RadioShack – Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream | Hacker News Reader

RadioShack – Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream

radioshack.com

46 pointsneb_b61 comments

If you scroll down and look at the 'The Team', you'll see it's two guys Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez. They bought the Radio Shack brand a couple of years ago: https://www.retaildive.com/news/radioshack-brand-acquired-by...

Tai Lopez is a motivational speaker celebrity (first I've heard of him). And Alex Mehr is apparently a former co-founder of Zoosk (a dating app).

My first thoughts were: This is a scam, I'm on a page spelled almost like "radioshack.com"

Then: The old radioshack page has let their domain lapse and been taken over.

Then: Ah, Tai Lopez, the only man I've ever known to keep his bookcases in the garage, like a set of house tools.

On a side note, on Tai Lopez's head shot the man in the lower right facing the camera looks like he's realized this motivational talk is going nowhere.

Tai Lopez is the "here in my garage" douchbag

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/here-in-my-garage

It did result in one of the best YouTube poops of all time so there's that at least.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko

I had such a hard time deciding whether to vouch this comment. But if the knowyourmeme page is on topic, then surely linking to this video (which that page links to) is also on topic.

It's also interesting that such an influential brand is now owned by a random rich person. I never thought that my childhood hideout would become a punchline. The only way to make it better would be to add a little intro to the video like "At RadioShack, garages are important to us. That's why we've decided to invest in 47 new lambos that we bought with our RADIO tokens..."

What a sad ending for the only electronics shop in town. My friend and I used to hang out there after school and try to build logic gates and simple counters.

Uno reverse card: Tai Lopez uses the funds from this to rebuild electronics shops across the world, and becomes a household hero for nerds everywhere. Since this outcome is so weird, that outcome suddenly seems not-impossible.

It's savvy but pretty scammy, as people will assume the businesses are still alive, when they are just shell fronts, using the prior logo/branding/domain names.

Here's Tai's parent company and their purchased brands:

https://www.retailecommerceventures.com/

Some big ones that I recall going to back in the day are Radio Shack, Pier1, Stein Mart, and Linens N Things.

Old brands pretty much never die. I haven't seen one recently but for a time I was getting public relations pitches for RCA-branded devices that were clearly some generic Chinese knockoff things.

Ditto MG.

Tai Lopez is the master of flexing in front of books he hasn't read, cars he doesn't own, women he paid to be there..

Update: 'The Team' section was removed from the site.

About 5 years ago literally everyone was being bombarded with youtube ads by tai lopez, where he is in his garage showing off a lambo and talking about how books are his most prized possession

Zoosk is a total scam dating app. I don't trust that guy

Even the corpse of RadioShack has been brought back from the dead with the promise of crypto riches. Scrolling through their partners is like a who’s who of old defunct 90’s brands. DressBarn?? It makes it crystal clear what their strategy is.

I have fond memories of RadioShack, it’s part of what got me into computers and electronics. But taking those memories and weaponizing them against me to try and extract what I can only assume is money, feels wrong on so many levels.

If anything (and I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment) I will avoid this new Frankenstein creation. That said, I’m sure it will still entrap enough people to make these two guys even richer while still being a net negative for society as a whole.

File this under the same drawer as Mariah Carey partnering with McDonald’s to sell more junk food.

Hard to argue with any of your points, their entire concept is absurd.

Fascinating to watch cryptocurrency and blockchain become the go-to pivot for those who have run out of traditional ways to be profitable.

Is this the original company transitioning to cryptocurrency? It was the RadioShack brand simply auctioned off to someone who wanted to use an established brand for their crypto project?

This is unfortunately how people get into the habit of thinking all crypto and blockchain is a scam - because a huge numbers of scams and silly ideas are indeed running in the space...

What would you say is the ratio of genuine crypto innovation/research/companies compared to scams? Considering the signal-to-noise ratio, I don't think it's that weird to just say "it's all a scam anyway" since that rule of thumb actually works extraordinarily well. Unless you're talking to an expert or having a deep dive you've gotten the point across correctly.

I’m not sure what it is, it might be as high as 99-1. But the 1 is pretty incredible. Look at fxhash on Tezos, it’s created something truly incredible in generative art.

What's an actually useful, not-contrived use case that crypto enables that isn't otherwise possible _for the average resident of a stable/wealthy country_?

I work in crypto since a little while, and have following the tech since 2014 or so.

I’m still really skeptical of that trash fire going anywhere. Including my day job.

I can only thing of one application, and it still have to deliver:

Providing mesh network of wifi, LoRA or 5g where the node are administered by individuals.

The nodes are mining a proof of coverage. And effectively being payed to deliver a service ( providing wifi/LoRA/5g coverage )

The nodes cannot trust each other, and having a decentralized ledger help them split the bill and compensate the nodes for their work.

In my view it would provide a “last miles delivery of coverage”

I have a few project in mind that I won’t mention here. The crypto they are using is not subject to much speculation.

That my favorite use of that tech stack. ( since the decentralized land ledger projects seems to not go anywhere )

Kind of baffled that nobody has mentioned this yet, but:

Buying illegal drugs online

(I am hugely sceptical on most things crypto) generally speaking the view of a rich, stable country might make you blind to some real use cases because you just don't have them. But for people in less privileged countries having a permissionless system of digital dollars is actually extremely useful. Also my pet theory is that Bitcoin MIGHT suck money out of the property market and make home ownership more affordable.

Decentralized Identity for individuals and devices.

I've found the images here to be a good quick and dirty summary: https://www.gsma.com/identity/decentralised-identity

Maybe I'm just dense, but this seems more like a centralized identity more than a decentralized identity. Which, if you lose, like I have with various wallets I've had over the years, seems extremely sketchy.

there isn't one. but by the time people realise that a few unscrupulous people will have made a ton of - fiat - money out of the gullible masses.

NFTs have proven incredible for indie digital artists across the world, but particularly for artists from the third world where making a living off them is a bit easier. There’s a huge honest indie art movement on the Tezos NFT space.

Good places to look around in: Fxhash (amazing generative art market that creates uniques through interaction between the code and the blockchain) Hic Et Nunc (now multiple sites, fully decentralised art market) OBJKT (sort of a better UI for Tezos NFTs, same stuff as in Hic).

What does NFTs add to this that couldn’t be achieved by FXHash hosting ownership status in a PostgreSQL database?

Nobody trusts a single SQL database or any single developer or company. The advantage is that you have a trust less, decentralised database no one can alter and has thousands of people hosting it.

This is a common fallacy I’ve seen among developers - the idea that because the technical solution is inferior it’s social value must be inferior. Blockchain is not a technical solution, it’s a social solution. At least as far as NFTs it has solved an insoluble problem, which was no one trusted anyone in particular with a ledger about digital art ownership - but they do trust everyone/a a large group that’s incentivised to keep hosting it, and has problem to be tampering resistant.

It has been like this since the beginning.

The space is in dire need of regulation. Sociopaths go for the lowest level of effort with the maximum level of rewards. Right now making a dumb crypto token and shilling it is likely the easiest immoral way to make money in this world.

There was a similar trend in 2017 I think, but it died off with the bear market. It has scents of the original dotcom bubble. Slap a .com extension on your brand, collect the cash.

KODAKCoin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin) seems to be the most literal 2017 parallel to this: old, nostalgic brand scooped up and used to rent legitimacy for a silly coin scheme.

It’s weird how amnesiac the crypto market is, it feels like everything is a rerun these days of something we lived through just four years ago.

That was the first one I thought of as well.

RadioShack devolved in such a way, with a long dying death, that all of my memories of early radioshack have been replaced with later-year memories of their store, when they became a total joke. I have no nostalgia for the brand. I'm sure it would be different if they went out of business with dignity in like 2001.

The last time I went into Radioshack to 'get something' in 2011, i needed to get a couple of cables to connect a mini HDMI cable to a full size connector. They didn't have the exact cable so I had to get several different ones to make the connection work. The price for the cables was literally $91, so I didn't get it, and ordered it online instead. Sad

And honestly even the memories of early-ish RadioShack involved a lot of rose-tinted glasses. Even in the 70s there was a lot of crap consumer electronics mixed in with the readily-accessible cables, components, and maker stuff (such as it was).

This will really help address the complaint that cryptocurrency is just a Ponzi scheme.

This feels like the era of webvan and pets.com, except those things were simply premature.

A token defi swap of croins and crokens (crypto coins and tokens) brings zero value to the world.

> "Meet our Partners and Collaborators"

This is literally just the list of defunct brandnames Tai has acquired.

time is a flat circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin

Its just incredible to me that this is allowed to go on and on. It is clearly BS all of the way down - where are the regulators to stop this before the massive crash?

This is two guys who bought a brand and are using it to defraud people out of their money - how is this legal?

You're preaching to the same group of people who, in the main, oppose any regulation that restrict the ability of people to invest in anything they want to invest in.

ask the investigator, Judge and jury in this case -- apparently, you

> RadioShack, and RadioShack alone, can bridge the gap and "cross the chasm" of mainstream usage for Cryptocurrency.

This is it, folks.

Relevant tweet with Tai Lopez explaining: https://twitter.com/tailopez/status/1333228688456904707?s=21

The grift continues

Grift - is a small scale swindle. This is a large scale swindle, so need a new term that represents the scale.

Since they stole web3 and crypto as nomenclature, I've started calling them croins and crokens.

Megagrift.

So sad that Kimble isn't able to add to this...

Metagrift

Macrogrift

You had me at Tai Lopez. Honestly, I’m very sad this is real and not a pitch-perfect parody site because everything about it is literally satire.

Tai Lopez shilling for some RadioShack coin. What a world.

RIP beloved electronics brand. I used to love this store as a kid.

I still have my RadioShack branded multimeter.

Can you say, "Jump the shark"?

What a bummer for this brand.

At one point, I had hoped that Amazon would buy up all the radio shacks and convert them into Amazon prime lounges and provide basically a sort of temporary workspace/island of calm you could escape to in any suburb.

One person, or group of people, realizes you can hash elements in a linked list and we get decades of bullshit. Wake me when this is all over.

The Shack is Back

This is not the RadioShack we need, but maybe it's the RadioShack we deserve. :(

Is this a joke?

My first impression was that it might be serious (would sort of make sense for Radioshack to pivot), then I saw Tai Lopez listed on the team and assumed it was a joke.

But it appears to be "serious" (inasmuch as anything involving the anthropomorphic joke named Tai Lopez can be)

I work in the crypto space and am generally pretty bullish, but this is the biggest sell signal I've seen. I wonder if Tai took out a big short position and is now using his name to crash the market.

ugh the crypto virus is spreading to zombie companies

This is embarrassing.

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