CryptoKitties sales plummet in popularity
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cryptokitties#sectio...
Someone who bought cryptokitty early on sold it for 100x returns easily.
Everyone on the hype train was reselling kitties to next bigger fool.
Now try to get 12Mi outside of SF and Bay Area for something with a more solid business plan, see how it goes.
I had a lot of respect for AH and USV. In particular I know some of the folks at USV. But some of their decisions astound me. When they invested in Crypto Kitties and Fred posted about it, I felt they jumped the shark.
I remember how $31M was poured into a startup called Color a few years back, only for the startup to go belly up a month later. Meanwhile they don’t even take a meeting with something far more promising, sometimes. I feel I will never understand the VC mindset.
For what it’s worth, here are their perfunctory rationales:
https://versionone.vc/announcing-our-investment-in-cryptokit...
I think that might because you're looking at it like this:
"How will a game that lets you breed collectible cats be something that people wanna do for a long time?"
When instead you should be looking at it like..
"Can provably scarce digital assets that are actually owned by users (not rented like the current system) be useful in the gaming world?"
CryptoKitties as a game is likely just a fad. But the investors are betting the latter idea might be a game changer when executed correctly (ie. building a fun game that has longterm user retention)
2. CryptoKitties went viral, slowing ETH transactions to a crawl and making top headlines - what if that can be repeated?
3. as someone said, 12M is nothing for them
2. Nobody invested in Crptokitties. They invested in a gaming/collectibles company; from TechCrunch: “While the startup is being pretty mum on what the future looks like and what they’re planning on using this funding for, it’s almost certain that the long term goal is to expand beyond CryptoKitties and use the same Ethereum ERC-721 collectible standard to create other game experiences, especially ones that can be played by regular people who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency.”
You use flappy bird and pokemeon go as examples of fads that would be dumb to invest in, but what about the early investors in Zygna? Gaming and collectibles doesn’t appeal to me personally, but they are massive markets and growing. Early stage investing is a long shot, and odds are this company fails. But the execution to date and market opportunity are sufficiently appealing that I’d invest alongside USV in these guys if I could.
The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them. Their immutability is their biggest selling point, after all.
If the conversation is about how human society can evolve with this new level and kind of coordination, then we may fare better.
Ex: The only things you can do with already mined blockchain blocks are selling them, or hoarding them.
You don't actually do anything with blocks. Blocks contain transaction data for the network, confirmed by miners who play hash games for block rewards. I think you mean the actual coins that come as block rewards, aka Satoshis / Bitcoin.
Are you familiar with decentralization and developing apps on things like Ethereum? Or IPFS?
Cryptocurrencies aside, currencies are hard to understand. It's not "you trade money for stuff, duh!". It's how USA can print dollars to import stuff from China year by year without giving anything back. It's who prints money. It's how come printing dollars makes existing ones less valuable while also creating debt. How does independent currency affect debt-based currencies?
It's easy to be elitist. We know about computers more than average Joe, so we are experts on computer's money, but IMO cryptocurrencies are more currencies than crypto. And currency part is harder to understand than crypto part.
I also doubt that blockchains contribute anything of value for most applications that are currently being tried out, but I also felt that "selling blockchain blocks" was an odd way to phrase it.
It's a bit like someone claiming that a perpetuum mobile is impossible because "movement consumes energy and eventually it will run out". You can't tell whether they have the correct idea about conservation of energy and momentum or whether they actually believe that moving at a constant speed would constantly require energy even without friction.
Let's see what's going to happen to finance. The fiat-crypto infrastructure that has been and is continuing to be laid out by multiple varied parties is an indicator for the recurrence of another bull market, especially when the current market cap is compared to the the cash, stocks and commodities that are out there, each kind of which crypto assets are identical to.
The best thing we can hope for is the next bull run to be based on actual use, working products that add benefit and value to market society. And who knows, maybe it'll all even become transformative.
Please remember that there are over 7 billion people in the world that want to potentially use it, so Bitcoin (or similar) are not working as a payment system.
Everything has existed on the plane of theory and whitepapers so far.
Nearly a decade after BTC's release and nearly half a decade after's ETH, shouldn't there be a few mainstream applications using them?
I run a CBD store and it's extremely hard for CBD companies to get banking without exorbitant fees. For example, it costs ~2.5% for normal companies to process a credit card payment through stripe. For us, it costs >7%. Many of my competitors and suppliers are turning to cryptocurrencies for the lower fees and guaranteed certainty of payment.
The impact of crypto is yet to be fully estimated but it seems as if there isn't any existing system crypto cannot replicate and there are many systems enabled by crypto that existing systems will fail to create.
Cryptocurrencies might have an edge for a while, but don't count on it long-term.
It's not even funny. Go for ETH, BCH, Dash, or whatever, Bitcoin is proud to continually shoot themselves in the foot.
Geez.
Some other applications: provably fair gambling, decentralized voting and an uncensorable twitter (ex memo.cash).
Gambling: why is that better than a non-blockchain, regulated solution? The results have to come from somewhere, so that is a centralized point of trust you inevitably need. Unless you mean that the odds are decided "fairly" then I question why you would bet your money at a place where you can't trust the odds, or why you don't bet elsewhere where the odds are more in your favor.
Decentralized voting: I don't know why anybody would want that. If you don't control who votes, you end up with rigged votes. Unless you mean that only the block producers (miners) vote, then you will end up in an oligarchy.
Uncensorable Twitter: If by "uncensorable" you mean immutable: nobody sane wants that. Once somebody posts child pornography to the blockchain, you will have to explain to the police why you have child pornography on your computer.
Even with full 100MB blocks you're only looking at ~5TB of storage for a whole year. This is easily attainable for many people, including myself, today. The point isn't to have everyone run full nodes you know, some trust is acceptable.
The fact is cryptocurrencies work very well as a payment system today.
> then I question why you would bet your money at a place where you can't trust the odds
Obviously here you wouldn't need to trust the odds as they are verifiable.
> I don't know why anybody would want that. If you don't control who votes, you end up with rigged votes.
You can have a voting scheme where you give out unique votes, centrally, which you can then yourself without trust verify that your vote is correctly counted. Why anyone would want that should be clear.
> you mean immutable: nobody sane wants that
Many people would want that. There are of course drawbacks.
You can also store hashes of content which you can store elsewhere which you can verify. Like many torrent sites work.
You missed the point about gambling. Please re-read what I said about the odds. You need to trust the service anyways to input the correct result.
Voting requires anonymity. By giving out unique votes, you jeopardized this.
Storing content elsewhere doesn't require a blockchain because it doesn't guarantee that it will still be there. Thus it's not censorship resistant.
Decentralization is just a means to an end: permissionless p2p digital payments. You don't need to personally run a full node for that.
For example Bitcoin Cash is a great payment system.
Or that the Zimbabwean Dollar is representative of all fiat