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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

>Sirin Labs, for example, raised $158 million last year to create a mobile phone that allows consumers to trade and use crypto. The company, which will ship its first batch of a few thousand phones in December, is now considering abandoning hardware altogether and refocusing on shipping software for other phone makers to use, Chief Executive Moshe Hogeg said in an interview. Sirin now only has enough funds for six to 12 months of operations, he said.

Uh. Glad this bubble has popped. Of all the things I want in a phone, "trade and use crypto" isn't quite a requirement. Besides existing phones trade and use crypto quite well

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Which phone (secure computing platform) do you trust to securely store your wallet key? All it takes to lose is an update to the wallet app that sends the key to a server.

You can install from an apk and not get updates.

Besides, if all you're doing is some kind of chain of authority you could do it through fdroid which enforces a constant key. No need for a standalone phone which will anyway have the same components as any other phone.

That sounds very reasonable, is there an equivalent chain of authority possible on iOS?

Sounds like a perfect watering hole attack to make a "cryptocurrency phone".

Think of it like selling a mail-order gold bar cozy. 100% of your customers have a physical item that's vulnerable to crowbar enhanced recovery.

Assuming everything goes as planned probably the Librem 5 when it comes out or anything that can run Replicant (or any other similar radio isolating fully open OS).

Aren't its baseband and wifi drivers still proprietary?

Definitely not the one made by some shitty startup with no track record.

Why would you want the wallet with you at all times? How often are you transacting? Seems like more of a risk than a benefit here.

There's clearly a demand for people having their old-school credit card or equivalent on their phone and debitable wirelessly.

I personally find that more risk than benefit, but traditional banking's security mechanism seems adequate for many people.

If crypto currencies cannot offer the same level of convenience/security, then how can they compete in the mass market?

If I had to choose a phone, iPhone. I doubt they can build anything close to it in terms of security. Not that I would use any phone I have with me the majority of the time for it, but I doubt they can do better in that form factor.

IIRC, Apple was banning actual BTC wallets because they recognized BTC was a competitor to their App Model.

You could use BTC online wallets on Apple Phones, but it was difficult to find one where your iPhone itself stored the wallet.

I can understand why one would not want such "features" in their phone. But I can't understand why someone would be glad something failed unless one is a competitor of the failing company.

It's inefficient for capital to be spent in useless projects. I'd rather that kind of money go to startups actually building useful things or at least trying to build something that people actually want

most of these bankruptcies are due to firms holding reserves in crypto. I don't think all companies combined spent that much of resources on employees in recent years, and most of the lost money is due to plummeted market, and that means that someone else got these resources to deploy more efficiently. so not all is lost in waste human work (if we would agree that it is indeed waste human work, which I personally do not agree with)

also, all that money spent on human work ended up in someones else pocket to spend further. In a way it is a "bitcoin tax on capitalist (or wanna be capitalists)"

Crypto being in a bubble meant a lot of capital pouring into crypto that would otherwise have had more productive uses.

>also, all that money spent on human work ended up in someones else pocket to spend further.

Broken window fallacy. There is no benefit from useless jobs. They are strictly worse than non-useless jobs.

There is certainly an opportunity cost related to all these bankruptcies - I agree with that. But without someone trying it, we would not know it would fail. So in a way, it is a valuable result as well. (and no, I do not believe someone can have perfect vision to know 100% one use of capital is right and another one is not - this is part of the process - trying and failing or succeeding)

I think I could have told you $158 million to create a crypto phone was a waste. Like I said - glad the bubble is popping.

And I would not believe you until I saw this failure proving me wrong :)

The energy use / ecological impact of crypto makes it nothing short of unethical.

much of ideas behind bitcoin itself was to replace traditional financial system. and traditional financial system is not zero energy use industry. in fact it uses a lot of energy. rough comparison from 2017 - https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...

granted - having both traditional and crypto financial system at the same time is net negative, but we can't really switch one on and another off instantly.

I mean, you can drive a Bugatti Chiron 500km for the same amount of energy as a single bitcoin transaction. The cost of a single transaction using e.g. visa is utterly negligible in comparison.

Edit: Some truly depressing figures here [1] including this

> Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 16.54

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

the author is making a point about the comparison to a transaction on a visa network. transaction on a visa network cannot happen without the rest of the traditional financial industry. I think the closest blockchain tech to a visa network will be lighting network, which is still WIP.

EDIT: Lightning Network potentially will be able to process much-much more transactions per second than visa network with the same usage of underlying bitcoin blockchain. Essentially Lighting Network allows you to create easily scalable and distributed version of visa network.

It could use vastly less power. The power consumption is a result of so many miners raising the difficulty. Lower difficulty == lower power use.

Do you guys literally not understand how the network works?

more difficulty is better - more protected network is. where efficiency will come from is better mining hardware and introduction mass adoption of the lightning network.

It isn't a requirement for you. Fortunately that's now how products are made because really we only need some mosquito nets in Africa and drinking water, everything else is a luxury for someone.

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