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I kid you not, I had the same questions as you, so I literally applied for a bunch of blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see what they're all about. I end up asking really basic questions like: "So why are you using a blockchain instead of a normal database?" or "What problem are you actually trying to solve?" It is actually embarrassing; I feel like I'm being abrasive on the phone by asking such truly basic questions, yet they always seem so startled by these kinds of questions and assume I'm somehow incredibly intelligent and perceptive to ask these basic questions.

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.

I salute your motivation in researching this question, and thanks for sharing.

I tried to phrase my original appeal carefully, because I didn't want to entirely discount the possibility that it was all just people chasing bullshit. But there's a lot of things in life that look that way, but the people doing it actually have what they think are good reasons. But, yeah, that doesn't sound good.

It seems to me that from a strictly engineering perspective, once you have a corporation involved that the pressures involved would, or at least should, inevitably turn any putative "blockchain" solution into a centralized database owned and administered by the corporation. To be concrete about it, how would WoW gold be improved by a blockchain? The answer is not only that it would have no additionally-useful features, but that it would take numerous hits.

For $100, I'll share with anyone my clever plan for taking a centralized database for tokens and just calling it a blockchain. Oops, I may have given my game plan away. Well, in the spirit of things, perhaps you should still throw money at me. ("In the interests of customer convenience, we just run the blockchain for them... and our engineers have also optimized blockchains quite a bit, eliminating all the Proof of X problems... And from there we were able to optimize turnaround times and responsiveness in the system... OK, basically, it's just a Cassandra installation... but we forked Cassandra and called it Cassandra - Blockchain Edition.")

Thanks. I actually don't think blockchains are all that interesting a technology, but the hysterical mania around them is interesting from an economic and psychological perspective. When will the bubble burst? I'm serious that I would actually consider working in this field for awhile to understand exactly how insane it is.

You're absolutely right that some people are honest-but-confused. In fact, I think particularly with large firms, they're all just shit scared about this newfangled blockchain thing and they all know their competitors are investigating it so they desperately want to get in on it before they're destroyed by it. Unfortunately, I think their manic pivot towards blockchain is a very bad move long-term. It would actually take more bravery on their part not to waste resources investigating it.

And again, you are right. It's hilarious to watch them reinvent the wheel. Often, the penny drops that they don't want to really have a bitcoin-like blockchain, so they accidentally reinvent either a Wikipedia or a Github. Github in particular you could (and they do) argue is a chain of blocks of data, so a blockchain. It's like cutting off the hump of a camel and then calling it a next generation horse: it kinda works, but it's not originally designed for that, so why not just use a horse?

in summary: a bunch of MBA types who belong in the sales department at Oracle have drunk the koolaid.

1.) Get publicity

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

10.) First squirrel in history gets promoted to Head Of Deep Blockchain Diversity Learning for publicity

11.) Repeat

Anyone know any good "Virtual Deep Blockchain Learning Reality" javascript frameworks, preferably designed to be easy enough for squirrels to use?

Red or grey?

slight OT, but visiting Europe for vacation I found black squirrel to be most beautiful:

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

I was visiting Mozart's grave in a Viennese graveyard (also the resting place of Strauss) and managed to see a Red, Gray, and Black squirrel all within the space of an hour.

You got it all wrong!

1) Start up

2) Cash In

3) Sell Out

4) Bro Down

Poor poor redskins

step 1) collect underpants

The super macro answer is injecting liquidity. By making an asset illiquid to more liquid/tradable it "unlocks" value. So is the argument in general for tokenization.

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.

It's all online gambling.

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/

Now that several of y'all have fleshed this out, this definitely makes sense. Skinned companies being shilled out as gambling fronts for dubious cryptocurrency schemes... what a sad way for "Atari" and "Kodak" to end.

The Kodak project has nothing to do with gambling. It's a smart-contract based photo rights management platform.

And to be fair to Atari, only some of its cryptocurrency initiatives are gambling-based. It sounds like its Atari Token will be used for a digital entertainment content marketplace. From Google Translate:

>>The company is developing a decentralized platform giving access to any form of digital entertainment,that is to say a very wide offer ranging from video games to movies and music. This platform, under development, will operate using a cryptocurrency, the Atari Token . In exchange for these equity interests, earnings and future royalties, Atari has granted Infinity Networks, Ltd. (Gibraltar) a long-term license to use the Atari brand .

The Wikipedia article on this so-called Atari company is useful reading to understand a bit about the hubris of what has gone on.

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'?

The bit that wasn't initially obvious to me is that these are all literally just investment rounds. They're just raising money and the "coin" is in many ways similar to a share.

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 bit that wasn't initially obvious to me is that these are all literally just investment rounds. They're just raising money and the "coin" is in many ways similar to a share."

This is kind of where my understanding of ICOs falls short. My understanding was that ICO coins don't entitle one to any equity in the company just the coin:

"ICOs are the Wild West of financing — they sit in a grey zone where the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and many other regulatory bodies are still investigating them. The main problem is, though, that most ICO’s don’t actually offer equity in start-up ventures; instead, they only offer discounts on cryptocurrencies before they hit the exchanges."[1]

If that's the case it's not like a share at all. Wouldn't it be more like a credit default swap or other derivative?

[1] https://hbr.org/2017/03/what-initial-coin-offerings-are-and-...

Wouldn't it be more like a credit default swap or other derivative?

It would actually be more like a tulip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

At least with a derivative, there is some kind of theoretical contractual value. Somewhere up the chain, there is something of value, say, a home mortgage, and you're making a bet on it. With ICOs, the coin is a vehicle for pure speculation. The only bet you're making is that the coin's value will go up, and the only way that happens is if other people make exactly the same bet.

I think there's two main categories these kinds of things fall in. First and most obvious is "ride hype train hoping to grab ICO windfalls." The second is "people say this is the future, we don't want to miss it!"

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.

In my experience, what you say is very accurate.

The best idea I've seen that involves crypto currency is the new game distributor "Robot Cache" which wants to offer the user ability to sell "used" PC games. The sale occurs via their "Iron" currency, which can be used to purchase other games. You can also opt in to mining the currency via their platform.

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.

Maybe I didn't understand their concept but I couldn't see how it wasn't just another centrally managed DRM system that lets you sell your license to someone else.

I can’t recall the name now but there was a book swap many many years ago where you got a few points for a new account and then you spent points for someone to send you a book and got points for giving one away.

Similar concept, and one that’s been borrowed heavily. Not sure why a block chain would improve that.

Except that this is a clear sign that we are deep into buzzword territory now.

If your company is not succeeding doing what it is currently doing, why not try something trendy? That is basically what is going on for most of these.

In summary, I'd say some are either pointless and/or exploitative, e.g. because they don't understand the space or they're trying to issue securities without have to comply with IPO regulation. But some are genuinely transformative, e.g. using tokens as a mechanism to incentivise performing operations in a hugely distributed manner.

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 attended a blockchain symposium this week. Two days of presentations by researchers, entrepreneurs, and representatives of companies looking at bitcoin in some way. As well as questions from an audience of people with enough interest to pay to be there.

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.

Their stock spiked by 60% and they're on the frontpage of news, at least for a couple of news cycles.

Mission accomplished.

----------

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").

The most favorable mental model I can think of is a highly abstracted form of "resellable pre-order discount".

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.

as far as I can tell, we're in the grip of a mania and the main purpose of most coin offerings is speculation bait. There seem to be some coins that are targeting legitimate long-term use (such as those in the telephony market, and those trying to democratise markets like storage) but by and large, it seems to be a cash grab.

"Most coin offerings" I'd agree with you with, but I'm specifically curious about what these relatively established companies think they are doing. I have a bit of a hard time imagining a well-lawyered company coming up with the plan to just say magic swoon words to boost the stock price, then all the inside stock owners sell, because that's at best perilously close to inside trading, if not obviously on the wrong side of the line.

(And remember, "raise the stock price" on its own isn't really a motivation. There has to be a plan to sell the stock on the news, or to avoid a take over bid by making the company too expensive, or placate a board of directors, or get new investment at the higher valuation, or something else for which "make the stock price higher" is a tool, because it isn't really a terminal goal on its own.)

I like to believe coins are at the stage, most relevant to today, as electricity was. Neat new variation of a current tech but entrapped in a new sleeve. First few miles of any new road you start off slow then as you see where you're going it ramps up.

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.

Wasn't there also a programming language that was planning to hold an ICO?

Maybe ICOs truly are the new Kickstarter.