Kin Developer Program

Comments (Archived):

1. when i see reward and incentive and ‘challenge’ marketing it tells me that the core proposition is just not compelling enough to get people at it organically. the kin token feels like a ‘we have to’ response and not a native strategy. sorry.

   1. Desperate times require desperate measures.

      1. With all due respect to the smart people behind this, the ICO seemed like a mismatched effort to save a struggling business model.

         1. KIK spent 2 years building data on transactions to see if the KIN eco system would be feasible and make sure that IF in fact KIK offered an ICO and spend millions on building the KIN app. it would bear extensive profits for investors like myself. This is a long term (1 to 2 years after KRE engine is implemented) investment strategy in the crypto space similar to XRP. In the end, the KIK team came away with the data and said this model isn’t being done in any markets so KIK when full speed ahead with the project. The biggest tech player in China dumped millions into this project because they can perceive the profit potential. KIK are hitting their milestones quarterly as well. Its a solid team hence my investment involvement.

            1. Excellent. I appreciate the comments and wish them the best. Easy to armchair when you don’t have all the facts. That is why this AVC thing is so valuable at times.

            2. XRP has looked like a banking recapitalisation scam.

2. When. I was in new york in 2000 I could get a cup of coffee for $.50. now I doubt I could find one for less than $2.50. and I live in Indiana.Very few people have seen a 5x increase in wages since 2000.I don’t think dollars are too great at buying coffee.

   1. Hi Kid, do you have a blog?

      1. sort of. i post on occasion on google plus: https://plus.google.com/+Ki…

   2. Dollars are great at buying everything.

      1. it is true that dollars can buy you many things, including most of what you would need or want. the problem is that dollars aren’t easy enough to get in the volume needed. most people are increasingly priced out of dollars. the situation is not sustainable.

         1. Not sure I fully understand that or your prior comment. How does crypto counter inflation? How would coffee be any cheaper or more affordable in your new crypto world?

            1. i’m assuming you are in USA, please correct if not. if you are a US resident/income earner, have you ever had hte experience of travelling to a foreign country and noticing, probably with delight, how inexpensive everything is for you? or consider why american software companies enjoy going to india to hire software developers. a large part of it is because you can pay substantially less for an entry level engineer than what you have to pay if htey are in san francisco.in the future, the same example will hold true, just substitute dollars and USA with a future coin to be determined. a properly executed monetary policy (that is the key) will enable purchasing power advantages to accrue to the currency holders.

            2. KM. American with dual (EU) passport. Have traveled all over the world. Also had a career in financial markets so understand the concept of arbitrage. The Big Mac Index was introduced in 1986 and I learned about purchasing power parities in the early 80s in college. The cost differentials in relative and absolute terms are influenced by a lot more than the exchange rates. So not sure what you are getting at.

            3. they are influenced by a lot more than exchange rates but exchange rates, and the monetary policy that creates them, are a huge factor.the simple thing i’m getting at is that monetary policy is the world’s biggest problem, in that it is directly responsible for massive income inequality and the civil and political instability it creates. cryptocurrencies are a chance to solve that problem.

3. Unsolicited copywriting advice:1. The headline offer is $3,000,0002. A few paragraphs later, it’s “up to $150,000″3. And it ends with “$60,000″And each step in the decreasing payout sounds less certain because it comes with more complications.If the offer is, “this is greenfield, it’s fun, it might work and only you have the chops to do it,” then the money is secondary and should be treated that way.If the offer is, “get in on the crypto goldrush,” then the stories about crypto developer magic have to lead.But if the offer is, “prizes, prizes, prizes,” it probably makes more sense be clear about the prizes early and often, and have the offer get MORE exciting as someone reads along, not less.I think there are some groundbreaking shifts due to happen because of micro-crypto as currency, and can’t wait to see what happens next… good luck!

   1. This offer has so many layers that it’s makes an Onion seem like an Apple.

   2. Unsolicited promotional advice – have a prize people want to win.

4. I know you can’t comment but I look at Dwolla and think that crypto is a pretty easy add-on. (because banks are the ultimate PIA to work with)

   1. Appears they recently raised more money:https://www.desmoinesregist…I think they are swimming upstream by being located (for what they are doing) in Iowa.Will also mention that being in NY Metro isn’t the only option they could be located 90 miles away and be better off than in Iowa.Noting the articles says that they only have 50 employees.

      1. How close is Berkshire Hathaway HQ to NYC? How many people really built Android, or SnapChat?I think sometimes it is a great advantage to not be in group think and have tons of people.

         1. Those are outliers. Iowa is not a target rich environment for what they are doing (or for that matter many things at all that I can tell).I think physical proximity does matter when you have to make deals with people as well as get attention. And it has to be a place that people would feel is a good idea to relocate to or even visit. And if the media is close by and you can mingle with them at parties and young people events you will get more attention and you will get more buzz. And all of that leads to people knowing what you are doing and can help you land a deal and acceptance.Once again it depends on what you are doing it doesn’t matter for everyone and every company.In a media and financial capital like NYC (one example) you can’t really compare it to being in Iowa. Just checked and about 200k people live in Des Moines. A total of 3m in all of Iowa.Snap (I have done work for them) is Venice/LA area right? Do you think it would be easier to get people to want to work for you in Venice or in Des Moines?Finally Fred was schlepped I believe to NYC by in part Joanne. Do you think if he started his career instead in a non financial capital like Des Moines or even Philly we’d be reading his blog? I don’t think that would be the case.

         2. Ha also what you are saying reminds me of the arguments that I used to have with my Dad when he proclaimed that it didn’t matter that he had a shitty wholesale district office in terms of who he could get to work there. All it took was one visit (and a job) in a shiny new office tower in the city to know that the nice office was a great way to get not only a better qualified person but to also pay them less because people liked having a nice environment to work in. Not everyone but most people. [1] (Perks over pay).[1] Colleges are going this route as well as you know. Sure if you are IVY you can get away with anything but 2nd and 3rd tier better put the rock climbing wall in the dorm and make the dorm appear nice for parents who visit.

            1. Sometimes you have to go against the grain, and your personal experiences. Airbnb will never work right?

5. “There are all sorts of consumer use cases to be discovered.”Very true, and I’m quite excited about that. (Disclosure, I’m long in Kin).

   1. Do you think the ICO market has “dried up”? Meaning that the easy money days are long behind us. Seems like traditional funding is now a better route.

      1. Not necessarily. See my (related) last posthttp://startupmanagement.or…

         1. Cool post. But this seems to support my theory that traditional ICO is gone. Is there a related post that talks about shifts or trends in financing?

      2. Not sure that’s correct. June was a 2B month, and July 1.4B.What I wrote about is very forward looking, and saying it’s changing the details of ICO implementation, but not their nature.

         1. Where is this monthly data? very interested to see.I think we have a solid business case for a crypto pivot, but there is a lot at stake.

            1. Here’s one source:https://stat.bloxy.info/sup…Feel free to email me 🙂 [email protected]

   2. I buy that.

6. Just curious how a company made it through your funnel without a killer consumer app already in mind? I am drinking from the “where is all the investment money going?” fire hose. It seems (from the outside) that all of this money pouring in the last 18 months is creating a lot of noise and making even harder to raise money in crypto. (One of the reasons I am in the comment section and not doing the blogging.)

   1. Kik has a clearly funnel. But they don’t know what to do with their crypto AFAIK.

   2. Fred has been in Kik since it was an explosive messaging company. The founder Ted Livingston is pretty much brilliant….but even he can’t figure out a way to get crypto adopted when there is no Normals demand for it.

7. Best of luck. Couple of things. 1) The incentives are peanuts. Anyone who knows what they are doing and has what you are asking for isn’t going to settle for $60k in a developer program. They’ll go raise millions in VC and do it right. 2) Its based on Ethereum. That means its an asset and the token values fluctuate and therefore the point is to get the tokens to go up in price (as William is hoping for in his comment below). Any token that allows its price to fluctuate will not be used for simple transactions like dollars, it will be treated like an asset. Until you understand that and start looking for a CC that is based on a non-value fluctuating token, noone will be able to overcome this human behavior.

   1. This comment made my head hurt and that has nothing to do with how you wrote it or your understanding of crypto!

   2. I agree. I think close attention should be paid to your last two sentences. Even Fred said people aren’t going to use their $10k Bitcoin for small purchases. I believe William has addressed this before.Full disclosure: I’m not long in any CC and I’m not a developer.

   3. Anyone who knows what they are doing and has what you are asking for isn’t going to settle for $60k in a developer program.I am not sure this is true (number is off though see below. And it sounds like the same logic that the ‘in crowd’ says when they claim that ‘anyone good wouldn’t be working for XYZ legacy big company’.They’ll go raise millions in VC and do it right.Lot’s of people don’t have that hustle at all. I run into this frequently in the wild.1) The incentives are peanuts.I was making a comment to my wife yesterday about a reward offered for information about a missing kid. The reward was $10k. I said the strategy is to offer enough money right from the start that someone will view it as ‘life changing’ even if it isn’t. So if you want to find your missing daughter you offer $100k not $10k. Because you don’t want to have to keep ratcheting up the offer then someone won’t know when you will stop. So you have to go large right at the start. If you are really rich then offer $1,000,000. $100k or $1,000,000 is large enough so that someone will rat out their aunt..Anyway in context $60k isn’t a good number at all it should be $100k because people will think (if they have no money and no hustle to go alone) that that will buy plenty of pizza.

      1. You are working hard to think, anticipate what the other person will think/feel, and doing so is crucial in nearly all of life.IMHO, human females do this much more than the males do. But, males CAN learn it!One trap for tech-nerd males is thinking that the world is rational in ways that make it irrelevant what the other person is thinking because the truth will come out soon enough anyway. While that can work a lot on major questions in some sciences, in general life is not nearly so rational; the truth is likely too slow to come out if it ever does; and, thus, in such an irrational world, thinking what the other person is thinking/feeling often remains important.

         1. Perhaps the reasons females can do this more than males is that they have generally more experience having to think and manipulate because they are not males.This dovetails with my sure to be controversial theory of the small jew. (I am a small jew so I can say this). The small jew has to do with his head what he can’t do with his fists. Something like that. Can’t do heavy labor so has to use brain to figure out how to get others to do heavy labor. This doesn’t mean he can’t be matched or beaten by the larger jew or non jew. But honestly it takes a great deal of skill to avoid a fight and violence using your head.If I was writing a book I would also highlight mafia bosses for example were there any tall mafia bosses? Capone was 5’10 and Meyer Lansky was 5’0. Of course Capone also is famous for saying ‘a gun and a smile better than a smile alone’.Short also typically means you are disadvantaged at sports which means you have more time to study and less activity from women.

            1. I believe that you are, of course, correct but only on the special case you explained while, actually, the situation is much more general; your description is correct for the more general situation if you just revise it a little.The situation for females goes all the way back to the crib. So, there’s some genetics involved; it’s at least partly nature and not all nurture, although this does not really conflict with what you said.For a hint, there is a video today of Trump returning to the White House:https://www.youtube.com/wat…He walks with one of his grandchildren, a girl, I’m guessing a daughter of Ivanka who has three children but who arrived at the WH today with her husband and only two children.So, watch the granddaughter in the video with Trump: She’s cute, little, sweet, vulnerable, darling, adorable, endearing, great smile, totally cooperative, etc. She’s dressed like a GIRL; her hair is like a GIRL; and she has the white headband that goes back even to my grade school days as a symbol of a darling, pretty, adorable GIRL.Can imagine that way back there in the caves, etc., 100,000 years ago, the females that got taken care of by their daddies were the cute, sweet ones, and the daddies who were strong limbs on the tree took care of at least their cute, sweet daughters.And for her being physically strong, apparently there was nearly no upside — way back there her role was rush to puberty, rush to motherhood, and be a strong limb in the tree, and for that role she needed a strong father and a strong husband to take care of her.And for the dark side of the situation, sure, the weak girls were less able to push away men.Well, that Trump granddaughter is from genes from Europe, Ivanka, Ivana, Trump, Germany, Scotland, and the European Jews. So, she’s of European descent.Okay, now look at girls that age from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Viet Nam — yup, cute, sweet, little, darling, adorable, precious.But from mitochondrial DNA analysis, the most recent common ancestor was about 40,000 years ago. So, the Trump granddaughter and the girls the same age from East Asia are close to each other but each still closer to their common ancestor. Soooooo, the girls 40,000 years ago were also cute, sweet, darling, adorable, precious, small, weak, and to elicit care taking from their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, husbands, etc.So, the role of “little” in human females goes WAY back and is from nature, not nurture. Whatever role is now from being so cute, etc., apparently that role was crucial tens of thousands of years ago.So, there are cute, …, precious girls to be cared about, cared for, taken care of.One way the girls play this role is to pay attention to what others are thinking and feeling.Way back there, the boys had other roles to play and used other means.

      2. I think your statement, “They’ll go raise millions in VC and do it right”, is on target. Although I’m not a developer, why would a team of developers, already working on apps, and perhaps even have intellectual property and intellectual capital, settle for the incentives listed above? Why would the winning team, capable of jumping through all those hoops, help Kin become, what sounds like to me, the hub of the crypto ecosystem? Why Kin enabled apps? Why the Kin crypto currency? Why help launch a Kin economy?I’m sure I’m missing something obvious here. But, why doesn’t Kin/Kik hire their own team and stay in house? Not being a developer I’m probably at a disadvantage when it comes to getting my head around this. Thus, I’m asking why.

         1. “They’ll go raise millions in VC and do it right”That was Frank Miller’s statement not my statement.why would a team of developers, already working on apps, and perhaps even have intellectual property and intellectual capital, settle for the incentives listed above?I don’t think this is target at those groups that is anyone with something already of value or in the pipeline.Why?Why do people do all sorts of things over the internet (ie police others content by flagging things or being moderators) with no pay? Write reviews (non paid ones) to help Amazon or any retailer? For one thing they enjoy doing so. Another things is there is social proof because they see others doing it. Look hospitals have plenty of high paid employees. But they also have people who work for free. Because it’s a non-profit or for the ‘Sisters of the Corn’. But I would imagine in a for profit hospital you could also get volunteers ‘because it’s medicine’. You probably would have a harder time getting volunteers at Nordstrom. But I’d imagine you actually could do that if you tried. But, why doesn’t Kin/Kik hire their own team and stay in house?Much more leverage this way plus you avoid all sorts of long term costs and short term headaches. It’s a great idea.

            1. Thank you. I figured you could clear it up for me. Exactly. Why would the target be anyone with something of value already in pipeline.

8. So they launched ICO taking millions from people without thinking clearly of what the usecase will be.

9. I read the Kin Developer program information and I do not understand the point or benefit for developers and consumers. I watched the video that Kik made to demonstrate its integration with Kin. It looks like one can earn some Kin by performing some activities (e.g. complete a tutorial). In that case, the benefit of Kin is that I can earn Kin risk free (I completed the tutorial) and can spend Kin to make my Kik account look cooler.Cryptocurrencies remind me of an MMORPG I used to play called DragonRealms. The game was text-based and pre-dated World of Warcraft. In the early 2000’s the game became a lot more popular and the in-game currency had a DR Gold (“Gold”) : USD exchange rate of less than one (1 Gold was worth more than 1 USD). The quantity of gold was not fixed and players earned gold by trading with other players, hunting (this would be similar to mining), or completing quests (this would result in “mined” ultra rare items that could easily be sold for hundreds or thousands of Gold or USD). Unsurprisingly, players started making serious money selling Gold for USD to other players. Also unsurprisingly, the exchange rate moved the other way and Gold experienced a huge devaluation. There were even more similarities between Gold and Crpyto headlines, as there were DR Gold thefts and fraud.In DragonRealms I could harness more computing power to create many characters and write scripts for them to mine items that would result in output that I could convert to USD. This occurred in the centralized world of DragonRealms with less complicated algorithms but I don’t see much of a practical difference beyond that.

   1. That first line is Crypto in a nutshell.

   2. a big part of the value proposition is in enabling a more sustainable architecture for scaling applications. for instance right now if github goes down it is a big problem, so much code gets deployed from there. github is fairly centralized. eventually “crypto github” will emerge and the work of hosting code repositories and deploying apps can be done by many participants that are unified by a monetary policy agreement, not an incorporation agreement.now, the hype surrounding currency valuations and the gap between where we are currently and how we can get to a more scalable technical architecture is substantial. but that is one example of utility that i think is very real and will be very valuable, probably for the entities that make it happen and definitely for organizations and individuals that want something like github to continue to work, but in an even better fashion.

      1. There is a problem with your example. Git is decentralized and free. Github is centralized but works with decentralized git and is free. What exactly is the value add of crypto git?

         1. keeping all the benefits that come from the centralization of github — namely making it easier for developers to collaborate, integration with deployment apps that facilitate containerization of code, etc — while letting hte underlying architecture of github become more stronger and harder to take down (and thus better at scaling). right now github sits on some set of computers, AWS or locally or whatever their plan is. if you take down whatever is hosting the app, you take down the app. that sucks big time for everyone who is dependent on github (a lot of organizations and open source projects). if the hosting for github is decentralized, you then increase hte number of nodes that have to be taken down for the app to be beaten. now i don’t believe total decentralization is worthwhile, since i think that will introduce other problems, but i think there is a happy medium. finding this happy medium may involve a token, if “crypto github” wants to allow anyone to share resources in building github, or may it involve a more restrictive approach in which entities apply and are licensed to share the burden of enabling “crypto github.”that is just an example. but i think you can extend it to anything — youtube, reddit, AWS, dropbox, etc — and make the analogy work. if this is accepted it can thus become apparent how cryptocurrencies transform the architecture of software development.

            1. You’re right in having concerns about scaling github (and similar sites) long term (over tens of decades), but the biggest issue facing open innovation such as is being espoused by the crypto community is the Dunning-Kruger effect. A lot of well-intentioned people are coming up with ineffective solutions to imaginary problems while ignoring a whole bunch of truly fascinating challenges.

            2. The happy medium is paying for AWS/Azure/Google/Your own racks. Pick two to fourThat’s too Expensive!! There are no free lunches.

            3. I think it’ll be easy enough, in due time, to coordinate between hundred or thousands of options

      2. The only issue with this argument is that people forever thought if I could only distribute things. Well AWS does, and it is not easy or cheap. People think if I automagically put in code I won’t pay AWS (we have seven of our own datacenters) and do not use AWS, but it is damn hard, and you add to not reduce the complexity when you don’t control everything.Meaning wouldn’t it be great if we could just use Phil’s internet connection and extra hard drive space at home while he is at work?? We have a million “Phil’s” out there just distribute the data and voila! It’s like a virtual RAID drive. You know how many times I’ve seen a RAID array go down??? Lots. And that is when you control the environment. Now let’s addsome very bad actors. Holy shit I don’t want that. I know somebody very well who had some servers at his house. His modem got hacked and at 4am the police came in put him on the ground took all of his electronics and held him. He was not charged but distributing child porn is no joke of a charge.Want to know how to get your AWS instance taken down? We can go into the ways. Now as a “kook” there might be things that you don’t want the NSA to get to (or Chinese equivalent)

         1. yes that is why i believe full decentralization is unlikely, and that a semi-centralized structure is far more likely. more decentralized than AWS, less decentralized then bitcoin/bittorrent/etc

         2. Exactly. Decentralized is like a RAID config with no control over the hardware, maintenance, or data. Throw in a bad actor (your taken from the headlines example of child porn) and now we are all bad actors.Pulling from Brad Feld’s post about optimists and pessimists, I want to be a constuctive doubter but I feel like a level 10 pessimist.

   3. That is the only thing I have in the back of my head, but then like Kid says part of it is distributing architecture. We have a developer that has had a MMORPG Prison game. The crypto currency is “cigs” We won’t go into how you earn or what you can buy with them. But people do pay cash for them.

10. right now you might have a job and you get paid $X. you want to buy a house that costs $Y. in the future you will get paid in a cryptocurrency in the amount Z.N * Z = X, where N is some number greater than 1. this will make it easier to buy house Y. when it becomes apparent this reality is coming, everyone will want to get paid in cryptocurrency that pays Z.

    1. Did not understand this…

       1. i tried to explain it using as a few words as possible. but the basic idea is that introducing a new currency has the potential to solve problems resulting from monetary policy. the biggest problem of which is that income inequality is high, resulting in a situation in which people don’t have enough money (or that prices are too high, depending on how one prefers to view things).

    2. So, wild volatility is a feature of crypto, Not a bug?

       1. No, eventually you’ll see cryptocurrencies with carefully managed monetary policies. You already see currencies pegged for stability and those that are backed by reserve assets

          1. What’s the point of an asset backed token?

             1. it will allow for the price of the currency to be controlled. for instance, say i issue kidmercury_coin. lets say i issue 100 of them. let’s say i also maintain a reserve of 5 shares of amazon stock amazon is currently trading at around $1,750 USD, so that means kidmercury_coin has a reserve of $8.750 (1750 *5).now let’s say kidmercury_coin starts trading at $5 per coin. let’s say i want to instill confidence in kidmercury_coin, so i say will work to keep that as a floor, so that hte price of kidmercury_coin does not fall below $5.let’s say someone wants to push the price of kidmercury_coin down, for whatever reason, benign or otherwise. they dump 75 kidmercury_coin on the market, in an attempt to push it below $5. i can sell some of the reserve to buy those shares back, and thus maintain the peg. if price keeps going up and that is a problem, i can increase the supply of kidmercury_coin. in this way, whatever price target is desired can be pursued (though not always executed in the desired manner).this is essentially very similar to open market operations conducted by central banks in the nation state system today. that point is something the hardcore decentralistas will not accept. they will have to suffer extreme price volatility to accommodate their ideology, and i believe that will be the primary downfall of the decentralization extremists.

11. .There used to be a similar concept used in the South after the Civil War. It was called “tenant farming.”The Plantation Owner assigned you a plot of land (little shack on it if you were lucky), advanced some seed, lent you some equipment (horse and a plow for which you ultimately had to pay rent), and let you keep a portion of what you grew.If you had an enlightened PO, they gave you an increasing percentage based on yield. More yield, more better for you. Very, very, very few enlightened POs.The tenant farmer, usually a freed slave, was at the mercy of the weather, the bugs, the wildfires, the Klan, and the PO.I never heard of any tenant farmers getting rich. There were a lot who worked themselves to the edge of death before moving north to Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati – list goes on a bit more, but you get the idea.That is how Southern black people came to live in the industrialized upper mid-west – running from failed tenant farms.Seems like a similar scheme.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

    1. Tell us how you really feel about it.Interesting comparison, especially when members of my family still have some of those tenant houses on their land. Miserable conditions being located beside a South Carolina swamp. Mosquitoes, no-see-ums, snakes and stinging pest being the worse. Look up the movie ‘Nightjohn’.

12. CONTRIBUTORS:When companies hire what they promote to investors as the smartest and brightest and then seek outside assistance for the exact tasks they hired in house developers they appear to need to get back to the hiring table. Gheez!Captain Obvious!#UNEQUIVOCALLYUNAPOLOGETICALLYINDEPENDENT

13. why would consumers use token developed by failed messaging startup?

14. Nice article helpful for new startups and developers tech lovers. Betapage.co