[HN Gopher] RadioShack - Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream
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RadioShack - Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream
Author : neb_b
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-12-18 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.radioshack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.radioshack.com)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Fascinating to watch cryptocurrency and blockchain become the go-
| to pivot for those who have run out of traditional ways to be
| profitable.
|
| Is this the original company transitioning to cryptocurrency? It
| was the RadioShack brand simply auctioned off to someone who
| wanted to use an established brand for their crypto project?
| kranke155 wrote:
| This is unfortunately how people get into the habit of thinking
| all crypto and blockchain is a scam - because a huge numbers of
| scams and silly ideas are indeed running in the space...
| bredren wrote:
| It has been like this since the beginning.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The space is in dire need of regulation. Sociopaths go for
| the lowest level of effort with the maximum level of
| rewards. Right now making a dumb crypto token and shilling
| it is likely the easiest immoral way to make money in this
| world.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| What would you say is the ratio of genuine crypto
| innovation/research/companies compared to scams? Considering
| the signal-to-noise ratio, I don't think it's that weird to
| just say "it's all a scam anyway" since that rule of thumb
| actually works extraordinarily well. Unless you're talking to
| an expert or having a deep dive you've gotten the point
| across correctly.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I'm not sure what it is, it might be as high as 99-1. But
| the 1 is pretty incredible. Look at fxhash on Tezos, it's
| created something truly incredible in generative art.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| What's an actually useful, not-contrived use case that crypto
| enables that isn't otherwise possible _for the average
| resident of a stable/wealthy country_?
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I work in crypto since a little while, and have following
| the tech since 2014 or so.
|
| I'm still really skeptical of that trash fire going
| anywhere. Including my day job.
|
| I can only thing of one application, and it still have to
| deliver:
|
| Providing mesh network of wifi, LoRA or 5g where the node
| are administered by individuals.
|
| The nodes are mining a proof of coverage. And effectively
| being payed to deliver a service ( providing wifi/LoRA/5g
| coverage )
|
| The nodes cannot trust each other, and having a
| decentralized ledger help them split the bill and
| compensate the nodes for their work.
|
| In my view it would provide a "last miles delivery of
| coverage"
|
| I have a few project in mind that I won't mention here. The
| crypto they are using is not subject to much speculation.
|
| That my favorite use of that tech stack. ( since the
| decentralized land ledger projects seems to not go anywhere
| )
| valzam wrote:
| (I am hugely sceptical on most things crypto) generally
| speaking the view of a rich, stable country might make you
| blind to some real use cases because you just don't have
| them. But for people in less privileged countries having a
| permissionless system of digital dollars is actually
| extremely useful. Also my pet theory is that Bitcoin MIGHT
| suck money out of the property market and make home
| ownership more affordable.
| meowkit wrote:
| Decentralized Identity for individuals and devices.
|
| I've found the images here to be a good quick and dirty
| summary: https://www.gsma.com/identity/decentralised-
| identity
| 65 wrote:
| Maybe I'm just dense, but this seems more like a
| centralized identity more than a decentralized identity.
| Which, if you lose, like I have with various wallets I've
| had over the years, seems extremely sketchy.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| there isn't one. but by the time people realise that a few
| unscrupulous people will have made a ton of - fiat - money
| out of the gullible masses.
| kranke155 wrote:
| NFTs have proven incredible for indie digital artists
| across the world, but particularly for artists from the
| third world where making a living off them is a bit easier.
| There's a huge honest indie art movement on the Tezos NFT
| space.
|
| Good places to look around in: Fxhash (amazing generative
| art market that creates uniques through interaction between
| the code and the blockchain) Hic Et Nunc (now multiple
| sites, fully decentralised art market) OBJKT (sort of a
| better UI for Tezos NFTs, same stuff as in Hic).
| addicted wrote:
| What does NFTs add to this that couldn't be achieved by
| FXHash hosting ownership status in a PostgreSQL database?
| kranke155 wrote:
| Nobody trusts a single SQL database or any single
| developer or company. The advantage is that you have a
| trust less, decentralised database no one can alter and
| has thousands of people hosting it.
|
| This is a common fallacy I've seen among developers - the
| idea that because the technical solution is inferior it's
| social value must be inferior. Blockchain is not a
| technical solution, it's a social solution. At least as
| far as NFTs it has solved an insoluble problem, which was
| no one trusted anyone in particular with a ledger about
| digital art ownership - but they do trust everyone/a a
| large group that's incentivised to keep hosting it, and
| has problem to be tampering resistant.
| dekervin wrote:
| There was a similar trend in 2017 I think, but it died off with
| the bear market. It has scents of the original dotcom bubble.
| Slap a .com extension on your brand, collect the cash.
| paulgb wrote:
| KODAKCoin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin) seems
| to be the most literal 2017 parallel to this: old, nostalgic
| brand scooped up and used to rent legitimacy for a silly coin
| scheme.
|
| It's weird how amnesiac the crypto market is, it feels like
| everything is a rerun these days of something we lived
| through just four years ago.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| That was the first one I thought of as well.
| sswaner wrote:
| This will really help address the complaint that cryptocurrency
| is just a Ponzi scheme.
| echelon wrote:
| This feels like the era of webvan and pets.com, except those
| things were simply premature.
|
| A token defi swap of croins and crokens (crypto coins and
| tokens) brings zero value to the world.
| weaponizedlinux wrote:
| Is this a joke?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| My first impression was that it might be serious (would sort of
| make sense for Radioshack to pivot), then I saw Tai Lopez
| listed on the team and assumed it was a joke.
|
| But it appears to be "serious" (inasmuch as anything involving
| the anthropomorphic joke named Tai Lopez can be)
|
| I work in the crypto space and am generally pretty bullish, but
| this is the biggest sell signal I've seen. I wonder if Tai took
| out a big short position and is now using his name to crash the
| market.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| You had me at Tai Lopez. Honestly, I'm very sad this is real and
| not a pitch-perfect parody site because everything about it is
| literally satire.
|
| Tai Lopez shilling for some RadioShack coin. What a world.
| clpm4j wrote:
| If you scroll down and look at the 'The Team', you'll see it's
| two guys Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez. They bought the Radio Shack
| brand a couple of years ago:
| https://www.retaildive.com/news/radioshack-brand-acquired-by...
|
| Tai Lopez is a motivational speaker celebrity (first I've heard
| of him). And Alex Mehr is apparently a former co-founder of Zoosk
| (a dating app).
| pdq wrote:
| It's savvy but pretty scammy, as people will assume the
| businesses are still alive, when they are just shell fronts,
| using the prior logo/branding/domain names.
|
| Here's Tai's parent company and their purchased brands:
|
| https://www.retailecommerceventures.com/
|
| Some big ones that I recall going to back in the day are Radio
| Shack, Pier1, Stein Mart, and Linens N Things.
| ghaff wrote:
| Old brands pretty much never die. I haven't seen one recently
| but for a time I was getting public relations pitches for
| RCA-branded devices that were clearly some generic Chinese
| knockoff things.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| About 5 years ago literally everyone was being bombarded with
| youtube ads by tai lopez, where he is in his garage showing off
| a lambo and talking about how books are his most prized
| possession
| justinsaccount wrote:
| Tai Lopez is the "here in my garage" douchbag
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/here-in-my-garage
| MrMember wrote:
| It did result in one of the best YouTube poops of all time so
| there's that at least.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I had such a hard time deciding whether to vouch this
| comment. But if the knowyourmeme page is on topic, then
| surely linking to this video (which that page links to) is
| also on topic.
|
| It's also interesting that such an influential brand is now
| owned by a random rich person. I never thought that my
| childhood hideout would become a punchline. The only way to
| make it better would be to add a little intro to the video
| like "At RadioShack, garages are important to us. That's
| why we've decided to invest in 47 new lambos that we bought
| with our RADIO tokens..."
|
| What a sad ending for the only electronics shop in town. My
| friend and I used to hang out there after school and try to
| build logic gates and simple counters.
|
| Uno reverse card: Tai Lopez uses the funds from this to
| rebuild electronics shops across the world, and becomes a
| household hero for nerds everywhere. Since this outcome is
| so weird, that outcome suddenly seems not-impossible.
| colecut wrote:
| Tai Lopez is the master of flexing in front of books he hasn't
| read, cars he doesn't own, women he paid to be there..
| er4hn wrote:
| My first thoughts were: This is a scam, I'm on a page spelled
| almost like "radioshack.com"
|
| Then: The old radioshack page has let their domain lapse and
| been taken over.
|
| Then: Ah, Tai Lopez, the only man I've ever known to keep his
| bookcases in the garage, like a set of house tools.
|
| On a side note, on Tai Lopez's head shot the man in the lower
| right facing the camera looks like he's realized this
| motivational talk is going nowhere.
| presspot wrote:
| Can you say, "Jump the shark"?
| bredren wrote:
| What a bummer for this brand.
|
| At one point, I had hoped that Amazon would buy up all the radio
| shacks and convert them into Amazon prime lounges and provide
| basically a sort of temporary workspace/island of calm you could
| escape to in any suburb.
| computerliker wrote:
| time is a flat circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
| joebergeron wrote:
| > RadioShack, and RadioShack alone, can bridge the gap and "cross
| the chasm" of mainstream usage for Cryptocurrency.
|
| This is it, folks.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| This is embarrassing.
| SamBam wrote:
| > "Meet our Partners and Collaborators"
|
| This is literally just the list of defunct brandnames Tai has
| acquired.
| okareaman wrote:
| The Shack is Back
| ggfgg wrote:
| And smoking crack
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| RadioShack devolved in such a way, with a long dying death, that
| all of my memories of early radioshack have been replaced with
| later-year memories of their store, when they became a total
| joke. I have no nostalgia for the brand. I'm sure it would be
| different if they went out of business with dignity in like 2001.
|
| The last time I went into Radioshack to 'get something' in 2011,
| i needed to get a couple of cables to connect a mini HDMI cable
| to a full size connector. They didn't have the exact cable so I
| had to get several different ones to make the connection work.
| The price for the cables was literally $91, so I didn't get it,
| and ordered it online instead. Sad
| ghaff wrote:
| And honestly even the memories of early-ish RadioShack involved
| a lot of rose-tinted glasses. Even in the 70s there was a lot
| of crap consumer electronics mixed in with the readily-
| accessible cables, components, and maker stuff (such as it
| was).
| shiftoutbox wrote:
| And the bubble is at Maximum!
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| The grift continues
| dannylandau wrote:
| Grift - is a small scale swindle. This is a large scale
| swindle, so need a new term that represents the scale.
| jerbearito wrote:
| Macrogrift
| echelon wrote:
| Since they stole web3 and crypto as nomenclature, I've
| started calling them croins and crokens.
| jagermo wrote:
| Megagrift.
|
| So sad that Kimble isn't able to add to this...
| musicale wrote:
| This is not the RadioShack we need, but maybe it's the RadioShack
| we deserve. :(
| outside1234 wrote:
| Its just incredible to me that this is allowed to go on and on.
| It is clearly BS all of the way down - where are the regulators
| to stop this before the massive crash?
|
| This is two guys who bought a brand and are using it to defraud
| people out of their money - how is this legal?
| ghaff wrote:
| You're preaching to the same group of people who, in the main,
| oppose any regulation that restrict the ability of people to
| invest in anything they want to invest in.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| ask the investigator, Judge and jury in this case --
| apparently, you
| [deleted]
| zanek wrote:
| Relevant tweet with Tai Lopez explaining:
| https://twitter.com/tailopez/status/1333228688456904707?s=21
| iamleppert wrote:
| Even the corpse of RadioShack has been brought back from the dead
| with the promise of crypto riches. Scrolling through their
| partners is like a who's who of old defunct 90's brands.
| DressBarn?? It makes it crystal clear what their strategy is.
|
| I have fond memories of RadioShack, it's part of what got me into
| computers and electronics. But taking those memories and
| weaponizing them against me to try and extract what I can only
| assume is money, feels wrong on so many levels.
|
| If anything (and I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment) I
| will avoid this new Frankenstein creation. That said, I'm sure it
| will still entrap enough people to make these two guys even
| richer while still being a net negative for society as a whole.
|
| File this under the same drawer as Mariah Carey partnering with
| McDonald's to sell more junk food.
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(page generated 2021-12-18 23:02 UTC)