
Line Launches Its First Cryptocurrency 'Link' - jessesoo
https://linecorp.com/en/pr/news/global/2018/20
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AgentME
Sounds like a lot of hot air. There's a lot written about how some new
companies are going to encourage LINK use and reward the users (doesn't
exactly sound very decentralized), and then a bunch of vague lines about how
LINK can be used to incentivize users of decentralized apps (dApps) of every
possible category. Nothing specific about those dApps though. Where do they
run? Ethereum? A brand new blockchain with its own vm and language? Systems
that focus on just a single of those categories have had a lot of hard
technical problems in being decentralized, but LINK is going to accomplish all
of those?

New cryptocurrency press releases that read like press releases and spend all
the time talking about company partnerships rather than the difficulties and
trade-offs of decentralization almost always end up being pump-and-dump
schemes in my experience.

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jstandard
The interesting point here is that they aren't doing an ICO. This reads to me
more like a blockchain exploration of a rewards system from a large company.

Far less likely to be a 'pump and dump' than the me too altcoin of the week
startups who focus on ICOs and being listed on bigger exchanges instead of
what value is actually being created.

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TekMol
I wonder why all the new crypto projects are so complex.

When Bitcoin was invented, it was already a pretty complex solution to a
problem that indeed should be tackled with new technology: Make payments
easier and more independent of third parties.

So far, Bitcoin has not achieved this well. Yet, I think there will be
technology that does.

But all those new projects are super complex. As if it is already time to
build whole new ecosystems on top of the crypto tech we have.

But we don't have very useful technology yet.

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mrschwabe
So you're saying a technology that has spawned a new market doing volume to
the tune of $500 million per day is 'not very useful'? I disagree.

Anyway, a lot of the complexity in this space is indeed over-engineering and
me-too engineering for problems that are already solved but that need to be
'customized' ever so slightly. In LINE's case they want the tech to line up
with their business model so just forking Bitcoin is not necessarily an option
for them (though perhaps they are using it on the backend or in some aspect of
their architecture / accounting system).

Maybe their new system will fail, maybe it won't - but definitely if they are
doing anything close to Bitcoin volume I wouldn't write it off as failure.

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lwansbrough
> So you're saying a technology that has spawned a new market doing volume to
> the tune of $500 million per day is 'not very useful'?

Well, actually that's pretty obvious. Most of the volume you speak of is just
trading. Trading isn't very useful, especially when it's just speculations on
speculations on virtual things that nobody really trusts enough to actually go
whole-hog on.

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mrschwabe
Nobody really uses the internet, most of the traffic you speak of is just
usenet boards and people pirating books. The internet isn't very useful
especially when you can get all the information you need at the library.
Nobody really trusts all these servers in different locations, it's to slow to
actually go whole-hog on anyway.

~~~
lwansbrough
The benefits of the internet at the time were time to access information, and
the varying types of information (much of which couldn’t be provided by a
library, such as email, or porn.) Bitcoin doesn’t win either of these
scenarios: it’s somehow slower to transact in digital currency (specifically
Bitcoin) than even hand to hand exchange of physical money - it’s faster for
me to walk down the block and pay for a sandwich than for me to pay online
with Bitcoin and have someone deliver it. Bitcoin isn’t really accepted
anywhere. You can take cash anywhere and pay for anything. Same with credit
for the most part.

Solve these issues and your argument might make sense.

And a friendly reminder that blockchain PoW systems are incredibly bad for the
environment.

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granaldo
They have an exchange after all too called bitbox
[https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bitbox](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bitbox)

