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The Almighty Buck Bitcoin

RadioShack Announces Ambitious New Cryptocurrency Exchange (radioshack.com) 104

Posted by EditorDavid from the RadioShack-Defi dept.
RadioShack.com is now showing visitors a new message: "Bringing cryptocurrency to the mainstream..."

With a 100-year-old brand, "we are going to lead the way for blockchain tech to reach mainstream adoption by other large brands."

The RadioShack home page says they'll start with a "symbiosis" with Atlas USV, a community-driven project to build a universal, decentralized/widely accessible DeFi base layer. Atlas USV's "Barter" mechanism lets users purchase third-party tokens and transfer them to Atlas USV's treasury in return for discounted USV tokens. "The Atlas USV treasury can accumulate any crypto asset of its choice with this dynamic...

"Once the liquidity pool surpasses other exchanges' liquidity level in any token pair, our swap efficiency will be unbeatable for that pair...

"Other decentralized exchanges margins on swap fees are our opportunity.... "

Or, as they explain on a more detailed web page, "We intend RadioShack to be the first protocol to pass over into mainstream usage in the history of DeFI," promising that RadioShack DeFi "will become the first to market with a 100 year old brand name that's recognized in virtually all 190+ countries in the world..."

"RadioShack has one objective: Distribution and usage by millions of individuals but possibly more important, by hundreds of blue-chip, large corporations as their gateway into becoming blockchain companies."

Currently there's a sign-up form for a notification when "RADIO token" launches (as well as links to their channels on Discord and Telegram).

Their "Fundamentals" page explains that "It is our hypothesis that the best way for crypto to be more mainstream is for an established brand name in the tech space to lead the way."

The RadioShack brand was purchased In November of 2020 by e-commerce rehabilitator REV, now listed as a collaborator on RadioShack's home page. (Ironically, the "Fundamentals" page also includes RadioShack's Super Bowl ad where there store is taken back by the 1980s.)

The official Twitter feed of Radio Shack now also has the same new tagline: "Bringing Cryptocurrency To The Mainstream."
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RadioShack Announces Ambitious New Cryptocurrency Exchange More

RadioShack Announces Ambitious New Cryptocurrency Exchange

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  • Everyone seems to be ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:33PM (#62095895)
    ... jumping sharks these days! LO fuckin' L

  • What? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:34PM (#62095901)

    Radioshack is still in business?

    • There's at least one person who has ownership of the name, probably bought it for a few bucks to promote his cryptocurrency scam.

      • Pretty sure Verizon owns it.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Pretty sure Verizon owns it.

          Parent post confirmed.

      • Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Koen Lefever ( 2543028 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @11:19PM (#62096089)

        In November 2020, RadioShack's intellectual property and its remaining operations—about 400 independent authorized dealers, about 80 Hobbytown USA affiliate stores, and its online sales operation—were purchased by Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), a Florida-based company that had previously purchased defunct retailers Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell's Sporting Goods, and Linens 'n Things, along with The Franklin Mint. (Source [wikipedia.org])

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dracos ( 107777 )

        Surely a crypto scam is more profitable than years of selling cell phones at a loss.

        • The way I see it

          RS got into the cell phone business because the company was starting to tank before the 2000s. Because who really wanted "Realistic" or "Archer"? The electronics hobbiest market was only a shadow of it's former self. Dot-com was where it's at, and no kid wanted to build his own AM radio anymore.

          Then cellphones became big at the turn of the century, and the hype exploded almost overnight. RS's saw this as an oppurtunity to lure shoppers back into their stores to not only sel

          • It wasn't the Mom and Pop stores, it was the company owned Verizon and ATT stores that killed them. When I worked at RS in the mid 2000s the nearest Verizon store was over an hour drive. The Mom and Pops nearby were shady as heck, nobody wanted to deal with them. Once a company Verizon store opened down the street, that was the end for RS in that town, because Verizon store always had an extra "$150 credit" or something customers couldn't use at RS and could undercut us every time. Then RS nationwide switch

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      They had many 'Tandy' stores here for about 20-25 years in the Netherlands and Belgium, but suddenly disappeared in the early 90s.

      • I remember there was a Tandy-only Radio Shack in the early 1980s about a mile from where I lived on the East Coast of the US. Sometime in the mid or late 80s, it was converted to a full Radio Shack store.

        IIRC: It had the standard red Radio Shack signage with a smaller Tandy logo when it was a computer only store

    • No - not in the way you mean. This is someone buying out the Radioshack brand to run a crypto exchange.

    • That was my first thought also. When you are a desperate company, you either sue everybody, go into crypto, or both.

      I expect SearsCoin soon...

    • This is almost certainly a holding company that bought the brand trying to make a fast buck.

    • Mod parent Funny and Interesting, but for Stupid. Nothing personal on you. The last part is for the people who follow recognizable names NO MATTER WHAT!

      However, the should be a target-rich environment for Funny comments. The historical brand of no value crashes into the imaginary value of the future. Sort of like a remake of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1... [imdb.com] (Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl in English). English trailer at https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3... [imdb.com] (but it will kill your appetite for popcorn). But

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      No, but that doesn't mean the domain name won't have some value when trying to lure in some rube with a crypto currency scam.

  • lets users purchase third-party tokens and transfer them to Atlas USV's treasury in return for discounted USV tokens

    I can see the point of a type of crypto-currency ETF that is built on top of all other cryptocurrencies, as a way to sort of diversify your crypto assets. It's not very exciting, but it's reasonable.

    What I really want to know is, how secure is their code? What is their MTTTL (mean time to total asset loss)? How long will it take for hackers to steal my stuff through them?

    • Re:Hype (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:38PM (#62095913)
      Also, do I have to give the cashier my phone number?
      • Thatâ(TM)s funny right there! Oh what memories. If only I had mod points or whatever.

      • Also, do I have to give the cashier my phone number?

        Yes. This will be the only cryptocurrency where the blockchain is kept on a roll of carbonless copy paper which is encapsulated in a metal box.

        During each transaction, a copy of the paper is torn off and given to the currency purchaser, who keeps it in their currency "wallet". The phone number serves as a unique identifier for the transaction, and the home address serves as the irrevocable hash value. Security is provided by always including a unique and unpredictable random math error on the hand-tallied s

      • Also, do I have to give the cashier my phone number?

        Only if you want your free batteries. What memories. (smile)

  • Shell of its former self. (Score:3)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:35PM (#62095905)

    This isn't the mass-distributor of RCA cables, Tandy Computers, and portable radios... it's somebody who bought the brand.

    • What a way to trash a 100 year old brand.

      • It's almost as bad as going in to browse some connectors and adapters and being constantly swarmed by people trying to sell cell phones.

        "No, thank you."
        "No, thank you."
        "No, I still don't need any help finding anything."
        "No, I said... bye."

      • What a way to trash a 100 year old brand.

        This didn't trash the brand. Radioshack did that themselves when they became a mobile phone reseller.

        • Well, they had to sell something. All of their previous business models had dried up. To stay up in the hobbyist space you need to go big like Fry's, and now even that is gone.

          • All of their previous business models had dried up.

            Companies still making money selling electronic components disagree. As do I who regularly orders components from all sorts of electronics shops both local and international.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The guy who owns the brand runs a company where they worship the ground he walks on. It's one of the most surreal things i've ever seen.

      This new owner does a lot of get rich quick schemes including a few pyramid ones.

  • I miss the old Allied Radio, before Tandy bought them, they became Radio Shack, and went downhill. Same with Lafayette Radio.

  • This could be a real blockbuster (Score:4, Funny)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:42PM (#62095921) Journal

    Pun intended.

    • Hold on, I'm gonna go see who owns the Blockbuster brand name, maybe I can buy it for a few monkey NFTs and use the brand name to launch a competing crypto service.

  • ... that I understood only about 5% of that.
  • Wait, I thought they rebranded to The Shack? Then again, I quit caring about them when they tried to become cell phone stores.
    • IIRC they went chapter 11 a few years ago and then finally shut down, the brand name got passed around a couple times I think and now these clowns are using it to basically start a completely new and unrelated business.

  • At last (Score:5, Funny)

    by dogsbreath ( 730413 ) on Saturday December 18, 2021 @09:49PM (#62095935)

    A Realistic cryptocurrency

  • I sold resistors. Capacitors. Inductors. And, most of all, hearing aid batteries.

    WHAT THE FUCKSHITSICKLES IS THIS?

    I despair for humanity,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slazzy ( 864185 )
      It's a great time to be into electronics as a hobby, components are super cheap these days.

      • It's a great time to be into electronics as a hobby, components are super cheap these days.

        Indeed. Digi-Key, Mouser, and Jameco have a million times (literally) the components that Radioshack ever carried. Sparkfun is also great. Even Amazon has a good selection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      It became a zombie brand. Something with vestigial name recognition that was passed around from one business venture to the next.

  • I shopped at Radio Shack regularly until they started to phase out the actual radio and electronics components in favor of shitty Sprint cell phones, pre-built RC cars, and overpriced underpowered batteries. Fortunately, Fry's still carried most of the stuff that I used to buy at Radio Shack. But now Fry's is dead too. DIY electronics may be so niche these days that there no longer needs to be a Radio Shack in every strip mall. But... in my neck of the woods at least... there are enough people put out b

    • I think it began when hobby electronics books stopped being a thing they stocked. Of course then the actual hobby electronics component sales suffered.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swell ( 195815 )

      We had a RS store a block from my house. Almost til the final day the employees (college kids working part time) told me 'Don't worry, they won't close our store.' It was already sad that they were reduced to selling cell phone scams. Nobody in the store understood electronics. They were still asking for customer phone numbers at the sales counter, which may have been the first corporate privacy intrusion at such a large scale. I was never a ham operator, but I'm sure they miss RS, Heathkit, Allied and all

    • Fortunately, Fry's still carried most of the stuff that I used to buy at Radio Shack. But now Fry's is dead too. DIY electronics may be so niche these days that there no longer needs to be a Radio Shack in every strip mall.

      Now you can get it all online, with a much larger selection. In the Bay Area we still have a few small boutique places that sell resistors and such. They smell really nice.

      • Now you can get it all online, with a much larger selection.

        ...at a terrible cost if you want same-day delivery.

        If you have a single resistor shipped to your door, then maybe... just maybe... you dont get to complain about global warming.

      • Sure. You can get components online... if you buy them in ridiculous quantities or in variety packs that include stuff you don't need. If I need a dozen resistors, 6 of one rating, and 6 of another; its kind of insane to have to buy a 200-pack that contains 20 each of 10 different ratings, 8 off which are useless to me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      On December 20, 2005, RadioShack announced the sale of its newly built riverfront Fort Worth, Texas headquarters building to German-based KanAm Grund; the property was leased back to RadioShack for 20 years. In 2008, RadioShack assigned this lease to the Tarrant County College District (TCC), remaining in 400,000 square feet of the space as its headquarters.

      Ah, the "newly built headquarters", a time when many companies die off.

    • Nothing wrong with prebuilt RC cars when they're not crap, like the ones they sold. Nobody wants a hardbody unless it's got good detail, or it's hilariously cheap. Rat shack's problem is that you can't be all things to all people in a tiny space and most of their stores were super small.

    • Perhaps Fry's crypto is coming next? Then Circuit City.

  • Every Tom Dick and Dirtbag thinks they are going to open a gold mine with crypto-con. Do people really believe this fantasy money crap?

    • Someone said to me, "Crypto is just Mary Kay for 20-something year old men." Right now, a lot of this stuff is young people getting into the get-rich-quick schemes (much like Mary Kay).

      • What this means is that marketing is 1000% more important now to having a valuable crypto-anything than actual technical quality. "How good is your app?" matters more than "How good is your currency?"

        • Keynesian beauty contest. You don't buy into this because you think it's a good idea. You buy into it because you think others will think it's a good idea. Or maybe because you think others will think others will think others will think etc.

          So you don't need a business model. You just need something that looks superficially like one.

          • You don't buy into this because you think it's a good idea.

            If you are one of the rare people that can distinguish whether something is a good idea or not, you can make a lot of money based on that.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by vivian ( 156520 )

          It has always been about marketing - anyone can start a bitcoin clone tomorrow and mine a million coins using a TRS80 before lunchtime. It's only the brand recognition of Bitcoin and the other few famous ones that make it possible for them to have any market value at all - because they don't really offer a lot of utility for making legitimate transactions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        but with no pink Cadillacs on the horizon . . .

        But then again, Cadillac ceased to be an entity in its own right with its own engineering almost two decades ago, anyway. Everything introduced since '05 has been a Cadillac label on the GM parts bin, although a few legacy Cadillac parts got used early on. (and that's 2005, to be clear--1905 saw Cadillac go to a four cylinder engine. It would become part of GM four years later, but still go on itself to introduce the first large production V8 for the 15 model

  • 1 - So, if I need some quick cash, or trouble balancing my checkbook, instead of an atm or calculator, I can go to the new Radio Shack, get some solder, and a "bread" board, and wire up some bitcoin or ethereum. Holy shit, Batman !

    2 - When Radio Shack was really Radio Shack, it was a beloved brand. Then, it became WTF, Inc. Now, a newer generation doesn't even know the name. So, if you are going to reuse or resurrect the name, fair use, but what the hell does "Radio Shack" imply about crypto or currency?

  • So it's a vaporware exchange trading in a vaporware aggregation of a vaporware product (cryptocurrency).

    This is more tenuous than the interstellar medium.

  • Now that the shark has been officially jumped, can we all move on to whatever the Next Big Thing is? Crypto-everything is getting tiresome.

  • As long as I can still buy 0.01F 500V 20% ceramic disc capacitors on their website, I don't care what they do with crypto.

    • I took a look at there site, and they have nothing of the sort. It's just a cryptoloon buying a very ill fitting name that is not cool at all with the current generation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        a cryptoloon

        Isn't that the national block chain currency of Canada?

        • Interestingly enough they have a "Store" option on the main page menu, but when I clicked it, it took me to a "page not found error". Sloppy and unprofessional. Makes me wonder if the site designer hurredly took old RS's website and did a quick-e-mod on it.

            I would not give these clowns the time of day, let alone invest one penny into their cryptocrap.

    • As long as I can still buy 0.01F 500V 20% ceramic disc capacitors on their website, I don't care what they do with crypto.

      The original company is entirely gone, this is just a brand being bought and used for something else.

      But Radio Shack's attempt to become a web-based business was disastrously bad. My last interaction with the company, maybe 15 years ago now, was an attempt to buy a rechargeable battery of some particular model. Placed the order on-line, and they sent me the wrong battery. I checked my email receipt and the models did match, I had ordered the right thing and they shipped me the wrong one. How to fix this pro

  • "We are hoping to continue to destroy that brand, until any recognition of what it once was, it completely wiped from collective memory."

    Hell, I loved Radioshack back in the late 70's and early 80's - under the name "Tandy".

    That's the Radioshack I remember.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Used to be Tandy in the UK. For as long back as I remember it was always the store you walked into hoping to buy something and then discovering they either didn't have it or charged too much money for that thing. When Tandy went titsup, their place in the market was filled by Maplin who were mostly the same (and also went bust).

      • Radio Shack was acquired by Tandy Corporation in 1963. Tandy had/has stores in the USA which sell leather and leather crafting tools, named Tandy Leather. For some reason they decided to use the Tandy brand when they opened stores in the UK and Australia in 1973; in all other markets they simply licensed the name and apparently sold stock to retailers. I've been in a Radio Shack in Panama City, and its stock was far more reminiscent of an old school US store like the one I used to go to all the time in the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          My remembrance of Tandy in the UK is a little clouded by time but yes I remember the clutter and rows of cables and things in bags. They also used to sell no-name / OEM speakers, record & tape decks, alarm clocks, 10-in-1 games consoles and weird little gadgets.

          I went for a little google and found this catalogue [tandyonline.com] which is from years before my experience. But what strikes me even now looking at it is holy shit they were expensive. There is stuff in this 40 year old catalogue that would stand out as expe

  • And multiple arrays of redundant vacuum tubes ensure that the system won't go down. :)

    I'm kind of rooting for them.

  • No. For fucks sake no.

      I would rather the brand dies completely than have it perverted in this manner.

    I wish somebody bought the name to make sure this abomination couldn't come to pass X-[

  • Talk about a missed opportunity not to rebrand before they lost all that real estate to not have available PC parts, PC building workshops, Twitch streaming events and connect that to 3d printers, makers, raspis, the boom in hydroponics. Instead they died selling cellphone sim cards. Sears, the company everyone went to for shopping at home for 100 years, stopped its mail order business the year Amazon started selling books online. What a great world finance capital built for us. So efficient. It was so muc

    • Talk about a missed opportunity not to rebrand before they lost all that real estate to not have available PC parts, PC building workshops, Twitch streaming events and connect that to 3d printers, makers, raspis, the boom in hydroponics.

      As Best Buy discovered, the typical demographic that buys this stuff will use your store for a showroom and then make their actual purchases online from a lower-priced competitor. There's only so much they can lower prices to compete, because there's a lot of overhead involved in running a brick and mortar store.

      These days, having a physical retail presence really only makes sense if you're selling things that people typically need immediately (smoke shops seem to be the hot ticket lately, but that's proba

  • Oh wait they're serious. Hahahahahahaha! The page is basically meaningless pseudo financial techno babble.

  • I'm quite sure this is not how you resurrect a once respected and storied brand.

    It's kinda like that monster movie trope where you think the monster is dead but it isn't and it manages to rise up for one last grab.

    I do believe that they had a chance to innovate in the electronics space like competitors found a way to do. And there might be still ways it can reinvent itself.

    This just looks bad for lacking any imagination imho.

  • And if you want the extended warranty for your cryptocoins

  • How many coins . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by base3 ( 539820 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @08:18AM (#62096691)
    . . . is my battery card good for?
  • Radioshack? I thought all the stores were demolished, burned to ashes and the ground salted so nothing will ever grow there again?
  • Atlas USV is associated with that youtube influencer Tai Lopez, the dude which like to pose next to Lamborghinis and preach about knowledge.
  • What ever Modell's is doing with the brand now, it has nothing to do with the Radio Shack we knew.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )
      Sorry not Modell's, though they are owned by the same company REV (Retail Ecommerce Ventures).

  • We can't keep small retail stores open but trust us like a bank.

    OK, dude.

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