Video Of The Week: Ted Livingston Interview At Token Summit

I realize this blog is dangerously close to becoming A Coin Fund instead of AVC, but what can I say? It’s what I am thinking about most of all right now.

Here’s William’s interview with Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik, on the plan to decentralize Kik around a new token called Kin.

#blockchain

Comments (Archived):

  1. LIAD

    You and me both brudda.To be expected I suppose.We missed the age of geographical discovery but not so the age of technological discovery. It’s in our DNA to be fascinated by new unexplored frontiers, especially when being on the bleeding edge is merely a matter of choice.I’m sure many of us are finding it very hard to resist it’s creative, intellectual and financial pull.

    1. William Mougayar

      You and Arnold have had the unfair advantage to have attended the Token Summit. You came as a believer, and you left as a total convert 🙂

  2. William Mougayar

    Tokens everywhere …

    1. Twain Twain

      When Ted says, “About…” the Scottish lilt that Nova Scotians inherited can be heard — LOL.

  3. Donna Brewington White

    A beckoning frontier is hard for a pioneer or adventurer to resist.

    1. William Mougayar

      wow, that’s a quotable statement. I like it.

    2. Girish Mehta

      A beckoning mirage is hard for a pioneer or adventurer to resist.The same wiring underlies our great triumphs and our great disasters.”Time discovers truth. Time reveals truth” – Seneca. 1st century AD.

      1. jason wright

        If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:If you can make a heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

          1. jason wright

            i find it hard to disagree with anything there, especially erc20 tokens and pyramid schemes, and blatant conflicts of interest across the ecosystem.

      2. Donna Brewington White

        I think frontiers and mirages attract a different type of hunger. Or is that thirst?

    3. Mac

      Well said. I would expect nothing less.

  4. JMS

    Fred,How do you avoid the temptation of being swept up by the crowd? It is far easier to spend mental energy on things that are going well, e.g. your views on blockchain, than face cognitive dissonance. As investors, we must guard against this want to focus on winners and ignore our losers. I don’t mean to imply any judgement about the meteoric rise in various tokens in recent months, but it is a good chance to address a fundamental question of investing.Thanks

  5. awaldstein

    Go with it.Coming to grips with the social side of what I don’t know what to call other than market communities as they really don’t have analogs to other places in my experience.

  6. jason wright

    1 trillion tokens. gulp.edit: he did say “trillion”?

    1. Matt A. Myers

      Meaning they’re holding 9 trillion?

  7. kidmercury

    Thanks for blogging about it so much, I’ve finally seen the light. Might as well be A Coin Fund, in time that’ll be the opportunity that we’ll all most be grateful for. Blockchain development skills are where it’s at.

    1. Rohan

      🙂 what changed?

      1. kidmercury

        I didn’t get the power of smart contracts before. Now I see it as basically tying a programming​language to the blockchain which I think creates infinite possibilities and allows all challenges with the blockchain to be reconciled in some way. Now i need to learn developing on ethereum

        1. Rohan

          Gotcha. Thanks for sharing! 🙂

  8. Evan Van Ness

    Would Jake share the Coin Fund name? 🙂

  9. prankeapple

    Man, with all the knowledge I’m dropping, you guys are gonna be millionaires one day. Here’s a lil prediction from yours truly:The blockchain/token market will crash when the masses realize Ethereum can’t scale past 15 transactions per second. We’re already seeing rumblings of that with Bitcoin (which only does 3-7 TPS). Good luck getting a mass user facing DApp off the ground on 15 TPS (on a shared network, no less). Sharding plans are still extremely preliminary, and commercial interest/demand has far outpaced the technical capabilities of Ethereum. Metropolis (which doesn’t even do PoS) has been pushed back repeatedly – perhaps it will lead to a modest TPS increase from Geth client improvements, but nowhere near the orders of magnitude we need for public use. Will the current enterprise tumescence recede into flaccidity when they discover they can’t effectively use public blockchains for years?There is, however, a silver lining – state channels and attestations of Merkle Tree root hashes that act as ‘pointers’ to larger data structures held off chain. Microsoft is doing some exciting work in this area in the realm of identity management. Any white paper/business plan you read that doesn’t include off-chain scaling (plan for the worst, hope for the best) as a fundamental component is deeply flawed.

    1. Mac

      That sounds like a case of E.D. (Ethereum Dysfunction)

    2. jason wright

      the truth is not yet evenly distributed.

      1. Twain Twain

        I have 0 comment on Ethereum or criticism of it. However, I do have a view on distribution theories and …Node-edge networks have moved from bell curve to power curve, don’tcha know? https://uploads.disquscdn.c…Check it out on consumer UX for social sites: https://uploads.disquscdn.c…I showed that slide to a Netflix engineer and asked him whether it was innovative to loop between 5* and thumbs-up-down OVER 8 YEARS(!!!) when both are really bad for accuracy in data analytics.He said, “Unfortunately, most engineers don’t know enough maths to do anything different.”

        1. jason wright

          the money has never been evenly distributed.

  10. Pete Griffiths

    Please tell me the next offering will be called ‘Kith.’

  11. Richard

    Personally, I’m grateful that you have. I finally get it. This is first and foremost an infrastructure play that competes for time and attention against other infrastructure plays. The brilliance, if it is indeed the winner, is identifying it as such without the need for proven applications to validate it.

  12. Kirsten Lambertsen

    This was the week, thanks to your posts, that the whole thing came into focus for me.This announcement, in particular, feels like an *incredibly* important moment, if perhaps not *the* moment. It’s too bad that Twitter missed the opportunity to be the first. Hopefully they’ll at least be *among* the first.Totally on fire about blockchain now. I think to avoid becoming or being eaten by a dinosaur you have to go places that aren’t on the dinosaur map. Thank you!

    1. Donna Brewington White

      ha!