Bitcoin Kinetics has offered 10 billion shares of common stock on the website Cryptostocks, Quartz reported. Information from its website showed that Bitcoin Kinetics is a Las Vegas-based startup founded in February 2012. It aims to create devices like ticket boxes, laundry machines, parking machines, pool tables, gas pumps, entry gates, music boxes and arcade machines, among others, that can be activated by Bitcoin payment.
According to the Quartz report, the offering is not like the usual company IPO since Cryptostocks, the platform where Bitcoin Kinetics intends to "list" its stock, is both a crowdfunding website and a site where shares can be bought and dividends earned. The legal status of Cryptostocks is also uncertain as it is not licensed or registered as an exchange. It was called by a commenter as "another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges," the report said.
Quartz reported that what makes the offering of a company that seeks to make untested prototypes launched on an unregulated "exchange" important is this: While the bitcoin ecosystem does not excel at making viable businesses, it is still good at making prototypes of things that could actually be real in the future after they have been made by firms that have sufficient resources to also get them past the regulatory obstacles.
No one can accuse Bitcoin supporters of thinking big, the report said. It quoted what the Bitcoin Kinetics founder said when he envisioned the future of his company. The unnamed founder said, "Eventually Bitcoin Kinetics will become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization run completely by smart contracts, 3D printers & shipping centers, making it run on its own.'"
However, the Quartz report took this to mean that jobs would be lost. Christopher Mims, who wrote the report concluded, "Got that? Corporations of the future are comprised of contracts executed in code and own factories full of 3D printers, from which robots ship goods. Profits are re-ingested by the software supervising the whole operation, and no one has a job anymore."
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