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The Almighty Buck Bitcoin Communications Digital Software Technology

Messenger App Kik Debuts Its Own Digital Currency (bloomberg.com) 51

The messaging app Kik Interactive has decided to create its own digital currency. Kik's plans are for an "initial coin offering," a process by which it sells tokens that can be used to buy services on its platform. "The idea is that as more and more people use Kik, the value of those tokens, called 'Kin,' will rise in value," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Kik, which has raised about $120 million (in real money) from investors including Tencent Holdings Ltd., could serve to add a new layer of legitimacy to the process. "Kik will be the largest install base of cryptocurrency users in the world," Chief Executive Officer Ted Livingston said. "Kin, on day one will be the most-used cryptocurrency in the world." The move comes as Kik finally reveals how many people actually use its app regularly each month: 15 million. That's a far-cry from the 300 million total registered users number it was sharing around this time last year. Kik plans to gift a certain amount of Kin to each user. They'll be able use the new currency to buy games, live video streams and other digital products. The company's goal is to attract new merchants to sell on the platform, creating a snowball effect where Kin becomes more valuable and more sellers pile onto Kik, increasing its popularity.
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Messenger App Kik Debuts Its Own Digital Currency

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Seems more like scrip than cryptocurrency to me.

  • by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:13AM (#54490313)

    Kik was the company that had the NPM package name, kik, taken away from the developer for trademark reasons and the developer broke the Iternet by deleting his packages (including the ever popular song

    • Sorry, express bus hit a pot hole and my finger accidentally hit the submit button. Before I was interrupted...

      The developer removed all his packages, including the ever popular pad left function. Who knew that every JavaScript project was dependent on it being available?

      https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/ [qz.com]

  • Porn. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:38AM (#54490425)

    Kik is positioning themselves for cam girls (and boys) to get paid.

    • That was exactly my first thought as well. Hell, it was happening on kik as I understand it already. Now the company can potentially make some money on the deal too.

      You offer users the ability to play "games" (i.e. watch interactive ads) and give them fake money, they pass it on for porn, porn returns it for real money or pays for additional services using it. Thus advertisement money goes to kik, and some small amount of that goes to people making porn, the rest goes in their pocket, and the porn

  • At last! An opportunity to make back my losses from my speculative investments in Linden Dollars.
  • this title really begs for an ethnic slur/stereotype based pun.

    Do you know perchance if owners of that messenger are Jewish?

  • And what's wrong with that? An opportunity for enterprising folks to (mostly) cut out the middlemen/gatekeepers.

  • Never heard of the app, then I went to look further into it:

    "On November 4, 2014, Kik scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard."

    "Kik Messenger has drawn controversy due to its reported involvement in a number of incidents of child exploitation. The app has been criticized as unsafe for minors due to its anonymity features and allegedly weak parental control mechanisms."

    "Kik has been criticized for providing inadequate parental control over minors' use of th

  • to limit universality of universal commodity called money

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