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Everything you want to do can be done on a simple database. You can mint tokens / share it / explore other tokens / message people / view feed. It isn't clear why you want to forcibly put this on Ethereum blockchain and pay a fee to do every transfer (The transaction charge currently is ~ USD 0.5-1 per transaction)

Can't win a free ETH if you use a simple database.

Haha, well actually we could do that regardless. The purpose of the giveaway is to source more ideas for what people actually want to do with cryptocurrencies, and to make sure our product can serve those use cases.

All of the examples you gave don’t need a decentralised cryptocurrency and I reckon could be done more easily with a regular database.

Unless you can give a reason why those examples require decentralisation then, as much as I respect your attempt at finding an actual use for decentralised Merkel trees, I ultimately think it’s doomed to failure.

I can offer a few reasons, but they might not convince you. Tokens are provably scarce, meaning the supply is limited and can't be changed by the creator of the currency. They're easily exchangeable, which means they can move between platforms and communities. Finally, they can interact with smart contracts, meaning people can enforce the way the token behaves.

I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too. This is an incredibly difficult brainstorming exercise. So many ICO's have failed to justify their use-cases, but tokens are so interesting that I have to believe there are good reasons to use them. Is there any case that you do find particularly helpful?

If you think your users are smart enough to figure out all you've mentioned, then they are smart enough to use databases for their usecases.

I think there are lots of people out there that can come up with interesting use cases, without being software developers and not wanting to learn about databases. If something like this can make it easier for more people to be inventive, then I think that is a good thing.

That’s a question I have too. I don’t want to forcibly put anything on the blockchain. I’m specifically curious about use cases where the decentralization, scarcity, and smart contract pieces of this can become useful. I can’t predict exactly what, but I do think those things will be used for interesting projects and our tools will keep making that easier for people to play with. We’ve listed a few examples of things people are doing above. But right now, I agree that in many ways this is less functional than a database. Right now people use it for fun, and to try out the technology for new things.

> USD 0.5-1 per transaction

This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.

So do you pay to post a comment on HN? Normal people will never hold an ethereum wallet and pay for transactions.

There will be plenty of people willing to pay to convey a message, it's the entire field of advertising.

No one pays to "convey a message". People pay for advertising to access an audience. As soon as HN started charging to post comments most people would stop posting. If they charged to post a submission the quality of the links would drop through the floor. The idea that HN has enough value that people would pay to comment here (while other free websites exist) is nonsense.

HN comments are free but the platform is owned by YC and YC enforces certain rules as they see fit. In Ethereum there is no owner, but looks like you have to pay for that

The entire value of HN is that it’s owned, guided and actively moderated by YC.

An Ethereum-based alternative would lose that aspect while also costing money and being very slow. I can’t imagine paying for what is effectively negative value.

The test for blockchain “dApps” is this: is someone so desperate to have thing X decentralized that they’ll pay for it in both real money and usability inconvenience? If so, it’s a dApp candidate.

In the real world, the only thing that seems to pass this test is some types of inter-company ledgers.

I'm no saying that HN is bad and Ethereum is good. For one thing, here I am posting on HN, so it's pretty telling :)

I just wanted to highlight the difference and that that HN is not free. It's free as in beer.

As far as inconvenience goes, it's temporary. Give it some time (2-5 years, I'd say) and it's only going to be about paying real money for it.

And if you think that EOS is decentralized, and that it will ever see the light of day, then even paying money won't be a thing for the users as they have a different business model for dApps, where the dApp owner has to stake EOS coins to get a share of EOS network's resources. Which is more similar to existing business model of renting EC2 servers

An intermediary solution would be to use a DappChain, which acts as a free-to-use sidechain of Ethereum. Loom is going to be releasing an SDK for their own sidechain, DelegateCall, soon:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdlnBsw1iRAks1F2pD6...

A similar initiative is POA Network, which has US public notaries acting as trusted validators for an Ethereum sidechain:

https://poa.network

Simple answer, your centralized database can go away tomorrow, or be arbitrarily modified. That can’t happen with the blockchain.

Does that happen to your databases a lot? That's just bad engineering.

That's not the troubling case.

The troubling case is the company hosting the DB shutting down, and therefore the entire system becoming worthless. This is what prevents you as the customer from trusting such a system.

but this is what exports are for. I would be fine if gmail etc. shut down tomorrow. there's no reason to add a massive overhead to everything just to solve an already-solved problem.

What if it’s not a massive overhead? What if the tooling is as simple as setting up a database nowadays, and the performance is a known/acceptable trade off?

Surely you can see there are some advantages of blockchain based tech then?

That is preventing you to trust a system where "a gaming streamer is rewarding his most loyal viewers with tokens they store in their own database and you can redeem for shoutouts or merchandise."?

I would somehow think that the database technology is quite secondary to the creditworthiness of the gaming streamer when people decide whether to trust or not a token system of a gaming streamer.

It's the streamer who's trust you need. Whether they have their patron's trust is a separate issue.

It's just a bit more effort. All companies sell convenience.

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Is this a real problem? Databases have been handling massive volume of transactions for decades.

Evangelism that embraces hyperbole while demonstrating ignorance does little to further adoption of nascent technologies.

This is only useful if the bits are useful independently of the creators. For example, the gaming streamer, hiphop, and Discord tokens would be valueless without the promises of merchandise, giveaways, and upvotes.

How would this be different than the person issuing your Hexel-based tokens disappearing? The value is still tied to the single issuer.

The person receiving the token isn't the customer, the issuer is.

As an issuer, you do not have to worry about Hexel dissapearing. Presumably, the website doesn't make this clear.

Right, the comment I replied to was saying that the issuer keeping a database and not doing any blockchain stuff had the risk that the database could disappear.

The Hexel model doesn't seem to fix that. The issuer could still disappear, leaving the end user with a bunch of Hexel-tokens that can't be used anywhere.

Allow people to make copies and backups of the database. This way they'll re-host if the server goes away and they'll be able to detect any tempering.

For bonus point sight the backups with a PGP key and issue sha-256 checksums of your database (itself already containing previous checksums) this way you can call it a blockchain and get all the hype for free.

I've heard about a thing called backups. If arbitrary modifications is your concern, you could hash a certain state or records for easy checks. Also, secure logging is an easy way to record changes.

I don't say that the blockchain is useless, but it's hard to come up with use cases where it's clearly superior than databases.

Any single time you don't want a central entity to control modifications and or the safety of those backups. Voting records immediately spring to mind. Any sort of civic spending and accounting also immediately comes to mind.

Those use cases are in almost all of the blockchain 101-s, do you know any site or gallery where legit uses are collected?

those aren't legit use cases?

I think it's interesting to standardize these things as ERC20 tokens. It's still very early days, but that allows you to leverage the entire ETH econsystem which is still growing. For example, I could store those ERC20 tokens on my hardware wallet, or phone wallet, send them to others without using a platform's website, etc.

Also, your comment reminds me somewhat of the infamous Hacker News comment when Dropbox posted ("everything you want to do can be done simply with rsync"). Sure, perhaps it's simple for tech folks that know how to build a database and a website that lets you mint and share tokens. But what if you are a popular Youtube vlogger? You either don't know how to do that, don't have time to, or don't want to spend the money. But perhaps you'd use this service, quickly mint tokens, give them away to users, and invent interesting use cases for them.

Personally, I love this idea and think it has great potential. Will anything useful come of it? Who knows -- it's early days. I think the most interesting use cases, if they exist, haven't been thought of yet. I look forward to seeing what people do with it.

There are two parts:

- Is the idea interesting ? Yes possibly. The idea of making it easy to create tokens is interesting. I can see twitch streamers giving away tokens to their subscribers / viewers.

- Does it need to be on blockchain ? For all the use cases described, the answer according to me is no. It is easier to simply have a frontend through which users can interact vs maintaining a wallet, installing metamask, etc. This is going in the direction opposite of the Dropbox example - making things harder for users.

It’s harder now but it’s going to get there! You gotta believe! We’re chasing something interesting and hoping we can keep making it easier and more useful. Right now, we do know it’s harder and people are still choosing to try it for fun! I agree with all your feedback above though and it’s actually really helpful to keep those realities in mind.

Everything about the way ETH and all this other drivel gets evangelized reeks of some sort of baseless fanaticism.

Is this Carlos from Bitconnect?

“Bitcoin / blockchain is still young”. No it isn’t it is more than 10 years old. An eternity in the tech world.

“Let me compare bitcoin / blockchain doubters to all doubters of some successful technology“. The fact that there were naysayers for some successful tech does not prove that there being naysayers for bitcoin/blockchain means that it will be a success.

Your reply is identical to every scammer and crooked shyster in the crypto space. YCombinator is damaging it’s brand associating with scams.

The sooner this blockchain nonsense crashes, the better...

I'm somewhat of a blockchain sceptic (or rather, unconvinced at this stage), but this sounds really interesting.

Meta: This is also a very well written announcement post, IMO, and I suggest anyone looking to launch something learn from it. It starts off with the most important soundbites up front, including the rather weird sounding "it's supposed to be fun". Then it gives a bit of backstory, but most importantly, provides interesting examples that back up the weird "fun" assertion.

It ends with a pretty clear explanation of what this costs and what the business model is.

All in all, great job. Good luck!

Thank you, that's really nice of you.

Hey I offered this exact service with:

www.dotcomco.in

Some of the in-house community cryptocoins I made as a portfolio of examples include:

www.ycco.in - distributed karma for HN community (still up)

www.instagramco.in and www.facebookco.in - distributed likes

Of course I didn’t make it to front page of HN and got no traction. As I have more than a few cryptocoin/blockchain themed domains I began tozenizing the domain ownership rights to try to sell with the pre-made community cryptocoin, my experience is there seems to be more interest in these domains than the community coins.

You charge 10 bitcoin as your fee which is around 80,000 usd in today's value!

That does sound outrageous, then again from the perspective of the cryptocoin world the first purchase with bitcoin was two Papa Johns Pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin which is around $80,000,000 today.

When I launched bitcoin wasn’t worth what it is today...that said what would you pay for your own community cryptocoin anyway?

$0

Then you are not the target audience. Every small business or community can be tokenized, just like every small business can have a website. Tokenization could encourage repeat visits, community virility and vested interest, not to mention investment.

"Every small business can be tokenized"

My parents own a gift shop (like a Hallmark). Can you give me an idea of how their business could be "tokenized"?

Off the top of my head:

* Distribute tokens to partners (product / gift manufacturers). Partners with vested interest in the success of a company could be much less likely to sever relations as it will hurt their investment.

* Distribute tokens to customers as a type of rebate. Like a loyalty program that encourages patronship.

* Use tokens to vote on what products should be sold. Many gift shops sell pipes and other drug related items. This decision would sink other family oriented shops. What would your customers like?

* Distribute tokens to the locals as an attempt to build virility and community around your shop.

* Distribute tokens to employees as a way to recognize accomplishments. Ever get a few bonus stock from your company for doing good work over the week? Me neither.

* Sell tokens to raise funds.

* Set budgets based on community votes.

The list is endless and these are rough ideas. Look for ways to align business interests and customer interests.

Most of these (e.g. rewards, distributing to locals/employees, sell to raise funds, etc.) rest on the idea that the token has value, which begs the question.

Many also have existing solutions that are well-understood (e.g. loyalty programs tied to phone numbers).

And, what happens when every business has its own tokens? Who wants to track/manage all of that? Seems like a recipe for token fatigue.

>Look for ways to align business interests and customer interests.

In general, seems like token advocates look for ways to wedge a token into an interaction. Not saying there are no use cases, but there's a lot of "solution looking for a problem" happening.

The token will have value based on there being value in the company or asset being tokenized. You can't start a coffee shop but can own some of the coffee shop down the street.

What are we here for if not to share in the risk and success of the endeavours we support?

>The token will have value based on there being value in the company or asset being tokenized.

The token doesn't de facto inherit the value of the business. That would only be true to the extent that the token represents a claim on assets or profits or other tangible benefit; in other words when the token acts like a security, in which case we have already solved that. There is also a co-op model that exists and conveys some of this benefit.

I don't know what a token adds to these scenarios, and in fact are not even legal in the US to act as securities unless the buyers are accredited (most people are not). Sure, until recently, the token has made it easier to skirt non-accredited investor status and other regulatory matters, but it doesn't make it legal or a better solution and, in any case, the SEC is moving in on that.

I appreciate the spirit of what you're saying, and want it to be true. It's just not currently the case.

Yes there are barriers and plenty of reasons why it wouldn't work. I agree it's not currently the case, thanks for thinking about the possibilities, not many do.

The tokens must be valuable but that will be shaped by the market forces. I'd love to buy some of the potential profit in my local coffee shop but I won't buy if it's backed by nothing.

All of these have existing solutions:

> * Distribute tokens to partners (product / gift manufacturers). Partners with vested interest in the success of a company could be much less likely to sever relations as it will hurt their investment.

= stock or partial ownership.

> * Distribute tokens to customers as a type of rebate. Like a loyalty program that encourages patronship.

= rebates.

> * Use tokens to vote on what products should be sold. Many gift shops sell pipes and other drug related items. This decision would sink other family oriented shops. What would your customers like?

= surveys.

> * Distribute tokens to the locals as an attempt to build virility and community around your shop.

= flyers, ads, etc.

> * Distribute tokens to employees as a way to recognize accomplishments. Ever get a few bonus stock from your company for doing good work over the week? Me neither.

= bonuses/stock options

> * Sell tokens to raise funds.

= IPOs or kickstarters.

> * Set budgets based on community votes.

= surveys

Literally everything you've listed is a solved problem.

The only thing on here that might benefit from being a cryptocoin is the rebates idea: that's because rebates depend on some customers not cashing in their rebate. So if you make it harder to cash in your rebates by using a worse technology which is hard to use like cryptocoins, fewer users will cash in their rebates. However, this is a sleazy business practice, and if capitalism works as it should, sleazy companies offering rebates in the hope that people won't claim them should go out of business, so hopefully this would result in bad publicity and this business strategy would backfire.

Competition proves the market. There are other unique use cases. Here are some:

* Hiring based on votes from stakeholders

* Choosing what events are held when through voting or burning (scheduling)

* Continuous community airdrops to encourage repeat visits

* Pairing with other local companies to cross airdrop for promotional purposes.

* Charging artists to hang paintings in the tokenized asset (encouraging patron art).

Tokenization can become a customizable base level component. Kind of like a webite.

I appreciate your skepticism but I do encourage you to rethink your stance.

Gift cards? What's the need for decentralized crypto token (given the costs complexity and friction)?

Gift cards are very limited. The tech behind gift card usage is extremely insufficient. Things like checking balance is often not even possible with a public API layer.

This would also enable seamless gift card exchanges. Currently secondary markets exist for gift cards, but they take ~10% margin to account for the high fraud risk, holding time, etc.

Combined with an api to transfer funds, it would serve as a virtual currency.

Why not just skip all that nonsense and build a token? It's an easier abstraction and does not involve asking permission or trusting a third party.

Tokens are very limited. Things like checking the balance is often not even possible for a nontechnical user (i.e. the vast majority of users), who doesn't care about API layers. You can implement software to make this friendlier, but you can do that with gift cards too, and the gift card technologies are already mature.

Not only is this a solution in search of a problem, it's a solution which hasn't found a problem, and is being shoehorned onto problems it actually exacerbates. If you're running a business, the last thing you want is for your business' systems to be decentralized, because that means you don't have control over them. There's literally only downsides for the business.

Jacksonville, FL shout-out!

Sounds like these guys have users, which is probably what makes the big difference.

Trying to actually use this reminds me of how frustrating and slow it is to actually use cryptocurrencies. Endless hoops, lots of waiting for confirmations, and that's me doing things the 'easy' way with Coinbase and MetaMask.

Edit:

> We've submitted your transaction to the network. This usually takes about 2 minutes to confirm.

30 minutes later...

Edit 2:

One email to the Hexel support team later and lo, my token is live: https://www.onhexel.com/token/e4a37f4f-3a26-4ae3-a8b2-c932aa...

5/7 would recommend

Yeah you're right, the user experience with Dapps can be pretty painful. We're trying to make this better.

Edit: transaction time depends on the gas price, email me at support@onhexel.com and I can make sure that things go smoothly!

Perfect example of the downsides. The next thing for us is deploying the token for you automatically, so that you don't need to deal with MetaMask or worry about gas price.

My favorite coin so far is the TallCoin: "I will issue 1 coin to any person who is taller than me (I'm 6'7")".

https://www.onhexel.com/token/bb571299-e19a-4671-9036-7b3e73...

I like WednesdayCoin, a coin that can only be transferred on wednesdays. https://wednesdaycoin.io/

(not a hexel coin, but another ERC20)

Agreed! Also one of my favorite coins. I was blessed to receive some a few Wednesdays ago.

You say that you're not focusing on trading and that you want to do things right. But isn't the sole point of crypto currencies that they can be traded? What uses are there other than trading?

Oh I do think the currencies should be used for exchanging things. I mostly meant that they shouldn’t be viewed as an investment or a way to make money. More as an actual currency.

That already exists and is named complementary currency.

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

There's no need for a blockchain, or distributed stuff, etc. The only thing you need is to convince people to accept it. You might as well make an app that transfers balance between rows on a database. And the reason why you never heard of complementary currency before, is that it's something done "just because you can" and has no real advantages.

I understand that none of the things I said are specific to you. But am I wrong?

But isn't there still a cost advantage? Rather than securing a centralized database you simply create a coin secured by the Blockchain?

I don't know. How much does it cost to run things on the blockchain. Someone must be paying. How much does it cost you to spin up on MySQL instance, replicated in all AWS datacenters?

Yeah, it's easy enough to spin up a DB on RDS, but using the blockchain does offload the need to secure the database (and securing infrastructure in general, at least where managing the token is concerned).

There's also no dependency or trust on hexel per se once the coin is created. They can disappear, but the contract/token lives on.

Definitely upside for using Ether, but comes at a price in transaction time and money.

Nice, I've never seen that but I'm going to read that whole page. I think that's probably correct about complementary currencies, if they're just currencies. I wonder if it would be different if each of them had actually different properties?

The cool think about tokens is that they can be programmed to behave different ways. Can you imagine a world where each currency is programmed differently? For example, maybe one currency gets deflated with each transaction (gets multipled by 0.9), and another currency can only be sent a certain number of times before it disappears, encourage people to hold it. Can you think of use cases where that changes the utility of a complementary currency? I'm asking because I can think of a few, but it's so hard to tell whether or not they're good ideas.

The second part, outside of that, is that tokens are on a blockchain. Again, none of this is specific to us, but there are a few properties that any token gets. Namely: They are provably scarce, they can interact with smart contracts, and they can be traded for other currencies if necessary.

What value are you guys actually providing? Everything you listed is incredibly easy to do without your site. How are you planning on making money? A static site could do the majority of this.

The most direct answer is that we’re providing ease of use and helpful tools. I guess you could argue that it’s easy or hard depending on the person. We plan on making money from paid features later on, like automated token distribution hooked into API’s, and smart contracts that can easily be hooked up to your token.

All the use cases you mention could be more easily implemented on top of a more mature distributed ledger such as Datomic.

1. What's to stop a competitor from copying your app feature for feature and implementing their own features faster than you can keep up because they're using established distributed ledger technologies instead of blockchain?

2. Are there any features you have planned that make use of the one thing that differentiates blockchains from distributed ledgers (decentralization)?

To your first point, someone could implement something like Hexel using a distributed ledger, but it would not have the trustless components of tokens that exist on the blockchain.

The first immediate feature of using a blockchain is that token holders do not need to worry about a private distributed ledger shutting down its service. A future feature we have planned is a developer program where anyone can submit smart contracts that do interesting things with tokens. For this to work with a distributed ledger you would need to implement your own public API for interacting with your ledger.

Hi,

How long have both of you been working on this project?

What was your traction before getting into YC?

I'm most interested in the traction part since there's this misconception that YC does not accept early stage companies. It looks there are a whole lot of companies in the very early stage and I personally take that as a positive sign.

In total about 4 months. Before getting into YC we had a an Ethereum developer tools project. It had pretty low traction at that time (a handful of dedicated users, but now many). But we had built other Ethereum projects together before. That developer tools project eventually transformed into Hexel, which is now consumer facing.

Congratulations. Couple of questions, hopefully I haven’t missed you.

1. Recent SEC activity: is this a threat to you? I see you have been careful to avoid fundraising in your examples, but other people here have come up with that as a use case in brainstorming.

2. Did you look at Stellar? It has none of the disadvantages of Ethereum (ie instant confirms and de minimus fees) and was in part purpose built for your kind of project. I know you both have Ethereum backgrounds but was wondering if you’d considered and ruled out alternatives.

Good luck! I’m keen to see a healthy online micropayments ecosystem so I’m supportive of your project, which could become part of that.

Given how the SEC is looking into crypto currency, how are you dealing with the potential risk that brings to your business model?

Would anybody be interested for the same thing but for regular currencies? I'm making a new one at https://pointsproject.org and could make local ones

There area bunch of these services already, so is this YC doing a me too or is there something inherently different?

Yes, totally valid point. The difference I see is that we're focused on functionality that goes beyond selling / trading. I know there are quite a few options for "Do your own ICO" and stuff like that, which is not that interesting. We're deliberately avoiding things like ICO's and trading right now. Our focus is on making tokens usable today, and consistently improving the ease of use for someone that wants to use a token for something real.

But you can't avoid trading with a ERC20 token, because they are designed to be tradable. Any exchange can add the token to the supported list, and the users can immediately send the tokens to the exchange and buy and sell them.

Unless these are not really tokens and the "user/owner" can send the tokens without a centralized permission.

Yes, the creator could go trade them on an exchange if they wanted to. But we don’t help people do an ICO or encourage it. I do think tokens made on Hexel could gain value, but that would come from making them useful, not starting off with a scammy ICO.

Altruistic attitude shall not save you from the idiocy of greed surrounding coins/tokens.

I created a Hacker News token. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to send you some (for free!). Either request on Hexel or comment with your Ethereum address.

https://www.onhexel.com/token/9ef7aaf7-82b2-470f-a84d-e392e7...

Oh shit, this might be perfect for a fun idea I had for something I wanted to do for my friends but without charging them money.

But if it’s an ERC20 token, don’t we need to pay gas to use it? Or does the token run on a chain that you guys control instead of on the Ethereum blockchain?

You do have to pay gas because it is on the main chain. We are working on a way to make this free in the future.

Speaking of ways to make transactions free for the user, is it possible to run a full node that verifies transactions and have it look at the type of ERC20 token in addition to the amount of gas and choose to always verify those ERC20 tokens that were made with Hexel even though they pay 0 gas?

Rather, I mean, I think that the above would be possible, but would those transactions be accepted by the rest of the network or do transactions need to be verified by more than just the one or few couple of full nodes that you run? I seem to recall something about the execution of every single smart contracts happening on all full nodes in the network but that seems strange (mainly because of how volatile any large scale network of distributed nodes will be in terms of nodes passing in and out or temporarily losing connectivity with the rest of the network) so I think I did not understand correctly how the Ethereum network really works.

Furthermore, if a full node could be run in the fashion I mentioned above then how many smart contract executions would it be able to facilitate per hour? Currently Ethereum is Proof-of-Work, so it would depend on your hashing power I guess. Perhaps the chance of finding a block is so small that you can’t realistically run the kind of node that I mentioned? And how about after they switch to Proof-of-Stake, will it be feasible then if not now? How much would you have to stake in order to be able to put through the transactions you wanted?

- I seem to recall something about the execution of every single smart contracts happening on all full nodes in the network but that seems strange

Your understanding is correct. All code runs on all nodes. That's why it costs $0.50 or so every time.

Hi, just a general question for tokens that you might be able to answer: let's say I create a token and I want to programmatically give those tokens to people as a reward. Think of it something like "kudos" so let's say I'm at work and I want to give my coworker a thank you and for that, as a token of my gratitude, I want to send them one of my tokens. Is this do-able at all or am I just thinking of this the wrong way?

One more question: since these tokens are created on ETH, does this mean for each transaction related to a token, I will need to pay gas each time I want to transact?

Right now you would need to send these tokens to your co-workers using an Ethereum wallet, and you would need to pay gas. However, we're working on a way for you to programmatically send tokens.

I think this project is well done, and I love how easy you've made it to just do up a concept, and get a group of people moving into tokenizing their value stream. I am working on a token for storing genomic data in UPort or Civic wallet, and will integrate with Ocean Protocol and Openmined and other data marketplaces. In looking at the compliance of issuing the tokens, I've found that it is essential to actually embed restrictions in the token (like the rtoken protocol is doing) to make sure it can't be traded by unaccredited investors or outside terms of a reg d lockup. It doesn't seem to matter what your intent is, if you provide the tools by which someone can begin trading an unregistered security, this seems problematic. Have you considered technical measures to prevent this?

The following quote from a recent Coinbase article has me wondering about the recent round of amazing crypto-art tokens and the speculative market that has emerged for buying and selling them. While the proposed eth721 standard makes a distinction that attempts to seperate these tokens from the ones used in ICOs, it appears as if the SEC and FinCEN don't really care about intentions, rather how these tokens end up being used. As a YC startup, with access to some well-seasoned sources of advice, I'm wondering what you've heard on these issues as they relate to your project? "The U.S. Treasury Department's FinCEN division recently declared that any developer that sells convertible virtual currency, including in the form of ICO coins or tokens, in exchange for another type of value that substitutes for currency is a "money transmitter" subject to proper registration with the Treasury Department, anti-money-laundering rules, and other regulatory and licensing requirements -- requirements that, if not satisfied, could result in imprisonment." from https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-exchanges-ico-teams-brain/

You could just make a Google Sheet called "My Friend Tokens", make two columns "name" and "amount", and put each friend on a row. Then enter your rewards there and share the sheet in read-only mode with everyone.

What's the actual difference between this and an Ethereum token? Except you don't need to pay for the Google Sheet, of course.

This made me laugh. In case it’s a serious question: the excel sheet doesn’t transfer ownership of the tokens to the friend. It would be like writing it down in my notebook.

What does ownership mean in this context? There’s nothing that the friend can do with those tokens. Transferring them to someone else doesn’t make any sense either.

So how is having a useless token balance recorded on Ethereum any different from having one recorded on a Google Sheet?

Zasssssssssssss! In his mouth. You Win.

And your opinion is my opinion. It's not a good idea because it is not free.

You could create anything worthless that would mean "the token", and that would be enough.

You could use PGP keys if you want it to be private and to run.

Created a coin! We've been toying around with the idea of crowd-sourcing a lot of mapping (for augmented reality) and could use the ETH network as the basic infrastructure to make it happen.

The details around pricing + scarcity mechanics connecting to physical spaces still need to be worked out, but the idea is promising. This would be a nice abstraction once there is an API where we could hook into!

https://www.onhexel.com/token/aab493ef-dbef-4d78-bb3a-9b7927...

This is very very rad. Good work folks! Less crypto scamming and more crypto fun is great.

Jean

Hi i'm founder of https://bitbank.nz a cryptocurrency forecasting platform, pre ICO.

I think more things supporting ICO's would be great e.g. like how waves has a decentralized exchange so that when you create a token on waves you can immediately monetize it.

I suppose theres a decentralised exchange for ERC20 tokens somewhere, but something that smoothes the entire end to end ICO process would be amazing.

Trying to check your app out, I got "Our security policy blocks MetaMask in Firefox. Please try Chrome, Brave, or Opera."

Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. We have a CSP in place to keep our site secure, but Firefox enforces it differently than other browsers, which prevents MetaMask from working. To make it work we would have to relax our CSP to the point where it wasn't really secure at all, so for now we don't support FireFox. We put a bounty on Gitcoin for someone to fix it.

If the user agent shows that the browser is Firefox, serve a relaxed csp policy, and a large warning banner explaining what you just explained.

I like the idea of ease of use for creating a token . But, if I sign up for your service what do you anticipate the cost of it will be per month / year for this?

Also, what are the smart contracts you use or security features that you have and can it be audited or is it a trade secret ?

Have you looked at other private ledger technologies and what do you think of those ?

There is no cost per month / year for the existing functionality, it’s all free. The cost later on will be for opt-in features.

Right now we have a single token contract that has been audited. We also have a few other smart contracts in the works, to be used with your token.

By private ledger, do you mean private blockchains? I’ve always been less interested in those. Part of the fun in blockchains is the public nature of them, and how they enable transparency and interaction between everyone. To me, private blockchains seem like they should just be databases in most cases. But I’m not an expert in that area by any means.

More like things like hyperledger https://www.hyperledger.org/ . Maybe a better term I should use is permissioned ledger.

My favorite is the HN Coin.

> I created a Hacker News token. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to send you some (for free!).

https://www.onhexel.com/token/9ef7aaf7-82b2-470f-a84d-e392e7...

Hi John & Marcus. We are interested in this. Can the coins we make be traded on an exchange?

Hey, they are pretty standard ERC-20 tokens, so they technically can be traded on an exchange. However, right now all of the coins have pretty low volume, so most exchanges probably wouldn't list them. A decentralized exchange built on 0x would work though!

It was my impression that any coin could be listed on certain exchanges if you pay the fee to do so. Depending on the exchange it could range from 50k to 1 million USD just to be added.

Yes, that's usually about right for most exchanges. But if your coin isn't popular enough, they usually will not add it.

However, there is a protocol for decentralized exchanged called 0x. Any tokens on Ethereum can be traded on this protocol, using websites like Radar Relay.

Congratulations on your launch! Could you please compare your project to OST? For example, I just used their new kit to launch an ERC20 based token: https://kit.ost.com/

Thanks!

Browsing to that page I notice my browser is pinging mainnet.infura.io over and over. Is infura.io the same company as hexel, do you have a formal partnership with them, or are you just piggy-backing their API without proxying it?

Infura is a service that allows you to make calls to the Ethereum blockchain. We use it to get the current state of your token contract.

Why do you use infura and not your own node?

For now we're using Infura for speed of development. We plan to use our own node in the near future.

Sounds like a great project.

I notice that the pricing model currently only features a free option. Wondering if you might be able to tell us more about the business model long term?

Many thanks

We're going to keep developing features that make tokens easier to use, especially at a larger scale. We'll charge for premium features later down the road, but those features aren't set in stone yet. We have a few things planned already, things like automated token distribution (without needing MetaMask) and smart contract integrations.

neat! this is such a great idea. I think there was someone else trying this as well but your setup is a lot more streamlined for non-techies out there.

This is an interesting take on the BaaS market. So this does something to similar to, for example, Chain (chain.com), but for non-technical people?

Kind of. I don't know that much about Chain, but it seems like they are building private blockchain infrastructure for payments. Our tokens can obviously be used for payments, but the angle right now is not that this is faster and easier (because at this point in time, it's not). It's more that this lets people explore new concepts with tokens, and we give non-technical people the tools to try those concepts out. And also make it fun.

Scammers on HN now... To be expected I suppose.

Human greed is matched only by human gullibility.

But do we need that, though?

Pyramids for everyone!

awesome! do you want hire another engineer?

great product!!!

Given that your goal is to make toys, the tradeoffs of cryptocurrencies are unacceptable. The whole architecture of cryptocurrencies is based around extreme security and trust. Who needs that level of security for a toy? Why would I tolerate high fees, slow transactions, and a clunky user experience if the token isn't worth anything? Why would I use a globally-distributed power-guzzling network of thousands of GPUs to make something as silly as TallCoin? This has all the downside of cryptocurrencies with none of the upside.

Databases aren't trendy, but they'd solve the same problem better with less waste.

Once we create the token, do we have full control of the Ethereum wallet from which it is issued?

You will have full control of the token contract from the ETH address that you used to create the token.

This is super cool. Love your unique take on making crypto useful right now and focusing on fun & community (rather than ICO hype).

Launch HN: Hexel (YC W18) – Create a cryptocurrency for your community