Current cash instruments are centralized.

So is crypto. The centralisation is in the algorithm that enforces scarcity as you mine more of the currency, slowing down the creation of new coins and the speed of verifying transactions. The only difference is that it isn’t a government or federal reserve doing the centralising.

Then a company like Coinbase shows up and uses their resources to dominate the market as the de-facto app change. Centralised again.

Crypto is just as abstract as the currency we currently use so only functions as legit currency because people are willing to buy and sell it from one side of the world to the other. Bitcoin for example has a single valuation, despite being decentralised.

If you want true decentralisation then you’re looking at the pre-currency barter economy.

Hmmmm and where do you get the machinery to create said Kong bills?

Seems more convoluted than connecting a gaming pc to a network (please don’t say bitcoin can’t do that now, you could initially)

I don't buy the argument that it's "turtles all the way down". Trust begins and ends at the chip level. I think its possible to make an open root of trust chip better than any solution on the market available today. I think the chips available on the market today are good enough for this specific application but not others.

The point of this I thought is to unify the virtual system with a physical product, in the pretty cash. So it isn’t just the chip now, is it? Otherwise why not just... use a hardware wallet and use bitcoin ?

I do agree that people can’t picture or visualize in their mind a “bitcoin”, and so this solves that part. But then you’re left with the, how do people print this tangible pretty currency part.

The point is physical cash is really important to a functioning society.

Cryptocurrencies are turning out to be really important but lack a physical cash instrument.

Kong marries the two.

Kong accomplishes that by minimizing trust down to the chip level - as opposed to the firmware or application level - so we can make these things trustlessly and cost effectively. Something like a Trezor is too expensive and dear to be treated like physical cash.

That’s why we have physical cash.

It already has all the benefits of physical crypto with less headache.

So kind of like how Samsung and HTC are starting to integrate hardware wallets into the phones?

Couldn’t you imagine a world where this starts trending cheaper and cheaper and soon becomes a commodity ?

Kong is radical in that it only stores keys on the secure element and only stores code in the EVM.

Kong is a toy implementation of this idea, but I think it's a very powerful idea.

The difference is a crypto wallet on your Samsung phone when lost or stolen makes you bankrupt where google pay wallets shrug it off.

And has the potential of being tracked by said companies and service providers

Whereas your crypto transactions are literally published on a digital distributed ledger for all to see including those self same companies. I thought the transparent, digital, decentralized public ledger was the big reason to use it?

Further, I'd suggest you read up on NFC and tokenization, it's not true that the companies in question actually do get access to that information unless they have separate-from-the-technology arrangements with payment processors.

In either case I'd rather be tracked than bankrupt.

> The point is physical cash is really important to a functioning society.

Not really. There's a couple northern european economies that are almost entirely cashless.

"Less cash but not cashless" is the motto of those northern european countries.

Both the UK and the Netherlands for instance have issue reports[1][2] to ensure cash does not go away as it serves a vital purpose for protected classes.

[1] https://www.accesstocash.org.uk/media/1087/final-report-fina... - from the UK report "17% of the population would struggle in a cashless society"

[2]https://www.dnb.nl/en/binaries/DNB%20Payments%20Strategy%202... - from the DNB report "While we support the retailers’ and banks’ wish to encourage electronic payments, we do not seek to achieve a cashless society..."

I'm talking Sweden where it is next to impossible to pay with cash in most places. And impossible to find an ATM.

Somehow I don’t think people buying stuff with dollar bills mind that dollars are “centralised”. In fact I’d venture that this is exactly why dollar bills are accepted in so many places around the world.

Not that Kong isn’t centralised. It’s just that it’s controlled by unknown nobodies, rather than the most powerful entity in the world.

For producing new bills? Why does that matter? What do you think will happen if anyone can create new bills?

I'm not sure. Feels like opening Pandora's Box. Historically, taking big centralized things (like the Internet) and letting smaller players participate has interesting results. By taking a technology like printing currency, and innovating in the security domain so non-counterfitability is cryptographically guaranteed I would expect a cambrian explosion in cash-like instruments.

So this is primarily physically currency that is hard to counterfeit? Cash (in the US) already has billions of R&D in defenses to the point that most people will never see it, and centralization ensures that cash is always accepted.

I just don't see why people would switch to something to ensure 100% real bills and lose all the other benefits of cash. How is there going to be a cambrian explosion with an issue that affects almost no one?

This is primarily a demonstration of how cash instruments can be decentrally issued.

Secondarily, it demonstrates how we can move validation from physical properties of cash instruments (such as fine printing and exotic inks) to cryptographic properties.

We believe the latter to be superior and a path to ratchet down the cost overheads that go into securing cash issuance and payment channels.

So I can print my own Kong?