretty sure I knew the least about blockchain going in out of everyone there so I was always a little concerned that I was just missing something implicit/obvious.

Mission accomplished.

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Companies have noticed that saying "Blockchain" and a few other buzzwords is enough to get a ton of money out of investors, especially since it seems like the majority of investors don't even know what Blockchain can do.

Kodak is +200% (maybe 250%+) after announcing their blockchain plans. Its no different than previous buzzword mania (ie: "Deep Learning" or if you remember the 2000s, "XML").

Considering that the eventual service and pricing is completely undefined at ICO, that still isn't very favorable at all. And even if this uncertainty was somehow revolved, there'd still be the issue that a pre-order larger than the eventual market would be destined to sink the issuing company, likely before the preorders are fulfilled.

I see a coins value as just people hopeful it'll find a usecase and fueled by greed on capitalizing on it.

I imagine things like this used to run a public, private, and virtual identity system for all governments. Bundle with another coin as a means for tracking makes models and authenticity of serials and ownership. Maybe even for digital content and distribution. But I don't see how any future uses come from something being sold today with no other value but to appreciate and be traded for another thing of value.

Maybe ICOs truly are the new Kickstarter.