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
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.
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.
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?
I wonder how the Lumen value is being derived. I assume whatever current worth is on Coinbase Pro at the time the amount is sent, considering they namedrop Coinbase Pro as a place to buy Lumens.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xur17|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 808sunset|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] feanaro|6 years ago|reply
This is unnecessary bias, though. If you look past the drama, cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twohearted|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] StavrosK|6 years ago|reply
I really wish all the speculators just went away.
[+] [-] caprese|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fmajid|6 years ago|reply
To paraphrase Keynes, it's not good security policy to base it on the workings of a casino.
[+] [-] drexlspivey|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seibelj|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] gexla|6 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thanatos_dem|6 years ago|reply
Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.
[+] [-] filleokus|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] thefreeman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malgorithms|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timerol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vcarl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drexlspivey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elamje|6 years ago|reply
Free, encrypted git repos and file storage as well as ID assertion and chat.
[+] [-] sealthedeal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyburke|6 years ago|reply
This is not good UX.
[+] [-] StavrosK|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flatline|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|6 years ago|reply
CoinBase Pro is useless. They want to know too much.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] byproxy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malgorithms|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|6 years ago|reply
Just without KYC/AML.
Yet.
[+] [-] capybaraz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeroxfe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intpbro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexnewman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldacid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] songgao|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cimbali33|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xof711|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giacaglia|6 years ago|reply