
Atari Is Jumping on the Crypto Bandwagon - mido22
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-15/pac-man-video-game-maker-atari-is-now-a-cryptocurrency-play
======
jerf
So, reasonably honest question (i.e., save the generic blockchain sarcasm for
the many other posts that will presumably be made here), does anyone know what
the game plan is for these companies? They have tokens, OK, great, but then
what? Are we supposed to buy them? Are we supposed to accumulate them in some
manner and trade them for something else? Are we supposed to accumulate them
in some manner and sell them? So Kodak is starting a blockchain to "pay
photographers", but does anyone have any details beyond that? If someone's
buying them, who, and why? How do I get a blockchain entry for a photograph?
How does that do anything?

I'm not asking for the really obvious sarcasm, so please only post "they have
no idea" if you've got decent evidence that they really do have no idea. I
presume they have _some_ sort of vision as to how these are going to do
something. If they merely have a bad or stupid plan, I'm asking for the bad or
stupid plan, not sarcasm. (I'm honestly just sort of assuming that none of
these plans will do anything that wouldn't work better with a centralized non-
blockchain-based infrastructure, but I'm at a loss as to what they even plan
to do with their probably-unnecessary blockchain.)

I've done at least a bit of poking at a couple of these things but I can never
find a concrete plan. (Including probably at least 15 minutes with Google
trying to figure out what Kodak was talking about when they first announced
it. Perhaps tech details have emerged since then?)

~~~
fludlight
1.) Get publicity

2.) Sell coins for USD

3.) Hope the SEC doesn't mind

4.) Sell stock (via a secondary offering) for USD

5.) Give USD to executives

6.) Build a cheap MVP to pay photographers or whatever

7.) Give more USD to executives

8.) "We're shutting down photopay because we couldn't get traction. Your coins
still exist. Let's pretend they aren't worthless."

9.) Give still more USD to executives to pursue machine learning for squirrels

~~~
aje403
10.) First squirrel in history gets promoted to Head Of Deep Blockchain
Diversity Learning for publicity

11.) Repeat

~~~
drharby
Red or grey?

~~~
joering2
slight OT, but visiting Europe for vacation I found black squirrel to be most
beautiful:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel)

~~~
stevekemp
I was visiting Mozart's grave in a Viennese graveyard (also the resting place
of Strauss) and managed to see a Red, Gray, and Black squirrel all within the
space of an hour.

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asciimo
This article stumbles right out of the gate. "Atari SA -- perhaps best known
for 1980s video-games 'Pac-Man' and 'Space Invaders' \-- is now jumping on the
cryptocurrency bandwagon." Those games were created Namco and Taito,
respectively. They were household titles well before Atari ported them to the
2600.

~~~
jedberg
To be fair, Atari SA isn't known for anything either. They just bought a well
known brand name. Even if they had listed actual Atari titles, you could make
the same criticism. :)

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corprew
I wish journalists would publish headlines like this and Kodak's recent
adventure as "The company that currently has the rights to the name [Whatever
Past Beloved Consumer Brand] is [Doing Whatever]"

It would be a lot clearer.

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reaperducer
I wonder what the throughput is on an Atari 2600 trying to mine Bitcoin.
Probably going to need the Supercharger cart.

~~~
asciimo
I'll take your question seriously and provide this story of an 1985 NES
attempting to mine. ([http://retrominer.com/](http://retrominer.com/))

~~~
Cyberdog
> For the portions of computing that do not happen on the NES, I've got a
> raspberry pi housed in a Makerbot Replicator2 3D printed case.

Shenanigans.

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granaldo
If you treat each token issued by companies, the total number of them to equal
the stock market that is the multitude of stocks available. Then it do not
appear too strange. Already more than 1000 tokens in the market now according
to [http://coinmarketcap.com](http://coinmarketcap.com) and
[https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en) at current pace
we are going we will see 20000 tokens or coins, with people trading back
fourth with some value put to them

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dawnerd
Considering Atari seems really into making free to play in app purchase style
apps these days that completely ruin a great franchise (see roller coaster
tycoon), using coins as an in game currency does make sense.

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snarfy
Time to short Atari?

~~~
zanny
Seriously, companies have had "buy X coins for $Y" since, well, forever. But
the most blatant one is arcades. Making the tokens digital and on a
decentralized trustless ledger? for some reason is not innovative at all, and
I highly doubt Atari is interested in developing a decentralized minable
gaming token cryptocurrency. They are just using a buzzword that makes people
with money shit their pants to implement something that has existed since
before currency itself.

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JustAnotherPat
Plan to buy some.

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vannevar
Can we return the word "crypto" to its proper usage, for encryption? Then we
can come up with a new term for cryptocurrencies.

I suggest "tulips."

~~~
mikestew
I am totally with you on this, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed. Languages
are dynamic, blah, blah, blah. I’m just going to go back to ranting about the
proper use of “couldn’t care less”.

~~~
Deestan
The word "crypto" has been literally decimated, and I could care less.

