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Jim Blasko Explains BitCoin Spinoff 'Unbreakable Coin' (Video 1 of 2)
Las Vegas seems an appropriate place for cryptocurrency businesses to emerge, both because the coins themselves are so volatile that some gambling instinct may be required, and because Vegas is a high-tech outpost with lower taxes and lower rents than many other West Coast hot-spots, well-suited to risky startups with ambition but without huge venture backing.Jim Blasko moved there to work on low-voltage engineering for Penn & Teller, and is a qualified Crestron programmer, too (useful in a town that looks from the air like one giant light-show), but has shifted to a quite different endeavor, or rather a complex of them — all related to cryptocurrency. I ran into Blasko during this month's CES, at a forum with several other cryptocoin startups, and the next day we met to talk about just how hard (or easy) it is to get into this world as an entrepreneur.
Blasko has some advice for anyone who'd like to try minting a new cryptocurrency. Making your own coin, he says, is the easy part: anyone can clone code from an existing entrant, like Bitcoin, and rename the result — and that's exactly what he did. The hard work is what comes after: making worthwhile changes, building trust, and making it tradeable. Blasko's done the legwork to get his own currency, which he's bravely called "Unbreakable Coin," listed on exchanges like Cryptsy, and is working on his own auction site as well. He's also got an interesting idea for cryptocoin trading cards, and had a few prototypes on hand. (Part 1 is below; Part 2 to follow.) Alternate Video Link
Blasko has some advice for anyone who'd like to try minting a new cryptocurrency. Making your own coin, he says, is the easy part: anyone can clone code from an existing entrant, like Bitcoin, and rename the result — and that's exactly what he did. The hard work is what comes after: making worthwhile changes, building trust, and making it tradeable. Blasko's done the legwork to get his own currency, which he's bravely called "Unbreakable Coin," listed on exchanges like Cryptsy, and is working on his own auction site as well. He's also got an interesting idea for cryptocoin trading cards, and had a few prototypes on hand. (Part 1 is below; Part 2 to follow.) Alternate Video Link
The hard work is what comes after: ... building trust, ...
By being based in Las Vegas?
Well, it could be worse. He could be based on Wall Street.
So what is the cost of this ad? /. shoudl just post their rates so that we all know how much it costs to buy an article.
All these bitcoin spinoffs / wannabes simply want to reset the ponzi scheme with the reinventors sitting at the top, holding all the easily mined out coins. That's it.
A low inflation rate kind of kills the motivation to "mine" the coin and help the transaction network run, doesn't it? One of the reasons why Bitcoin (and the clones like Litecoin and Dogecoin) popular is that the early adopters could get a bunch of it while it was cheap and then watch it quickly go up in value.
I might be willing to devote about of $100 of power/time/compute cycles for a cryptocurrency that might be worth $500 a few years from now. If I knew that the currency was going to be worth $110 (best case scenario!) a few years from now, I'm not going to waste my time.
| How about a cryptocurrency that targets an inflation rate that is known to be economically stable, say 2%, by standardizing on a openly evaluated standard basket of goods. You know, how actual currencies work but without the middlemen of the reserve banks
Because you can't do that without reserve banks. And you can't have banks without a way of pricing money through time, and you can't price money through time without a debt market.
Hey cryptocurrency boosters, are you up to loaning bitcoin or something less popular for 10 years?