Can 'blockchain' mobe Exodus stem movement of HTC's Jah people?

"Exodus" may be a fair description of HTC's customer base in recent years – once the reviewers' darling, it has fallen a long way. Earnings for the first half of 2018 were almost half the same period last year (PDF). HTC Exodus 1 HTC Exodus 1 So perhaps Exodus isn't the wisest choice of name for its first "blockchain phone …

[Anonymous Coward]

Desperation

Rather unfortunate to launch a blockchain currency phone when cryptocurrencies have lost 80% of their value this year. So not only is it a small market to start with, it's looking like becoming even more niche.

Was this the best differentiator that HTC could come up with?

[Dave 126]

Re: Desperation

Does the US Dollar value of one Bitcoin have much to do with Bitcoin's usefulness to a user? Or rather, was Bitcoin's previous high value not merely the result of speculation, speculation that was actually a barrier to its adoption as a practical means of paying for stuff?

In the physical world, a wallet is just as useful for holding 30,000 Dong as it 10 Quid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Desperation

Whilst you’re probably right that the US dollar value is not directly related to Bitcoin’s utility, I would strongly suggest it’s stability of value certainly is. As you point out, last year’s wild deflation made it difficult (or foolish) to spend any coins you had. This year’s inflationary turn on the other hand has conversely made it difficult to find someone willing to accept it as means of payment, especially if wanting to defer such payment to a later date (which is pretty standard for large purchases). The question is, with no central body to govern it and extremely limited tools to control it (deflation, despite being generally accepted as economically terrible, seemingly baked in by design), will it ever be stable enough to facilitate such use?

[Dave 126]

Re: Desperation

I haven't played with Bitcoin, but I'm coming to see it as a version 0.9, a first draft - something that others will play with and identify room for improvement. Examples include:

A few years back there were crypto currencies that attempt to sidestep Bitcoin's fluctuations - fixing the value to an established currency, for example, or a commodity good. I understand the Ethereum is moving from a proof of work to a proof of stake model, in an attempt to sidestep excessive electricity consumption.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Desperation

I pay with BTC regularly, using it on several sites. The devaluing of the currency and 'holding' assumes that no further income in cryptocoins is being made..

There are the miners, and there are the speculator investors. Essentially, the coins are volatile around a generally stable mean, which as you point out has been devaluing over the year. However smart trading in the ups and downs in the generally stable periods cann still make a lot of coin on the markets.

Then you spend it in places like scan.co.uk, buying computer parts. Or trade it out to your bank account through Coinbase or some other site. I used to spend it on steam, before they cancelled it when the network fee jumped too high. At one stage it was around £20 per transaction.

[onefang]

From looking at that graphic, are they planning on putting full nodes on each phone? That's a couple of hundred GB of storage.

[Charlie Clark]

Should've called it The Godfather

This phone looks predestined for moving money around without involving the banks, ie. a wet dream for organised crime.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Should've called it The Godfather

Problem for organised crime is that the crypto coins networks are eminently traceable. Once you have been associated to something, you can be assosciated to everything else you've done. Crypto is not the place for moving dodgy money, it's more tracable than using the banking system :P

[Suricou Raven]

Buzzwordy.

Decentralisation includes, but is not limited to, cryptocurrency. There are a lot of decentralisation technologies that are potentially quite a lot more useful to deploy, if they really want to. If they put in a torrent or IPFS client, for example, combined with LTE D2D or wireless peer-to-peer mode communication, and made a few tweaks to the app update mechanism, then nearby phones could share updates - saving the user the billable network traffic.