Video Jim Blasko Explains 'Unbreakable Coin' (Video 2 of 2) 39
Regulation, speculation, fraud, and cultural fashions all play a role in making new currencies risky; reader mbkennel yesterday asked an insightful question: "Are you up to loaning bitcoin or something less popular for 10 years?" Confidence in any given currency can be tested with the terms current holders are willing to accept to make loans payable in that same currency. (On the other hand, if large companies will accept it in payment, they've probably got an idea that a given currency will be around next month or next year.) If you've bought any form of crypto currency, what's been your experience, and what do you expect in 10 years? (Alternate Video Link)
Tim: Jim, I want you to talk about and not forget is that you’ve got next to you for a couple of cards and I am wondering if you could show those off a little bit and talk about them.
Jim Blasko: Yeah. This is AllStar Crypto. These are just prototypes. This is a project that we’re going to try to get you this year and basically it’s like baseball cards, for Crypto currency, and some of the packs will contain like a scratch off card with a private key underneath, that you will be able to import to your wallet, now I thought a couple of people say that’s like lottery and I say that’s not like lottery because it comes in a pack and you don’t know if you’re going to get one and it’s much like baseball cards, or basketball cards anybody who wants a Kobe Bryant autograph card, might go out and buy 10 packs they’re probably not going to get one in pack.
Tim: You could argue they’re gambling too.
Jim Blasko: You could argue they’re gambling too. So to me it’s baseball cards, my father owned a chain of baseball card stores in Florida for a while, he needed to travel the state and sell the sports cards and, so that’s where the idea kind of came from, I know that there is that – let me have a physical product aspect that doesn’t exist with Bitcoin, okay. Nobody really has something physical, now you see these coins being made and stuff like that, but this is a something that I thought all ages could get into younger generation, older generations something they could hold maybe in trade, it’s a whole new aspect, that’s something I hope to release this year, bitcoinables.com which is the auction site for Bitcoin and not for – well that users, sorry, that uses Bitcoin, it’s kind of like eBay, but a crypto version and that’s really kind of our baby right now.
Tim: If people think this is a cool idea and they want to get some of these cards...
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: What’s your timeline for making those available, if things go as you hope?
Jim Blasko: If things go as I hope, I would like to release first quarter this year, I think that’s
Tim: That’s aggressive.
Jim Blasko: Yeah, it’s aggressive, it’s – I’ve got all the cards designed, there is 100 cards set, fronts and backs are done, and I have a guy to print the cards and packaging to get it all done it’s a matter of getting enough investment money to get it processed because it’s much.
Tim: Do you have a NSRT line?
Jim Blasko: Yeah. Yeah. We do. We would like to be at somewhere around fifty dollars a box, 25 packs, so around $2 a pack.
Tim: Okay. I think those – the coins you mentioned that have sort of either NFC or low power Bluetooth.
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: Something like that.
Jim Blasko: Some of those are pretty neat. They got technology in them. Then you got guys out there that are taking little pieces of tin and putting a Bitcoin logo on it and selling it on eBay, and my father comes to me with a handful of these things and says I have a bunch of Bitcoins. And it’s like, oh no, what happened, talk to me. So not all of, it’s that some of it’s novelty, really novelty.
Tim: I think a question that a buyer of these would have is how do they know that they are – anything like that has got an artifact that’s supposed to obtain value but we can’t tell until later on?
Jim Blasko: Until what?
Tim: Until you know in this case until you
Jim Blasko: Do the scratch off?
Tim: Scratch off. You might keep it in a package for ever as a collectible or something.
Jim Blasko: That’s the thing about it. The reason I wanted to put the scratch off on it was so that if somebody scratched it off, you knew that that was probably not good, so it couldn’t be resold. But if it was unscratched somebody could resell the item on the auction site or anywhere else. So that’s a protection for a re-buyer if you will.
Tim: It also seems like an area where there is some established technology with all kinds of scratch off games.
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: That I’d suppose you are going to have to convince people that they are not all buying low value cards while you hoard the high ones.
Jim Blasko: Well, sure, sure. We would have to – I think I have built a lot of trust and honesty in Unbreakable coin. And that was really part of it, it is stages. Once we build trust, because we have got a real – we’ve got a good name in the Crypto industry. We never taken part of any pump and dumps, I have actually been the first guy to stand out and say, hey don’t pump my coin, allow it to rise on its own, let it be a true community coin with a true value. Let it rise on its own. That way the price is more solid, stable over time. So we build trust, we put a phone number on the company. I have put my face out there since day one to say, here I am. If you have questions call me, if you want to talk I am right here in Vegas.
Tim: And if someone thinks it’s an intriguing idea, making their own as a project, it sounds like you started out as a hobby?
Jim Blasko: It was. It really was. And there was some things that I didn’t like about Crypto. And I thought, you know what, there is not a single person out there that I can call and say how did you do this, how does it work. There was not one person. Yeah I could read all day, but it’s still Bitcoin can be confusing and in the whole aspect of hashing and mining and networks of wallets and nodes and all these things that go along with it, exchanges and faucets, and you know there is just much that I wish there had been somebody I could have called at first because I lost a bunch of money.
Tim: Does it worry you that at least in this context that there are some coins that are out there some varieties of Crypto coin that have established names, seems to be like a hard place to try to get to be convinced?
Jim Blasko: Into that top 10 realm?
Tim: Exactly.
Jim Blasko: Yeah, what they call the top 10.
Tim: Even the top 10 right.
Jim Blasko: Yeah. It’s real hard. Unfortunately the ones that have gotten up there, they don’t seem to stay around, only a very few have, Litecoins has been there for a long time, Dogecoin have been up there, PeerCoin, there are some coins though that are gimmicking scams, they call them scam coins, these guys come out, their money value goes way up, then gets dumped right down, and you never knew who did it.
Tim: Dogecoin I think has struck a lot of people as being a gimmick itself?
Jim Blasko: I think it was a hobby, same thing, kind of the same idea, they did it for fun. We did it for fun. We want to just make something that was secure, strong and we would play around with ourselves and then all of a sudden people liked it, they liked how we were honest, we didn’t pre-mine it, we didn’t have an IPO or an ICO or anything like this, these are gimmicks to getting money from people ahead of time before the coin even has a value. I mean there are so many companies out there that are selling these ICO coins and the value never comes back. It’s been happening all week. It’s been happening for a year. So, it’s just one of those things that we knew we could do better. We would – I know I could be honestly better in this business and I think fill the trust with my community.
Tim: If somebody says I want to try this out myself
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: Because it looks like a neat project.
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: Can you think of resources they should look at? Sounds like you have a GitHub page that would be worthwhile to check out.
Jim Blasko: Yeah. I mean, anybody can grab our source code or Bitcoin source code. They can open it up with visual studios, they can open it up with any type of Windows editor or Linux editor and they can – go through it, just read the code. Now, they are going to need a little bit of code knowledge. They are going to need to know how to do some C++. They are not going to just jump into it and make a coin. But with a little bit of research and a little bit of time spent, yeah, anybody can create a coin. And the hard part is again, after you create it, getting it running and getting it stable for long time. UnbreakableCoin has never broken down. It’s been running strong for nine months now and it continues to grow more hash, more miners every day.
Tim: Have you found investors to help do things like you mentioned you have an office?
Jim Blasko: Yeah. I have one investor here in Vegas. Actually he owns half of my company. He is great friend of mine named, Pedram. Pedram Rahimi he owns a construction company out here too. And because I’m a low voltage engineer we work together with that stuff. And he saw me working on this for a while and said, this is really cool, Jimmy. You made something that people will really like. And I said, alright, do you want to be part of it? So, yeah, he is my investor. He supplies our office and me, some funds to keep the company going into – go to conventions, speak with people, that type of thing, to network.
Tim: Yeah. You mentioned just now that you work as a low voltage engineer.
Jim Blasko: Yeah.
Tim: And I know since before we turned the camera on, you told me an intriguing fact on how you came out to Vegas, would you mind me mentioning that?
Jim Blasko: No, I don’t mind. I was an employee for Audio One and one of their employees – one of their clients was Penn & Teller, Penn, in particular, Penn Jillette. Penn is a real nice guy and I flew out here and started working at Penn’s house for about a year and I just wanted to stay. I didn’t want to leave. I loved Vegas. I got here and I saw that the town was like me. It’s always awake, it’s never stopping and that’s how I am. I just go as much as I can until – I don’t go to sleep. I just shut down like a computer. Okay, that’s how I feel. I run until I shut down. So, that’s kind of how Vegas is, except it doesn’t shut down. So, yeah, that’s what brought me here and after we finished working at his house I kind of just stayed. I didn’t want to go back to the Miami, actually.
Tim: Now that you are working heavily on Bitcoin projects or Cryptocoin projects there is a lot of that going on in this town. So no shortage on that front.
Jim Blasko: Oh yeah, no it worked out great. Yeah. I wouldn’t mind to be in Miami, still, for the Crypto thing because Cryptsy is there. They are down there. And Cryptsy is a great company. I love those guys. Paul Vernon and his staff is absolutely amazing at Cryptsy and it’s a best exchange out there, probably in the world if you ask me, safest, most secure. So, they’ve got a good Crypto thing going on down there too, but actually over here, it’s really taken off. We were having conventions like every few months. It’s not just an annual thing now, it’s becoming an all the time thing. And anything that happens whether it’s CES, or new start-up technologies or anything, you’re seeing Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency companies popping up. So there is a few of us out here. I think I was the first here. And I know Michael Terpin is, he has got BitAngels out here sort of, I know he is getting ready to start an incubator out here. Michael Terpin is on to some big things and we’re happy to know him and try to work with him.
Tim: Let me ask you – well, one more question, I think outside of a certain small group of people, let’s say 95% population at least it is a strange concept, the idea of money that is not?
Jim Blasko: Digital money.
Tim: That’s not printed by government?
Jim Blasko: Yes. That’s the best part.
Tim: So there is a lot of fluctuation in prices of cryptocurrency, what do you tell somebody who is not currently a cryptocurrency user, who says why would I put any value into something that can?
Jim Blasko: Why would I put my money into something that keeps losing money? Damn good question. You got to have faith sometimes in something in systems. That’s like asking Steve Jobs at the time when Apple stock crashed, why should we put money into Apple? And Steve Jobs will tell you because we’re going to create the best products on the planet. That’s how we feel. We’re going to create the best products in the planet and it’s going to all use Crypto.
Tim: And you are not just speaking of your endeavors in particular you are talking about the idea of distributive currency?
Jim Blasko: No, I mean the whole group. Yeah, Crypto is going to be worldwide usage. Somebody asked me yesterday how long before you think it will be used in grocery stores? I said probably two years. I think that’s accurate and Microsoft takes them in, while they take Bitcoin. And of course all the other Cryptocoins can be exchanged for Bitcoin and then you can use your Bitcoin. So, they are kind of the leader. Well they are the leader and we’re all the followers. But the good thing is that anything Bitcoin comes up with Unbreakable coin can merge in because we’re built off of their core. So if they come up with the great technology core we can implement it right away and a lot of these other coins can’t do that.
Tim: If someone does a similar cloning reimplementation then they would also get that sort of benefit?
Jim Blasko: Yeah, anybody who forks off of like Unbreakable coin takes our coin and makes their own coin, yeah they get that same feel. And that’s been the question that’s coming up lately is can we fork off the Unbreakable coin, I am not going to stop you. It’s open source. I can’t really stop you. So I encourage you. Actually I would encourage everybody to make a Cryptocoin if they are dedicated towards making the Crypto community better. If you’re going to expand the Crypto community in a good way they should make a Cryptocoin.
Tim: I think it will be fun even at the high school or a college class kind of project?
Jim Blasko: Oh, it would be wonderful. College projects are great. And I am sure there is probably a few out there that are college projects right now, a couple of Cryptocoins. I read about a few actually. I can’t remember the names but I read about at least a couple. And that’s good. You know those coins can actually fund the college. They could – if it took off and they’ve got a bunch of it, they could sell some of it and buy new books, or lower the rates on admissions to the college or something like that. There is a lot of good that could happen out of Crypto for a college or a high school. Think about high schools, high schools don’t get kind of money the colleges get. If they are government funded you know, so if they created their own Cryptocoin that took off, oh my god, those teachers could have the best books on the planet, the best software, the best new computers for students, and it won’t cost you a dime. That would be wonderful, I would actually like to be part of something like that.
Tim: Do you have any parting words of advice, to somebody who says I want to get into learning about whether or not developing but just?
Jim Blasko: If anybody has any questions they can call us. We are the only Cryptocoin out there with a phone number. So 1406 CALLUNB anytime you guys have questions. I would be willing to help anybody with anything I can in this community. If you like Crypto I like you.
Who the hell cares? (Score:5, Funny)
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Pay whoever runs the ads some money?
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Makes me wonder what Bennett had to do...
He is working undercover as a Slashdot editor.
ok. i'll play. "my experience is... (Score:3)
Re:ok. i'll play. "my experience is... (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not follow. A large company can accept Bitcoins and convert immediately to their local currency. That does not require faith in a long-term forecast.
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At the very least, large companies need to anticipate short-term stability, which is I think what the quote was getting at.
A small company, for which a day's takings in Bitcoin is only a fraction of the day's Bitcoin-to-local exchange volume can easily cash out immediately, and so has no need to have an expectation of long-term or short-term stability.
A large company typically cannot convert a large amount of Bitcoins to local currency instantaneously without destabilising the exchange rate, so they need to
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That does not compute. Why does a company, any size that is, need to convert heir daily/weekly/monthly earning in on go. What is so wrong about converting the payments into local currency as the payments come in. Sure it may make sense to batch some transfers so that the fees are minimized, but apart for that there is no reason to wait.
In addition this is somewhat self regulating, when a company starts to accept payments in BitCoin, it will start low and slowly grow. When it gets large enough to matter the
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Implementing an infrastructure to handle a new payment protocol isn't free. Would you bother to add support for something that isn't going to be around?
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enduring complaints concerning crypto-currency." yeah, i bought BitCoin back in the day. sold it soon, too. made a little coin. kinda like betting in Vegas. for the lulz.
I suspect that there is an enormous selection bias in that people who made a lot of money with BitCoin are featured in (online) newspapers, those who made a little money comment in discussions and the other 80% who lost a little or a lot of money do not comment.
Also, many people invest a lot in hardware to mine BitCoins (and other Coins), which is where their profits go entirely. That seems like a hamster wheel to me. Those people like the experience of learning about hardware and crypto-currencies. Then ag
Another use of Crypto-coin - as gift cards (Score:4, Interesting)
One use for cryptocurrency that isn't talked about much is as a gift certificate.
If a store [slashdot.org] created a custom BC clone and pre-mined it completely, it could assign them an arbitrary fixed value (1 Slash-Dollar = 1 USD???) and sell them as gift cards. The advantage over a regular gift card is that the buyer can then split them and give the pieces to friends as gifts or even trade them on an "open market" if he wanted to (okay, that's being done now, but you get the idea).
The company that created and pre-mined the cards would be on the hook for all transaction fees. Unlike a "real" currency like BC they could set an expiration date ahead of time or say that "after a certain date, we will charge a hefty fee for all transactions OTHER than through our store" or if the currency is designed to be "short lived," even "after a certain date, we will accept it for purchase at a discount, and this discount will increase each month until the currency becomes worthless."
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There is another nice thing about that system. If the crypto behind the currency is ever broken, it matters less and less as time goes on.
I wonder if there would be a way to have the currency keep a fixed value for a certain period of time, then taper off until it is worthless. This way, if I wanted a store currency, I could have one which would be valid for a year or two (with a -lot- of notice about the expiration date coming up), then after that time, I wouldn't have to worry about it.
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Who cares about the crypto behind the currency, the only thing I care about with regard to a currency are what primary resources back that currency. The value of the land, the value of agriculture, the value of mines, the value of aquatic resources, the value of the economy backing the currency, the stability of the government that defines the value of that currency and their ability to protect the value of that currency. Those things will define how stable that currency is and whether or not you should be
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Um? The only thing that gives the value to a currency is the shared trust in this currency. The "gold standard" or any other shenanigans are/where just smoke an mirrors to reinforce this shared trust. (Especially when going from minted gold and silver coins to paper.) But even the value of gold and silver coins is based on shared trust. Sure you can melt the gold and trade that, but there is not guarantee what the gold price will be in the future or that the next person will accept these coins.
Private currency (Score:2)
I kind of wonder if a group of companies could create a kind of private currency that would be represented as a store credit, say Amazon, Google Play and maybe Alibaba (to pick 3).
They could denominate it in dollars and provide incentives to customers and vendors to accept some of their income or refunds at a dollar premium in private currency as well as making it transferrable to other people (using a cryptocurrency model, maybe) as well as being portable to other core vendors. They could even offer to pr
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Do you know how bit coin works? How do you "pre-mine" a crypto currency. The mining process is part of the running transactions. If today all bitcoin mining ceased, no transaction would ever be validated. This thing with bitcoin is, there are no tokens that need to be mined. The mining process actually is just a clever way to authenticate transactions in a decentralized manner. That the miner gets something out of it, is just a reward so that people provide the computing power to authenticate transactions.
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The mining process is part of the running transactions. If today all bitcoin mining ceased, no transaction would ever be validated
I'm pretty sure the first few BC's were "pre-mined" by the same person/group which invented BC in the first place, if not as a deliberate way to create BC then as a way to test the protocols, algorithms, and code.
I addressed this general terms in the original post when I said "The company that created and pre-mined the cards would be on the hook for all transaction fees."
In other words, the issuing authority would have to absorb the computational costs of adding all transactions to the blockchain for that c
WHY? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why has Slashdot posted advertorials for Mr. Blasko for two days in a row now? Man has Slashdot jumped the shark or it isn't disclosure promoted content like it should.
Oh look (Score:1)
Another scamcoin!!!! Here's how to make your own:
1. Create your own cryptocoin
2. Mine it until a solo operation is no longer feasible and you have millions of coins
3. ???
4. Profit
My take is different (Score:3)
(On the other hand, if large companies will accept it in payment, they've probably got an idea that a given currency will be around next month or next year.)
I don't think this is the most likely answer. Most likely is that the big companies have an instant exchange set up where a purchase made in bitcoins is immediately converted to dollars, and they charge their customers a small transaction fee in the form of an exchange rate difference.
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and they charge their customers a small transaction fee in the form of an exchange rate difference.
So you lose money each time you use it? That sucks.
I don't have that problem when I use real money. If something costs $10, I give the person a $20 bill and get $10 back. By your logic I might $9.95 back.
What a horrible deal for the person using this crap currency.
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and they charge their customers a small transaction fee in the form of an exchange rate difference.
So you lose money each time you use it? That sucks.
Not quite. It also costs money to process transactions with credit cards etc., and even cash when you account for all the handling work. These costs are absorbed into the price, so actually you lose money no matter what the payment method. Solutions like Bitpay are actually a little cheaper than CC processing.
Irrational exuberance (Score:1)
Won't work until state sponsored (Score:2)
It was made environmentally damaging to limit participation. But putting creation to a central authority, and they can keep the creation calculations simpler and easier, but be the
2 whole stories about a scam (Score:2)