posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:51AM
from the get-on-the-blockchain-train dept.
from the get-on-the-blockchain-train dept.
BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42630136 and many others are reporting this story,
The US firm said it was teaming up with London-based Wenn Media Group to carry out the initial coin offering (ICO).
It is part of a blockchain-based initiative to help photographers control their image rights.
Kodak also detailed plans to install rows of Bitcoin mining rigs at its headquarters in Rochester, New York.
Anyone have further details?
For a few years now I've debated writing up a post about why a "blockchain-based DRM" is an idea that people frequently talk about, but which is a really dumb idea. Because the key point in the blockchain is that it "solves"...
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Also at Bloomberg, The Verge, and Futurism.
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CES 2018: Kodak Soars on KodakCoin and Bitcoin Mining Plans
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:59AM
Perhaps they'll finally be able to deliver the super8 camera they announced back in 2014? [kodak.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:11AM (7 children)
... but not so much that it's illegal. Rather the central government called on local governments to tell the miners to wind down gracefully.
China has good reason to forbid mining: their hashrate is a substantial fraction of the total. Mining is cheap there because coal is cheap.
Perhaps the PRC is dismayed at the short life expectancies of children with asthma.
However the miners aren't just shutting down; they are relocating to other countries, mostly the US and Canada.
Here in the Pacific NorthLeft I only pay 8.16 cents per kilowatt-hour, doubtlessly because of the abundant hydroelectric power.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:36AM (6 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:48AM (5 children)
> I always believed that wasting energy on production of bitcoins is insane.
Insane compared to what? The amount of energy used to mine, extract and refine precious metals like Gold? Or the amount of energy used all across the worlds financial sectors to process transactions?
Bitcoins energy use is a small fraction of the energy costs of current transaction systems. As Bitcoin aficionados work on the pretext that Bitcoin will be a replacement for the above transaction system, its current consumption is not a problem, because (a) it is temporary until the switchover is complete, and (b) further tech developments and refinements will result in a reduction in energy consumption.
However until that fateful day comes (if it comes at all) Bitcoin will run in parallel with the existing system, so there will be increased energy usage costs. However, it still doesn't seem that large (at least to me).
(Score: 2) by qzm on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:25AM (4 children)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but bitcoin mining energy is orders of magnitude above existing financial transaction systems.
The current hash rate is astronomically high, and makes the worlds financial industry look like a desktop calculator.
But hey.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:52AM (3 children)
Are there any numbers?
I am genuinely curious, knowing the sheer amount of energy used in:
a) processing transactions (payments, transfers, payroll, etc...) through the financial system
b) Running the exchanges to be able to exchange all the different currencies
c) Running all the traders systems in all the brokerages and investment banks for them to be able to do the exchanges
d) All the hedge funds, including the low latency arbitrage hedge funds that earn money by evening out the spread between exchanges
(d) Alone is crazy on energy consumption. They will overlock and run as hot as possible, not giving a damn for energy consumption, and there are thousands of them all chasing one trade, and only the fastest one actually gets the profit (not unlike bitcoin itself actually).
Bitcoin is supposed to replace all of the above really (At least that is the goal of some of the more devout followers, the way I read it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:04AM (2 children)
You can estimate the electricity just used to support the retail banking buildings in the US and it is about double that bitcoin mining uses (however for fewer transactions per second; but bitcoin transactions per second do not scale with energy by design). Extrapolating based on population (US is ~ 5%) would give that btc uses ~1/40th that of retail banking buildings.
I've yet to see anyone do an actual comparison though (include the energy use of btc exchanges, credit cards, atms, secure transport, fraudulent chargebacks vs hacks, support employees needed, etc).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:56PM (1 child)
Of course, now show us your work on what % of global financial transactions that 1/40th energy consumption supports. Here's a rough top-level starting point: Total btc market cap is about $100B. Total global money supply is nearly $100T. If it takes 1/40th the energy to process 1/1000th the currency... your energy consumption is 25X greater. That would not seem to scale well... Your number is almost certainly nonsense anyway, but _assuming you are right_ about that number, then you are assuredly horribly wrong about the implications of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:02PM
Ok, but to avoid distraction I want to see if I'm confused on the comparison you just made:
This energy per market cap calculation doesn't make much sense to me:
You want to say that a << b due to some inherent properties of bitcoin and dollars. Actually we see that has nothing to do with it. It depends on the exchange rate and number of each in existence. You may as well be arguing that USD/BTC is 25x too low for the current amount of energy used or the dollar has 25x the value it should in terms of energy (due to middle east meddling, etc).
What implications do you refer to?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:11AM (1 child)
After the switch to Digital why did they never come out with anything of significance, Nikon and and Cannon survived the switch, also I'm I misremembering wasn't the CCD developed by Kodak?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:13PM
They did have a range of half-decent consumer digital cameras in the late 90s, and tried to create a camera OS with a proper API that could run custom software that added features to the camera. Sort of like small applications, but obviously nobody wants to install custom applications on a mobile device like a camera (perhaps they should have called them "plics" or "cations" or some other shortened form of "applications" that currently eludes me - and maybe opened a "Plic Store" on the internet...).
However, imagine it's 10-20 years ago, you walk into a store to buy a "prosumer" digital camera. They have a Nikon, a Canon (with $50 voucher for a Canon printer), a Sony with Zeiss-branded optics, a Leica-branded Panasonic and a Kodak.
Seriously - are you even going to look at the Kodak?
I don't know about specialist/industrial products, but from the consumer POV, Kodak didn't have much rep as a quality camera/lens maker. Kodak made film, film processing equipment and ran film processing franchises. Yes they made cameras - cheap and cheerful cameras sold on the razor-blade business model with film and processing services as the blades. Even if Kodak could have sold lots of cameras, their owners would no longer buy a dozen rolls of Kodachrome to go on holiday or pay for 432 6x4 prints on their return.
If Kodak had followed on their research and taken an early lead in digital cameras, the practical upshot would still have been to obliterate their major line of business a few years sooner.
Instead, they tried to prolong the life of the processing business: there was PhotoCD (hand in a film, get a CD of decent-quality scanned images) which was a godsend for those of us working on multimedia at the time but (unsurprisingly) didn't have consumers queueing up so they could watch holiday snaps on their TV. Associated with PhotoCD they replaced the backend end of their processing with a digital negative-scan-and-print system that could handle both film and digital sources - which would have been a hit if everybody had come back from holiday with a dozen memory cards that they wanted turned into 432 6x4 prints*. There was the APS system that tried to make film more like digital, by adding metadata etc.
Its one thing to adapt to a changing market - but if you are a huge company and your main business model goes bye-bye in the space of a couple of years, you are probably shafted whatever you do.
(* Dang! these folk with horseless carriages aren't stopping every 20 miles to rest their horses any more! We'll have to sell the coaching inn, unless someone invents a new car with limited range that takes an hour to refuel - fat chance of that!)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:00AM (1 child)
https://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/Press_center/KODAK_EKTRA_the_Camera_First_Smartphone_Launches_in_the_United_States/default.htm [kodak.com]
https://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/Press_center/KODAK_Tablets_launch_throughout_Europe/default.htm [kodak.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:56AM
OK but they made the first digial camera in 1973
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:09AM (2 children)
Is this a new scam where people/companies launch a new type of coin with zero liquidity but high "exchange rate" and then claim to suddenly be rich/not bankrupt?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:39AM
It could be a way to artificially inflate a balance sheet. I hope that accounting firms are wise to this, and SEC rules make it clear how much of a company's net worth is "backed up" by questionable cryptocurrencies.
The more thinly traded cryptocurrencies have a lot in common with thinly traded penny stocks, you can hold $10M "worth" of stock in a thinly traded company, but if the daily volume traded in that company is only a few thousand dollars, you'll never get even $1M out of your holdings - any time you go to sell, you'll be crashing the price.
The major cryptocurrencies are a little better, you could probably cash in $10M worth of BTC or Ethereum over a few days without crashing the price, if you do it carefully - try that with Verticoin and you're gonna have a bad time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:36PM
1. Buy stock X.
2. Announce business X is making its own cryptocurrency.
3. Sell stock X.
4. Profit.
5. Short the stock.
6. Announce "We didn't mean it."
7. Cover your short.
8. Profit^2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:09AM
So since they have proven themselves to be complete and total whores, perhaps the will go all the way? KimButtCoins! What comes out, cannot be worth nothing, because that is one famous ass, not like khallow, or RunawayASS at all. Unless. Can I interest anyone in tulips? Pets.com? Stock going for pennies on the dollar! Do you need a blow job? Get out of here, Donald! Serious investors only! Or suckers. Mostly suckers, with money. Hey, khallow! This is a very great libertarian investment! Only half your ammo stocks, and you could be rich!