Even as a developer, when I saw "tokenbrowser.com", I was expecting to see a web browser. Visually, it looks more like a chat client (makes sense since they are taking inspiration from WeChat).
Having been on the marketing side of a consumer product which used "browser" to describe what it was, I can confirm that "browser" = "web browser" to nearly everyone (analysts included) and is truly, sincerely not worth fighting.
In my experience, until they fix the "browser" positioning, nearly every conversation they have with anyone who might care about the actual product will include 2-5 minutes of explaining and rationalizing the use of a word that people already believe they understand.
Frankly, I think brave needs to look at this and realize they could race to be a point of sale payment solution. This miscommunication makes me realize what brave payments could turn into.
I think this is exactly what's missing from blockchain-derived technologies: a simple human interface to remote resources. More to the point, calling this thing a browser anchors it firmly into a well-known context. This should be useful for explaining it to our parents.
I think if I told my mom this was a browser, she would be confused to see something that looks more like her text message than a web page.
I'm looking at the Apache LDAP browser right now. Not a spec of HTML anywhere.
Perhaps a more constructive question would be: what is the best way to describe such apps?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161695 [2] https://wiki.status.im
Serious question - is it easier or more likely to fix government issues which cause that lack of cash, or is it easier to fix those issues in order to get the technical infrastructure necessary to transplant technology not even widely used in the US?
The notion that a poor villager would be reliant on the Ethereum network for anything is slightly terrifying. Where do they go if they're wronged, there's a bug, or the people running the network decide upon a hard fork?
Is that a reliable money supply?
> What happens if I lose my phone? Can I recover my funds?
> Our launch today only uses Ethereum testnet coins (not real money) in case this happens. However, you can recover access to your wallet by storing a backup phrase, or by choosing trusted friends (coming soon).
Also, the stated aim of helping the poorest sounds noble, but experience with charity is clear: poor people want solutions used by wealth countries, not a solution designed to be used by them. Banks and Courts can't be what the first world uses to fix problems, while we make a different system for the poor.
https://www.ted.com/talks/timothy_prestero_design_for_people...
Creating a stable and trustworthy government and a banking system is hugely difficult compared with developing any cryptocurrency.
Btw, I really love The Phileas Club; it's a great roundup of world news, and as someone with a more or less conservative tendency, I think the host (Patrick Beja) does a great job being fair to points of view that aren't his own.
Be realistic. How many Sub-Saharan Africans are using Token or working on it right now? You're first-world devs working on first-world tech and wrapping it up in humanitarian terms because it makes you more attractive.
It's kind of exploitative. It's all about money at the end of the day, isn't it?
I apologize for the rant. Just had a semester of classes on faith and development and law and development and this stuff is often very complex and a type of unintentional colonialism often runs through it.
"Hey, check out these people! Check out how much they need our help! Wouldn't things be so much better if we did X for them?"
In many cases, yes, but in a lot of ways it is impossible for people who aren't on the ground to properly understand culture, context, and needs. Does the team have anyone on the ground? Is this informed by research on the topic? From a less critical perspective, a portion of the site dedicated to such research (and thus informing the goals) would be really cool and useful.
I'm still having a hard time seeing any cryptocurrency based application as anything but an attempt to facilitate speculation based on that currency's value. There seem to be so many perverse incentives inherent to this technology that I automatically find any idealistic application of it suspect.
Perhaps this is overly cynical, but all cryptocurrencies seem to boil down to a system that would immensely benefit whoever came up with that particular currency (by virtue of having mined all the early blocks before going public or whatever) and whoever invested early if it ever took off.
Governments, banks and other financial institutions that are able to create more units of a currency (by literally and figuratively printing money in the case of governments and by virtually creating money through fractional reserve lending in the case of financial institutions) immensely benefit from their monopoly/oligopoly privileges in that regard.
Probably not, especially not for all the coins started after bitcoin took off.
Bitcoin itself may be an exception but without a reliable genesis story it's impossible to know for sure.
In Bitcoin's case, Satoshi created the world's first trustless, global digital payment system and distributed it as open source.
Maybe it's just me, but that seems like a pretty big deal. Especially when the software was not patented, and free for anyone to use and build with.
Could Satoshi hold a bunch of BTC worth over a billion USD? Yup, and I hope he/they do. IMHO the creator(s) deserves all that wealth.
> whoever invested early if it ever took off.
Is that not the nature of anything that is capable of being an investment?
With cryptocurrencies, I don't have to worry about that. The fact that I can store them in a physical location (e.g. a phone app, on a paper wallet in a vault) is immensely useful - I can keep coins in my phone wallet for sending to friends for shared bills, and don't have to think about whether the company that owns my cash is going to make some bizarre policy change or if they are secure enough to prevent hackers manipulating my balance or crashing the company's infrastructure. There's also a sense of ownership that comes with that, similar to owning physical cash.
I think there's two innovations beyond bitcoin that are necessary to become properly useful instead of just a tech toy: economic stability, and fast transactions. Also, potentially offline transactions if that's feasible. Economic stability would provide the ability to trust the coins' ability to maintain value rather than using them for fast exchange and cash-out cycles (inflationary) or speculation and investment only (deflationary). Fast transactions for synchronous exchanges, e.g. in-person or business sales funnels. I don't know if Ethereum (or any other altcoin) provides these capabilities, but that's just my 2 satoshis.
Also, remember that understanding happens in layers. The web with all its components also once looked very alien to all of us (DNS, REST, Server, Client, Browser, FTP, Gopher, P2P, HTML, Javascript, the list goes on). We just take it all for granted because we grew up while layers were piled on top. But if you can't even tell a client from a server, then understanding how a modern web app works will also take a long time and will look way too complex.
This is not to say that ethereum will be as revolutionary as the web, just that simplicity can easier grow out of complexity than complexity can grow out of simplicity
[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process...
You just listed how Ethereum is a sizable tech stack and still growing and then suggest that it will eventually get simpler - after it has more users, after there is technical lock-in.
That seems contradictory to many working projects. Perhaps it is complex? It's a reinvention of almost the entire web stack.
The complexity you're referring to may be the runtime? It is more complex than, say, Bitcoin because it has for most purposes a Turing complete language baked into the protocol.
Bitcoin is a blockchain that forms consensus on the state of a specific implementation of a data structure (somewhat arbitrarily, a list of transactions) and it has a very limited set of operations to manipulate that data.
Coming to distributed consensus on a transaction ledger is ultra-useful, as we have come to know. But there may be other data structures that may be useful for distributed consensus as well. Rather than building a blockchain for each one, why not build that flexibility into one protocol so the developer can choose?
Ethereum is a blockchain that forms consensus on the state of a more general set of data types, with a Turing complete language to operate on the data.
More complex? Yes. But the hope is that this flexibility drives a rich developer ecosystem, where innovation can happen within the network, rather than having to build your own network from scratch.
As for decentralization leading to fragmentation? This is a feature, not a bug. It is the feature that allowed Ethereum to grow in tangent with a thousand other blockchain mechanisms. Maybe fragmentation will bring its demise, but it as breath of fresh air from our rapidly consolidating tech industry.
I bet you the next smallest state-level medical provider registry right now is probably 50,000 lines of server-side code.
How does this make ethereum too complex to be useful?
Open Whisper Systems source is GPLv3.
It's all the same protocol, but three different networks running that protocol. You can't communicate between these networks, and you'll need three accounts in order to communicate to people using these networks.
In fact, Whisper Systems has actively killed every third party app that tried plugging into Signal's network. While there's nothing stopping you from making a client, expect a lot of hostility from them if you decide to do so.
If they are using the standard protocol then how do they connect to the Ethereum network? Do they use their servers as proxy to the network? Because if it's so, that would defeat the whole point to me.
This app is more about having WeChat with crypto payments and with app interactions. Light client could come later though.
No, SPV clients exist to avoid running a node: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4649/what-is-an-...
This is totally false. So called SPV clients have been available since 2011 I think. Where the hell did you get this information? Just curious.
Examples of lite bitcoin clients include (but not limited to) breadwallet, bitcoin wallet for android (Schildbach), multibit, bittiraha-walletd etc.
- Is this just a messaging app? A payments app? A web browser?
- It's all of those things, except not a web browser, it's an "app browser" (why not app store, especially considering the whole point of these is that they are paid?)
- The starting experience is anything but compelling: http://i.imgur.com/U69Gskl.png
- Is this developed by Coinbase? If so, why is there no mention, and the app is developed by "Bluxome Labs"?
From the top of my head the following examples come to mind.
1. Early criticism of the tablet was that nobody would use them because they didn't have a keyboard.
2. Early criticism of the internet was that nobody would ever purchase anything over the internet.
3. Early criticism of dropbox mentioned elsewhere in this thread, "they're just re-selling S3, why would anyone use that".
Disclaimer that I'm pretty deep in the Ethereum space so my perspective is anything but objective, but it is informed as I know the space quite well.
Smart contracts are capable of big transformative change to how we do a lot of things, but they are REALLY new and we're only just starting to learn how to use them and what we can use them for. Here are some examples.
1. Look at [ENS](http://ens.domains/) as an example of what DNS might look like if it weren't centralized.
2. Look at [simple Escrow examples](https://dappsforbeginners.wordpress.com/tutorials/two-party-...) for how smart contracts can remove middlemen from financial transactions.
None of these things are likely to blow up into massive mainstream adoption tomorrow but they are illustrative of what is possible and there are a lot of people working very hard to make these things ready for mainstream adoption.
In my opinion what's really missing is a fiat currency token, that can be legally recognised as actual money for a lot of business to be able to go massive.
Servicing the underbanked is an important goal. I know people working on solving underbanked issues and I know it is important to them and support them.
In this case, your comment is a completely blatant blaming statement. Just because less than traditional marketplaces share a similarity to this product, or the other way around, is no indication it's intended use is a darknet market replacement. In other words, the developers intent here is unlikely to be what you claim, simply by way of a biased comparison. The outcome of use by users may be different certainly, but that doesn't make your claim valid, or rational.
In fact, the only group who would be mostly likely to make this claim would be a group who seeks to control markets. If such a group sought to control markets, by manipulation of sentiment and social logic (of which is required for discussing said post) then a highly rational thing to do would be to create a lot of accounts over a long period of time and then use those accounts randomly to post negative sentiment about things that remove control from the group.
Further, I present an observation that by not knowing who it is that is posting, we (the HackerNews group) are doing ourselves a disservice in letting these individuals have an equal voice, especially when it is a voice of blame. That is not to say that entities should be denied posting when new, but perhaps those entities should be required to engage in positive additions to the discussion before being able to be blaming, as I am doing here, clearly. Of course, I have the karma to do so and a long history of comments that can be inspected to verify identity.
That's a good use-case for cryptocurrencies, and text messaging, if there ever was one. I'd like to see a project, similar to HN be developed which implements this using similar techniques to eliminate the increasing inclusion of irrational arguments into the discussion.
You know how AWS went down a while ago and github (and a zillion other sites) stopped working? With this tool, you could log into a repo manager (several are in the works) and there is no single point of failure that can take it offline.
You know how you wanted to send money from Taiwan to the US and the bank wire was declined despite repeated attempts and without any clear explanation and your money was trapped in a bank account in Taiwan? (might not have happened to you, but is happening to me at the moment) with this tool the exact rules for how a particular currency can move around is specified ahead of time in clear turing-complete computer code.
The only reason Twitter can stop that now is because the force of law stands behind their admonitions. How would Ethereum stop Twitter from suing a big alternate app vendor? The barriers that exist to prevent this are already non-technical.
>You know how AWS went down a while ago and github (and a zillion other sites) stopped working? With this tool, you could log into a repo manager (several are in the works) and there is no single point of failure that can take it offline.
Ethereum is an append-only system such that data inserted cannot be revoked? I know how btc works but have only glanced at Ethereum. I know programs are registered as parts of the blockchain, but all data and assets? If not, how do you ensure there is no point of failure for an interface like GitHub, or do you just mean the code to run it will always be available since it will be in the chain?
>You know how you wanted to send money from Taiwan to the US and the bank wire was declined despite repeated attempts and without any clear explanation and your money was trapped in a bank account in Taiwan?
Again, this is not a technical limitation. The banking system has every ability to move those numbers around. They are declining to do so without disclosing the reason. In this case, Ethereum/Bitcoin are not functionally different than using any other non-seized liquid asset. Someone could refuse to honor your ETH/BTC transfer just as easily as they could refuse to accept your USD transfer.
It's a little less expressive, which makes it safer. Easier to reason about the code, for example)
https://github.com/tokenbrowser/token-app-js/blob/master/LIC...
My company is receiving many inquiries oriented to managing funds and trading. Also, In the context of YC Startup School we are building an API for multiple cryptocurrencies, tokens, and smart contracts. We are even disassembling smart contracts to gather more metrics about the blockchain usage. If you are interested on using it instead of building your own infrastructure please contact me via my company page.
Is this an end run around Apple's 30% of IAP?
I wonder if they will reset the usernames when it gets put on livenet because it kind of seems unfair.
