I'm not convinced that association with cryptocurrency does much to give the appearance of credibility, trustworthiness and stability to keybase.io
I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.
I guess it depends on what the corporate goals of keybase.io are - I think it was identity management or something rather being a crypto player.
edit: I should qualify that I've always seen and continue to see keybase.io as being a really reputable and stable company and not shonky. I guess I was a bit jaded by being flooded with crypto ads on every social media platform 12 months ago or so.
> I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.
I'm sorry to hear that. There is a lot of scammy behavior in the space, but there is also a lot of interesting work going on. It just turns out that the shitty people speak the loudest, so they're the ones you hear about, rather than all of the people heads down working hard on interesting problems.
I don't think it is intellectually honest to dismiss the entire space as a scam due to the bad actors.
I realize the word “shonk” in Australia is used without any ethnic meaning, but in some places it does have and can be offensive.
I point this out not to be a busybody or to take offense, but just mention it for anyone else who might have thought “that’s some interesting slang” and start using it
> cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.
Can you explain? Intellectually interesting? No question. But powerful or useful (I consider them synonyms)? I'd like to see some actual examples.
This is genuine curiosity, not snark. I'm on the board of a blockchain startup who has a legitimate application for a blockchain -- an aspirin. But this application could have been done 20 years ago if there hadn't been patent issues for hash chains. And while the engineers are enthusiastic to do a coin nobody can explain why someone else would want to buy one, except in the hope that someone someday would pay more for it.
I've seen a few vaguely interesting applications cor crypto currencies, but they are all been at best 'vitamins'. I've yet to see an 'aspirin'.
Me, I associate the Internet with "shonk". And people, fundamentally, although AI could do it too.
Also, I hate the term "crypto". Crypto is a general term. As you say, it's "cryptocurrency". Just because most people are ignorant and meme-driven, there's no excuse to post like that here.
But whatever. Cryptocurrencies, as anyone who's been following them for more than a decade or two knows, are about money that's not controlled by governments, which can be used on the Internet, and which can be exchanged anonymously.
If something is primarily used for scams, it's a perfectly reasonable heuristic to associate it with scams.
I understand why Keybase is doing this (the attraction of cryptocurrency is profound, and not just because there's so much money being thrown around), but it not do anything for their credibility.
Understandable. But you have to consider that the Stellar foundation has been supporting keybase.io financially.
Also, your association of cryptocurrencies with scams is understandable given the sorry state of e.g. the Ethereum and EOS ecosystems which are dominated by get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, gambling apps, and other stuff. Not exactly enthusiastic about that myself.
However, among its peers, Stellar is relatively respectable in the sense that it has some serious corporate partners (i.e. normal legal entities in normal jurisdictions) and quite a few stable coins issued by fintech companies for the purpose of supporting international payments. And with support/involvement of regulators in many countries.
Additionally there seem to be some serious use cases emerging. The most significant of those would be IBM building a SEPA competitor on top of stellar with dozens of international banks. But there are other applications as well.
Keybase associating with Stellar is not necessarily a bad deal for them as they get money without giving away shares (presumably). And given the nature of their technology, crypto wallets are a natural use case for them as the whole point of their platform is making key management usable for end users and crypto wallets are literally nothing else than key pairs.
Sure, but unless cryptocurrency makes it into trustworthy software with legitimate uses instead of just speculation, it's always going to remain dodgy.
so weird that we live in two totally different worlds, this was a completely benign announcement to me, but to you all of this cognitive dissonance has flooded your mind
what I saw: Hm Stellar has a Development Fund, and people within Keybase' engineering team that wanted cryptocurrency security to be easier so less people get scammed
what you saw: questionable corporate goals because things involving cryptocurrency involve people getting scammed
fascinating, to say the least, it is a perspective.
Stellar is a pretty cool platform. Here are some features:
Any node can issue tokens pretty easily. Tokens are basically IOUs and come with counterparty risk. For example you want to issue tokens for carbon emission trading, you can do that with a few lines of code but people have to trust you to redeem them for whatever they are worth at the end. The only asset that comes without counterparty risk is the native asset XLM.
It uses the Stellar consensus protocol (not proof of work) with a new ledger being closed every 3-5 seconds. SCP favors safety over liveness (no progress until consensus is reached)
Stellar has a decentralized exchange built-in in the protocol layer. That means that market orders are p2p messages and are part of consensus for each new ledger.
My biggest problem with Stellar (and Ripple, which it was forked from) is that it's a centralized blockchain. Transactions are public, but you cannot become a block-producing node (validator). This allows censorship if they do not like the person proposing transactions, or the transaction itself, and could rollback if they wanted.
I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.
This is true for Ripple but not for stellar. In stellar you become part of consensus when any node adds you to their quorum slice. For example IBM runs a node, if they do business with your company they want to add you to their quorum and you are part of consensus.
This is one of those things that comes up frequently in discussions about Stellar. It's simply not true. It's neither centralized nor limited to a few partners. You can start your own validator easily. The way the Stellar consensus protocol works is that when you do that, you specify which other validators to trust.
The consensus in the network of validators is based on the network of who is trusting whom. Right now there are a few dozen companies running validators: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html that trust each other directly or indirectly.
Most of the companies running these validators are doing so because they have business dependencies on the network. Running a validator is not actually free and comes with a bit of devops overhead. So you need a good business reason to do so as mining is just not a thing in Stellar. If you are doing business on Stellar, trusting your direct business partners is probably a smart thing. E.g. IBM and the banks they are partnering likely have ironclad contracts between them and good reasons to trust each other's validators. Most nodes also trust the SDF and trusting additional nodes for resilience is basically something you can do based on your judgment of who is running those nodes and how well they are running them (up time).
Lots of new nodes start with a default configuration that includes the Stellar foundation's own nodes. This is a bit of a problem. Stellar foundation is actually considering shutting down their own validators at this point as there are now plenty of reliable other validators around that they don't need to be there by default anymore. Over time, the number of validators and companies using them is likely to grow substantially. The network gets more robust as the network grows organically.
Of course for a malicious node the trick is getting others to trust you back. This only happens when people actually trust you. This makes e.g. 51% attacks really hard because you can spin up all the nodes you want but if people think you are a scammer, your nodes won't have any decision power. Mostly that's a good thing. Stellar is very resilient against this kind of thing; unlike other networks.
I won't repost my entire comment here, but I noted in 2017 on Hacker News some pretty shady stuff going on with Stellar/XLM and their customer support team / developers.
I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:
"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.
Same here. It was my first and only entry into the coin space. I figured I would let the coins sit there and see what happens. Good thing I didn't try to acquire more coins because I ran into the same issue. It was a cheap first lesson (free) but it has kept me from wading in further anywhere else.
I think this goes back to a critical point in the crypto space.
If you don't have your key pair, then you don't own the coins. I think everyone who lost coins had wallet issues. Maybe there would still have been issues even if you had your key pair, but the general rule still stands.
Back when Stellar got stared, you had to use the API to create a key pair and then you needed the API again to interact with that address (send coins from it.)
Yup... I was part of one of the first XLM grants. I saved my credentials and stopped paying attention until recently when I tried to go to my account. There was some sort of wallet migration needed due to a security issue, and it needed to be done years ago, so it’s all just gone now.
Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.
So you're angry that the virtual money you got as a handout, from a system in early development, was lost four years later after you failed to act on an upgrade announced months in advance. Sounds fair.
Ah, I tried just now. As I was waiting for this to become slightly more useful. Seems my account has also disintegrated (I can actually log in, but the XML, or stellars) are gone.
If I have a good understanding of how the bitcoin protocol works, and is well versed in cryptography, does anyone have a tip on what to read to understand about the Stellar protocol?
Just some quick Googling on my phone led me down cryptobro low quality content, unsurprisingly.
EDIT: And also, this implementation looks really neat, congrats! It made me excited about crypto currency again!
David Mazières (designer of the protocol) has given a number of talks. Here's a good video of his talk at Google, and I believe it's the one I watched a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwnhZmEZjc
As a relatively long-time Keybase user, I went in and set up my Stellar wallet on my phone. There does not appear to be any way to fund this wallet, though. Reading the comments here, I guess I'd have to buy Stellar on some other exchange and ... transfer it to my wallet? (So I'd have a wallet on an exchange, and a wallet on Keybase?)
It's like any other currency. If you wanted to buy GBP, you'd have to go to an exchange and transfer them to your bank, which had to support GBP for your account.
Sure, it would be better UX if they could charge you some USD and give you Lumens, but I don't think it's worse than obtaining any other currency.
Keep in mind that the purchase of crypto in the US could be a taxable event, and the sell or transfer of it almost certainly is. I would look very closely at the Keybase/Stellar reporting tools and your tax situation to assess the impact before diving into the crypto pool, especially for casual, near-term transactions like this facilitates.
I like Keybase, I just find the name a little odd to push as a cool IM to normal people. I'm also still waiting to see them release their own email service, maybe something that can cleanly interface with ProtonMail?
Readit News
I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.
I guess it depends on what the corporate goals of keybase.io are - I think it was identity management or something rather being a crypto player.
edit: I should qualify that I've always seen and continue to see keybase.io as being a really reputable and stable company and not shonky. I guess I was a bit jaded by being flooded with crypto ads on every social media platform 12 months ago or so.
I'm sorry to hear that. There is a lot of scammy behavior in the space, but there is also a lot of interesting work going on. It just turns out that the shitty people speak the loudest, so they're the ones you hear about, rather than all of the people heads down working hard on interesting problems.
I don't think it is intellectually honest to dismiss the entire space as a scam due to the bad actors.
I point this out not to be a busybody or to take offense, but just mention it for anyone else who might have thought “that’s some interesting slang” and start using it
This is unnecessary bias, though. If you look past the drama, cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.
Can you explain? Intellectually interesting? No question. But powerful or useful (I consider them synonyms)? I'd like to see some actual examples.
This is genuine curiosity, not snark. I'm on the board of a blockchain startup who has a legitimate application for a blockchain -- an aspirin. But this application could have been done 20 years ago if there hadn't been patent issues for hash chains. And while the engineers are enthusiastic to do a coin nobody can explain why someone else would want to buy one, except in the hope that someone someday would pay more for it.
I've seen a few vaguely interesting applications cor crypto currencies, but they are all been at best 'vitamins'. I've yet to see an 'aspirin'.
Me, I associate the Internet with "shonk". And people, fundamentally, although AI could do it too.
Also, I hate the term "crypto". Crypto is a general term. As you say, it's "cryptocurrency". Just because most people are ignorant and meme-driven, there's no excuse to post like that here.
But whatever. Cryptocurrencies, as anyone who's been following them for more than a decade or two knows, are about money that's not controlled by governments, which can be used on the Internet, and which can be exchanged anonymously.
I understand why Keybase is doing this (the attraction of cryptocurrency is profound, and not just because there's so much money being thrown around), but it not do anything for their credibility.
Also, your association of cryptocurrencies with scams is understandable given the sorry state of e.g. the Ethereum and EOS ecosystems which are dominated by get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, gambling apps, and other stuff. Not exactly enthusiastic about that myself.
However, among its peers, Stellar is relatively respectable in the sense that it has some serious corporate partners (i.e. normal legal entities in normal jurisdictions) and quite a few stable coins issued by fintech companies for the purpose of supporting international payments. And with support/involvement of regulators in many countries.
Additionally there seem to be some serious use cases emerging. The most significant of those would be IBM building a SEPA competitor on top of stellar with dozens of international banks. But there are other applications as well.
Keybase associating with Stellar is not necessarily a bad deal for them as they get money without giving away shares (presumably). And given the nature of their technology, crypto wallets are a natural use case for them as the whole point of their platform is making key management usable for end users and crypto wallets are literally nothing else than key pairs.
Don't have to look much farther for motives. However, may I suggest a slight amendment to your statement and thinking:
The association with keybase.io does much to give the appearance of credibility, trustworthiness and stability to cryptocurrency.
I really wish all the speculators just went away.
what I saw: Hm Stellar has a Development Fund, and people within Keybase' engineering team that wanted cryptocurrency security to be easier so less people get scammed
what you saw: questionable corporate goals because things involving cryptocurrency involve people getting scammed
fascinating, to say the least, it is a perspective.
To paraphrase Keynes, it's not good security policy to base it on the workings of a casino.
Any node can issue tokens pretty easily. Tokens are basically IOUs and come with counterparty risk. For example you want to issue tokens for carbon emission trading, you can do that with a few lines of code but people have to trust you to redeem them for whatever they are worth at the end. The only asset that comes without counterparty risk is the native asset XLM.
It uses the Stellar consensus protocol (not proof of work) with a new ledger being closed every 3-5 seconds. SCP favors safety over liveness (no progress until consensus is reached)
Stellar has a decentralized exchange built-in in the protocol layer. That means that market orders are p2p messages and are part of consensus for each new ledger.
I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.
The consensus in the network of validators is based on the network of who is trusting whom. Right now there are a few dozen companies running validators: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html that trust each other directly or indirectly.
Most of the companies running these validators are doing so because they have business dependencies on the network. Running a validator is not actually free and comes with a bit of devops overhead. So you need a good business reason to do so as mining is just not a thing in Stellar. If you are doing business on Stellar, trusting your direct business partners is probably a smart thing. E.g. IBM and the banks they are partnering likely have ironclad contracts between them and good reasons to trust each other's validators. Most nodes also trust the SDF and trusting additional nodes for resilience is basically something you can do based on your judgment of who is running those nodes and how well they are running them (up time).
Lots of new nodes start with a default configuration that includes the Stellar foundation's own nodes. This is a bit of a problem. Stellar foundation is actually considering shutting down their own validators at this point as there are now plenty of reliable other validators around that they don't need to be there by default anymore. Over time, the number of validators and companies using them is likely to grow substantially. The network gets more robust as the network grows organically.
Of course for a malicious node the trick is getting others to trust you back. This only happens when people actually trust you. This makes e.g. 51% attacks really hard because you can spin up all the nodes you want but if people think you are a scammer, your nodes won't have any decision power. Mostly that's a good thing. Stellar is very resilient against this kind of thing; unlike other networks.
You can read the entire account here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174
It starts with this:
---
I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:
"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.
You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ....
Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.
Apologies we cannot be of further help."
I think this goes back to a critical point in the crypto space.
If you don't have your key pair, then you don't own the coins. I think everyone who lost coins had wallet issues. Maybe there would still have been issues even if you had your key pair, but the general rule still stands.
Back when Stellar got stared, you had to use the API to create a key pair and then you needed the API again to interact with that address (send coins from it.)
Deleted Comment
Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.
Just some quick Googling on my phone led me down cryptobro low quality content, unsurprisingly.
EDIT: And also, this implementation looks really neat, congrats! It made me excited about crypto currency again!
Free, encrypted git repos and file storage as well as ID assertion and chat.
This is not good UX.
Sure, it would be better UX if they could charge you some USD and give you Lumens, but I don't think it's worse than obtaining any other currency.
CoinBase Pro is useless. They want to know too much.