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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

I see so many people here frustrated with the fact that the creators are giving nonsense answers. It's important to remember that this is a money-making scam. Asking them how their technology provides any value to users is like asking a Nigerian prince about the philosophy behind constitutional monarchies.

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Usually I would agree with you but this is an intriguing concept. They explicitly state in the white paper that this is an experiment, so treat it as such. All I’m hearing is a lot of “contempt prior to investigation”.

I agree that it is an intriguing concept. But at the same time they seem to be ready to sell Kong for $$$. And they don't explain why there are three tiers of rarity to the cash - shouldn't 500 KONG == 500 KONG all the time every time? Seems like a mechanic to raise more money, just like 'rare' cosmetic items in video games.

The "tiers" are just bundle names. We could have been super dry but decided to make it more like collectable cards packs; our expectation is that most people will buy Kong since it looks cool (that's totally fine with us). Our margin on Kong is typical of other startup hardware projects; not great. We're not raking in cash from a digital token sale.

We've made a physical product, we'll sell it to cover the costs of doing so.

I agree that they do look cool. They remind me of euro notes but turned up a notch or two.

But I'm wondering what made you decide to go with the generic greek bust heads? Missed opportunity to depict some cryptography and computer pioneers imo.

They’d probably get sued if some of those portraits were of people still alive today.

Some of the design elements are skeuomorphic throwbacks to traditional currencies.

One design pattern among currencies is "person on front, place on back" - we didn't want Kong to be too geographically local so we picked the planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Luna, etc) for the places and the associated Roman pantheon. Romans used currency while Greeks famously didn't. (Lydians aside.)

Yeah see “startup” is the problem word there. That implies you have a product. You have a cool hobby project, but there’s no use case.

I’m so curious why people think (and it’s certainly not just you, I see this attitude all over) that it is possible to run a business without providing value to customers.

We've sold and are selling products to customers. That seems to constitute utility for someone as well as fit into the definition of a "business".

This is a truly unbelievable answer to the question you were asked.

You think? If someone is paying them money for the manufacturing of goods, then regardless of the value and utility of those goods, I’d say they have a business.

It's a dark world where the fact that someone will pay for something/someone is, alone, proof of utility.

This seems incredibly disingenuous. Unless the founders have a history of fraud, your comment is way out of line.

And yea it is cool, this overriding principle defies any predefined business model or use case. Novel things come from new things not incremental improvements like “Apple Pay”. Which those are explicable money making scams and schemes to control people’s banking info and insert yet another middle man to profit off the mere act of transacting.

This is the right response. I'm surprised people are even entertaining the idea.

The concept of a cryptocurrency backed physical paper note is definitely not a scam.

As far as this specific project. The creators will probably need to show some physical notes, how they work and so on.

This appears to be an early-stage project idea so cut them some slack here.

It is a particularly strong scam in the crypto space. I'm very impressed with the innovation in their area.

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