Because it's not immediately clear, this is a project developed by Coinbase, but under its own brand. The demo, which is available on the Apple Store and Google Play store uses TestNet Ether for now.
I like the idea, but this is very confusing to end-consumers:
- Is this just a messaging app? A payments app? A web browser?
- It's all of those things, except not a web browser, it's an "app browser" (why not app store, especially considering the whole point of these is that they are paid?)
- The starting experience is anything but compelling: http://i.imgur.com/U69Gskl.png
- Is this developed by Coinbase? If so, why is there no mention, and the app is developed by "Bluxome Labs"?
I would find your pitch much more interesting if you didn't go from "look at this very cool technology" to "look how we're changing the world for the better for these poor people in Africa".
Be realistic. How many Sub-Saharan Africans are using Token or working on it right now? You're first-world devs working on first-world tech and wrapping it up in humanitarian terms because it makes you more attractive.
It's kind of exploitative. It's all about money at the end of the day, isn't it?
I apologize for the rant. Just had a semester of classes on faith and development and law and development and this stuff is often very complex and a type of unintentional colonialism often runs through it.
"Hey, check out these people! Check out how much they need our help! Wouldn't things be so much better if we did X for them?"
In many cases, yes, but in a lot of ways it is impossible for people who aren't on the ground to properly understand culture, context, and needs. Does the team have anyone on the ground? Is this informed by research on the topic? From a less critical perspective, a portion of the site dedicated to such research (and thus informing the goals) would be really cool and useful.
Aside from the app, and what it can facilitate, I find chat UIs to be a zone for invention. Here Token partially formalized the UI [1] for menus and the like. As it is with Telegram for example, you provide a "keyboard" of a grid of buttons to press, similar to SOFA each button has a value. However Telegram does not have menus, so general purpose bots need a lot of back and forth to refine what the user's intention is. With SOFA, it seems to be one payload with nested options that do not need to be committed in order to explore what options there are, reducing concerns for connectivity requirements just to find out what they can do.
living in Zimbabwe now, there a severe shortage of cash, Im hoping a project like this one will catch one day. good luck
I just heard an interesting talk about this on the Bitcoin Podcast[1] a few days ago. They have some inserting ideas around being able to democratize startup stage investing.
Are they using some implementation of the Ethereum light client protocol? Last time I checked it wasn't available yet: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol
If they are using the standard protocol then how do they connect to the Ethereum network? Do they use their servers as proxy to the network? Because if it's so, that would defeat the whole point to me.
Is this supposed to be a UI for end users of smart contracts? Are smart contracts widely deployed in production yet? Or just b2bexperiments experiments ?
What can you actually do with this, other than chat and send payments? There's only 2 apps in the recommended section and they're both basic.
I think the token economy will growth and growth. We can expect good and really bad news because anyone can participate.
My company is receiving many inquiries oriented to managing funds and trading. Also, In the context of YC Startup School we are building an API for multiple cryptocurrencies, tokens, and smart contracts. We are even disassembling smart contracts to gather more metrics about the blockchain usage. If you are interested on using it instead of building your own infrastructure please contact me via my company page.
Token's client is a lot faster (and much less buggy) than status.im.
This would be a huge thing in places where there isn't a good free bank account-to-bank account money transfer app. which I assume is why facebook is also eyeing such things.
Maybe I am not getting it but ethereum is way to complex to make it successful - and because it is decentralised it looks deeply fragmented. As I said, I am probably not getting it.
See also Status, which is very very similar and open-source: https://status.im/
This is huge ! So many new Ethereum project out there : Token, Status.im, Augur, Golem, Aragon ... It's amazing to see such an ecosystem growing so fast.
I'll bite. Why do I need this?
I tried using it. It works like a charm. May be I felt good because I have been following the Ethereum ecosystem. I am fine if someone would have felt otherwise.
I asked the first time this was mentioned on the Status thread:
Is this an end run around Apple's 30% of IAP?
Is reputation a single number associated with an identity, or is there a network element to it?
Yo can I get a copy of the Apps source code?
Open Whisper Systems source is GPLv3.
Did anyone else register a bunch of 'leet' usernames?
I wonder if they will reset the usernames when it gets put on livenet because it kind of seems unfair.
Who sends tips like that? Hopefully there are better use cases.
I applaud the effort the coinbase team has put into this project. Yet I'm sceptical if this will be the breakthrough for cryptocurrencies.
I'm not sure "Browser" is a good term for this; I get that they are trying to convey that it's just a client for the existing independent Etherium network, but to 99% of people, "browser" == "web browser". It's just going to cause confusion, especially in non-technical users (which seems to be a user base they are trying to go for here).
Even as a developer, when I saw "tokenbrowser.com", I was expecting to see a web browser. Visually, it looks more like a chat client (makes sense since they are taking inspiration from WeChat).