I was able to successfully sign up and get 5,000 STR, so that worked for me at least. But then I started looking a little deeper into the blog post.
> Development is led by Jed McCaleb and Dr. David Mazieres in collaboration with a small team of others. (The technology is based on the open-source Ripple project, originally created by Jed a few years ago.)
So, is Stellar fundamentally the same thing as and/or a fork of Ripple? They've hired the same guy who started Ripple (Jed McCaleb), and as I recall there were a lot of concerns around that, as noted in a WSJ article [0] and other places. Jed is also on the Stellar board, too, one of only three members -- and so wields a considerable amount of influence.
If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple? Centralized authority holding a large chunk of initial funds, questionable governance decisions, etc., just to name a few of the political problems, not just the technical ones.
I'd love to see the "IP layer for currency" described by Stripe succeed, but I'm not sure that this implementation of it represents a good idea. And I'm also concerned about whether Jed, the cofounder of both MtGox and Ripple, has the best interests of Stellar at heart.
"If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple?"
Correct. Like Ripple, Stellar requires special (and dangerous) trust in certain nodes. For example, gateways (https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/#gateways) have to be trusted by the Stellar network as they send messages like "a user deposited 100 USD via a bank wire transfer, so please accept this digital representation of 100 USD, trust me". This trust is dangerous as people running an (initially) honest gateway may start acting maliciously and lie about how much USD or EUR or other currency exist on the network. By the time the malice is detected, maybe the network could trace all USD or EUR that was issued by the gateway, and revoke it, suddenly pissing off a lot of users who owns this currency as it would disappear from their wallet. Users would then loose trust in Stellar, and the network would collapse...
Stripe would presumably be the first gateway trusted by the Stellar network. Okay, so what if Stripe decided they could not trust other gateways and wanted to remain the only gateway? Well Stripe would be the only way to inject USD or EUR or other currencies in the network, effectively making Stellar a fully centralized digital currency, with the entire Stellar network being dependent on Stripe not being hacked, not being abused by a malicious employee, not shutting down, etc.
This is the complete opposite design principle of Bitcoin which requires absolutely no trust in any specific authority.
Gateways actually don't have to be trusted by the network. Think of them as similar to stores issuing credit: the gateway just says "the user has a credit for 100 USD, redeemable at my store". That credit is tradable, but only to other users who trust credit from that gateway.
This means there needs to emerge a good system for users to decide which gateways to trust, but a malicious gateway can only directly harm the users who have decided to trust it.
The beauty of this model is anyone can become a gateway at any time. See for example the gist linked at the end of the Stellar blog post: https://gist.github.com/thejollyrogers/b114b5a98fa11a5a4ad0 — becoming a gateway is just two API calls.
"The network does not need to trust gateways, but users need to trust them" -> a subtle difference, but it does not change my point: trusting a gateway's honesty is required.
So let's say I choose to not trust any gateway and their currencies, and instead decide to transact in the native stellar currency directly. This is a strange choice: why have support for alternate currencies if the Stellar protocol in itself can do nothing to help gateways gain trust? You might as well have, say, Amazon not even bother becoming a gateway issuing their own USD_Amazon, but instead Amazon would just accept the stellar currency directly. In this case I am still required to trust the native stellar currency. I am required to trust that Stellar --the nonprofit organization-- will correctly follow their mandate (https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/): distributing x% to X, y% to Y, etc, properly thwarting fraud attempts from people with many fake Facebook accounts, properly thwarting fraud attempts during voting (https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation), properly thwarting fraud attempts from people building fake nonprofits to attempts to gain a share of the 25% of stellars reserved for nonprofits, etc. And Stellar trusts Facebook, so I am even required to trust that there is no malicious employee at Facebook that will exploit APIs to attempt to gain stellars. You plan to distribute stellars through SMS? Heck I now need to trust telecom carrier employees, etc. Even if you are honest and make no operational mistake, fighting all these fraud attempts will be a large uphill battle, and there is way too much trust required, way too many possibilities for mistakes to happen.
Contrast this with Bitcoin: all Bitcoin requires is trust in three cryptographic algorithms which fit in a few thousand lines of code (ECDSA w/secp256k1, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160).
I appreciate the attempt of building a different payment technology, but Stellar should not mislead people into believing they are similar to Bitcoin ("Stellar is decentralized [...] owes a lot to Bitcoin"). Stellar threw away the most fundamental element of Bitcoin: complete decentralization (including decentralization of the issuance of units of currency.)
Stellar is built to be a bridge from the physical one to the digital one. There certainly are tradeoffs there, particularly that the kinds of trust relationships needed for your life today have direct analogues. But, as I mentioned in https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective, it's not obvious that the Bitcoin technology on its own will end up being enough to avoid having to reintroduce trust in some form. (There is a chance that we'll figure out how to do trust in a distributed fashion, which would be awesome for both Bitcoin and Stellar.)
So I'm with you — there are real tradeoffs here, and I'd encourage everyone interested in this stuff to mull them over (and I'm also happy to discuss: gdb@stripe.com). But one thing I really respect about the Stellar organization is the very deliberate approach they've taken to these choices, and how they've found a happy middle that feels like a translation of the existing physical world into the new digital one. If it works, I think it'll make Bitcoin and other digital currencies even more successful.
In practice, however, using BitCoin requires trusting something that is the equivalent of a gateway (an exchange) with your BitCoins if you want to be able to freely trade them.
The fact that this weakness does not appear in the BitCoin protocol, but is rather implied by the human desire for convenience and marketplaces, doesn't make it less of a flaw. One can sneer at everyone who lost money with MtGox for "choosing poorly", so to speak, but on the other hand exchanges are the driving force behind BitCoin's success.
> The beauty of this model is anyone can become a gateway at any time.
If this takes off, then you could use this to build the killer "spot me $5" app. A few weeks ago when some friends were describing the spreadsheet they used to track who owes what to who, I proposed a micro-virtual currency limited to just the circle of friends that all trust each other, whereby exchanging the virtual currency you can transfer debts, and trivially find out who owes money and who is owed just by looking at the current account ledger. Seems like Stellar enables that on a massive scale, without everyone needing to trust each other, because the coins are all tagged with the issuer.
Stellar uses real-world currencies to denote the held values. Does it limit these currencies to actual known entities, or could I become an issuer and start issuing credits in a fake currency? If I can do that, then it seems like there's an opportunity here to use Stellar to track things other than monetary exchanges. As a hypothetical example, if I had several kids, they could all trust each other to issue units of a fake currency called "Chore". If I ask one of them to do something, they could instead pay 1 Chore to their sibling to have them do it instead. This can of course be redeemed later if I ask the sibling to do something. Since it's a fake currency, it has no real value and can't be traded outside of the small group of kids (as nobody would accept it). This sort of thing can't be done with e.g. USD because the proxy money could be traded to someone else who doesn't realize that I won't actually accept it back for money.
Thinking about this a bit more, there is one flaw with using it to track debts among a circle of friends, which is that any of those friends could then turn around and trade the USD-stellar I issued them to someone else, who doesn't realize that they shouldn't actually trust me for it. Using a fake currency as a proxy for USD would work here, but of course fake currencies have their own problem which is everyone has to invent a unique fake currency to avoid confusion.
Another solution would be to allow gateways to declare that their coins are only redeemable by a limited set of accounts. That way I can be a gateway and issue USD-stellar that everyone knows is worthless if it leaves the circle of friends. I could do this ad-hoc just by refusing to redeem any issued coins by someone outside the group, but as mentioned above that leaves open the possibility of people not realizing that these particular coins are worthless (outside the group). Of course, this also has the problem where someone may now look at their balance and see that they have $500 USD, but not realize that $50 of it is actually debt issued by me, because the software they're using doesn't distinguish restricted coins from others.
Perhaps the fake currency approach really is the best. This has the benefit of letting an extended group of friends trade around debt issued by people they're not actually direct friends with, but they trust transitively through a shared friend. If I decide to accept debt issued by Alice, and Alice refuses to pay up when I go to her, I can then talk to our shared friend (but hopefully Alice would agree that the debt I bought from Joan is still valid and pay up). The downside is, of course, that everyone has to be using the same centralized shared currency. And that won't scale past a small group of friends (if it did, it wouldn't be a fake currency anymore). Although if you have several smaller circles of friends each with their own currency, and there's overlap, they could decide to trust the other currency and treat it as equivalent to theirs. I guess this is a continuation of Stellar's philosophy that the trust is granted by the person accepting the coin, rather than being dictated in any fashion by the issuer.
Of course, all this is predicated on the fake debt-currency not spreading far. As you try to scale to larger groups of friends, it ultimately ends up being simpler just to switch to USD.
I guess the real challenge here is figuring out how to let Stellar wallet clients display contained balances in a way that doesn't confuse coins issued by generally-trusted gateways vs coins issued by small gateways that most users probably won't trust. If I can somehow either categorize myself as a gateway, or each gateway I trust, those categories could be used to display balances appropriately. This way I can categorize Alice, Joan, Bob, Fred, and Jane as debt-issuing friends, and they can issue USD, and I won't accidentally think I have $500 USD when I really have $450 USD and $50 friend-debt. This doesn't really solve the problem of trading debt to people who don't realize it's worthless, but I don't know if that's a legitimate worry.
We recommend you only trust one gateway per currency for that exact reason. You can only paid in currency issued from accounts you trust. Lets say your friend holds Euro credits from a gateway in London, and you live in San Francisco and therefore only hold USD credits from a gateway there. All she has to do to send you USD is specify "Send him X USD". She doesn't have to care about your issuer. It's taken care of by the protocol.
Check out https://www.stellar.org/api/#api-payment. By setting Amount.issuer to be the recipient's address, the protocol will find a path from the sender's gateway to the recipient's gateway.
Speaking more broadly, I anticipate many gateways will also become exchanges, to make their credits more valuable, aka more "liquid". For instance, in the last example, what was required to make this work was a "market maker", someone in the middle buying London EUR and selling San Francisco USD. If no direct exchange existed (highly unlikely in this example), there may be a EUR -> XYZ Currency -> USD. To avoid this external dependency (and also offer a cheaper exchange rate), it would be in the London and SF gateway's best interest to trust (https://www.stellar.org/api/#api-trustset) each other. Then, the exchange from her EUR credits to your USD credits would happen directly.
Ah hah. I don't see any way to actually authorize an account to hold credit though. TrustSet seems to strictly be the reverse, and nothing else looks relevant.
You can indeed issue fake currencies. The only technical limitation is that currencies are (as it stands) limited to 3 letters.
Note that your friend would only be able to trade your fake currency to someone who is willing to trust you, so there's no obvious need to have more technical enforcement preventing trades.
Well, the main design is that people will use this for real-world currencies. If people are interested in starting to issue fake ones with arbitrary names, it's probably worth raising with the developers! They're hanging around in #stellar-dev, and I'm sure would love feedback :).
> Thinking about this a bit more, there is one flaw with using it to track debts among a circle of friends, which is that any of those friends could then turn around and trade the USD-stellar I issued them to someone else, who doesn't realize that they shouldn't actually trust me for it.
Unless this is totally different than Ripple, this can't happen unless there's a trust pathway between the recipient and you.
Well, I haven't actually used this yet, but I was thinking that you might be able to convince someone to trust the gateway that issued the USD you're trying to trade them.
Yep! That's where the stellar comes in. It's something that everyone the network can accept and requires no trust. So as long as someone is willing to convert your gateway's credit to stellar (and worst case, your gateway should be willing to do so), you're fine.
That's assuming your gateway has stellar on hand to provide as conversion. Stripe is starting with 2% of the stellar, but (AFAIK) nobody else is starting with any significant chunk. If a gateway issues credit in exchange for real-world exchanges, I don't see why there's any expectation that they'll have stellar on-hand to use for the conversion, although perhaps they can use their real-world money to buy stellar from some other gateway.
I'm also wondering, since the amount of Stellar is capped (100 billion, right? Can this ever change?), and since 50% of Stellar is being distributed to people who sign up, it seems like a sizable portion of this Stellar will almost certainly immediately become unusable as people sign up, get their Stellar, and never come back.
Edit: Just found the bit where it says Stellar will be created at a rate of 1% annually. The fixed 100 billion cap I cited was based on earlier comments about Ripple's cap.
> That's assuming your gateway has stellar on hand to provide as conversion.
That's not the only way that gateways can talk to eachother. Given this is ripple we're talking about, anyone who has a mutual trust connection between gateways can facilitate a transaction, as can any market-making trader.
Looking at MIRI's gateway and my own showed dozens of such connections. Ripple has 100,000 users, any of which can be part of the connection between any two given gateways. Stellar is planning on growing that large and larger, so it should be expected that this will happen there, too.
Well, the real worst case is probably that the Earth gets hit by a coronal mass ejection and takes down all electronics: http://bit.ly/1qO25PH :).
But more seriously, a gateway you trust going under is indeed a risk. That's part of why you can specify not just "I trust this gateway" but also "I trust this gateway for up to 100 CAD" — you can explicitly specify your exposure.
Switching between currencies, especially paper currencies, requires trust unless you're physically handing over money. I have full control over my bitcoins, but if I want dollars, I need to trust Bitstamp and my bank, or Stellar and my gateway.
Anyone can be a gateway, so Stripe can't prevent others from succeeding. The only barrier to entry to becoming a successful gateway is earning the trust of the folks transacting on the network.
IMO it would HELP if some of the USD and other government backed currency transmitters/gateways/etc tried to help with accountability IE - how much USD did we transfer into Stellar in raw numbers today. I'd be willing to participate on the ACH side.
I can extend a trustline of $20 to my buddy Jim or I can extend a trustline to a gateway for $20. It makes no difference to the network.
For example, gateways (https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/#gateways) have to be trusted by the Stellar network as they send messages like "a user deposited 100 USD via a bank wire transfer, so please accept this digital representation of 100 USD, trust me".
Also incorrect. The only trust required is for the user to trust a gateway to hold a balance on their behalf. The consensus process--you might want to read about it at https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus ensures that the all nodes agree to this change in the status of the ledger.
This trust is dangerous as people running an (initially) honest gateway may start acting maliciously and lie about how much USD or EUR or other currency exist on the network.
Wrong again. Both Ripple and Stellar's consensus process require that all of the nodes agree on the state of the ledger before any new transactions can be added to it. Bogus transactions or changes to the ledger are easily detected.
If someone should be dishonest, the honest actors will notice them lying and can disregard their future attestations. That is, if you lie once, you have no gain as the network doesn't care and they won't care what you say in the future.
The ripple protocol requires validators to sign the consensus ledger after each validation interval. If a validator fails to do this, it will be easily detectable. Similarly, if a validator signs a ledger and then signs a ledger after that which cannot be reached by a combination of valid transactions, this will also be easily detectable.
And then you say…
By the time the malice is detected, maybe the network could trace all USD or EUR that was issued by the gateway, and revoke it, suddenly pissing off a lot of users who owns this currency as it would disappear from their wallet. Users would then loose trust in Stellar, and the network would collapse...
Nope; see above why this can't happen.
Stripe would presumably be the first gateway trusted by the Stellar network. Okay, so what if Stripe decided they could not trust other gateways and wanted to remain the only gateway?
The model isn't based on trusting any particular gateway; it's based on trusting multiple gateways to not collude against you.
Example: you may not trust a gateway run by the Democratic National Committee or one run by the Republican National Committee, but you can be pretty confident they aren't going to collude against you. And because they'd both are on your Unique Node List, if they agree with the other nodes you talk to, you can be confident the ledger reflects the true state of the network.
Well Stripe would be the only way to inject USD or EUR or other currencies in the network, effectively making Stellar a fully centralized digital currency, with the entire Stellar network being dependent on Stripe not being hacked, not being abused by a malicious employee, not shutting down, etc.
Wrong. Again.
Anyone on Ripple (or Stellar) can be a gateway or market maker and provide liquidity on the network. There's nothing special about Stripe, except that they have more money and reputation than most of us do.
It does mean that lots of people will trust Stripe to hold USD balances on their behalf.
If you're totally paranoid, with Ripple or Stellar, you can decide to only transact fiat currencies with people you know and trust and act as gateways for each other (https://ripple.com/wiki/Ripple_for_Gateways). The beauty is you can transact with people outside of your circle if one of your friends has extends trust to someone you don't know. You don't have to trust them, but as long you trust someone in common, you can transact with fiat.
This is the complete opposite design principle of Bitcoin which requires absolutely no trust in any specific authority.
Because the bitcoin protocol doesn't take into account the concept of gateways between the blockchain and fiat currencies, bitcoin users are left with relying on exchanges like Mt. Gox to address this. How did that work out?
Patrick Collison here. I think that Stellar's governance is going to be one of its strong suits. (And something that we thought was lacking in other efforts.)
Stellar is a nonprofit organization and will have public financials and governance documents. It will also hold just 5% of the stellars -- 95% is being given away as quickly as possible. The board is composed of Jed, Keith Rabois, and me. A number of other advisors (http://stellar.org/about) are ensuring that everything is run well and fairly.
Thanks for responding, Patrick. I appreciate you engaging in discussion on this matter.
I'm not sure that this actually answers my questions, though. You seem to have more or less restated what I said without specifically addressing anything.
For instance, I said, "Jed is also on the Stellar board, too, one of only three members -- and so wields a considerable amount of influence." Then you said that "the board is composed of Jed, Keith Rabois, and me".
I'm not sure how that allays any concerns that Jed, who was specifically criticized in a number of Ripple-related efforts, is now on a similar organization. All it does is restate what I earlier said -- that Jed is on a small board, and apparently has an equal vote, and apparently wields a lot of influence.
In any case, I'm more interested in hearing about how Stellar is or isn't like Ripple. Is it essentially the same technology with a different governance structure on top of it? If not, in what way(s) is it different?
> For instance, I said, "Jed is also on the Stellar board, too, one of only three members -- and so wields a considerable amount of influence." Then you said that "the board is composed of Jed, Keith Rabois, and me".
Sorry, mostly I was just alluding to the fact that most of the board is composed of external members.
> In any case, I'm more interested in hearing about how Stellar is or isn't like Ripple. Is it essentially the same technology with a different governance structure on top of it? If not, in what way(s) is it different?
There are technical differences (like the inflation), and they'll diverge more over time, but I think the technical differences are of secondary importance relative to the issues around coin distribution and governance. If a distributed financial network is going to succeed, I believe that it has to be run by an impartial organization.
I'm not sure anyone in a high profile position can guarantee exclusion from being criticized. Having said that, I don't think it's fair to come in here an parrot some vague negative statement and then use it to question their motives. If you've got a specific beef with him, then you should just say what you mean instead of saying something that only serves to lay blame without rational.
95% of the coin is being given away and the effort is decentralized in nature. A 5% fee for the continued development of this platform and a fair amount of control over it's direction seems overly reasonable to me. Clearly Jed and his team care about creating something that is beneficial to everyone. I'd rather see speculation about the possible benefits than a rathole over something someone got bent about during the Ripple deal.
> If you've got a specific beef with him, then you should just say what you mean instead of saying something that only serves to lay blame without rational.
I think I was very specific in the OP and the WSJ reference.
But to spell it out: Jed McCaleb is a cofounder of MtGox and Ripple. MtGox collapsed, is defunct, and is under investigation by multiple governments and regulatory agencies. Ripple dropped 40% in one day when Jed liquidated.
I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder whether Jed is the right person to be on the board of a new digital currency, given the track record at the last two organizations.
To be crystal clear, we're talking about human evaluated trust here. You are stating you don't trust him to be the right person to sit on a board of a currency he developed and is spearheading.
If you want to establish reliable evaluations of trust in a human, you have to stay away from biases and blaming statements. Yes, Jed was a cofounder of Mt. Gox. Yes, Mt. Gox caught on fire and burned to the ground. However, to establish a logical connection between those two statements requires a truthfully evaluated statement regarding how Jed was responsible for the fire. To my knowledge, Mark was the one responsible for that fire, not Jed. Mark was responsible for the legal, fiscal, and operational health of that system. Not Jed. You have not pointed to a statement that causes this to evaluate the two statements together and provide correlation.
If you can't do that much, then it's just a blaming statement based an associative bias.
I've been in a bad situation before with co-founders and it didn't end well for anyone. I can't speak for what happened at Ripple with Jed, but the guy has a right to go out and work on what he believes in without being unfairly judged for taking actions that were well within his right of exercising in the past.
The 5% number seems a little strange to me. The post also said there are 1% more Stellars every year. So that is the same as the ruling central organization giving itself infinite money. I guess the 5% is kind of vanity metric to make people feel safe without much meaning.
Patrick,
nice effort, and I wish you and your team all the best. I am writing a book on Bitcoin and I'd like to have a chance to discuss your initiative in person. My email is easy to find.
- Stellar is a nonprofit. No one owns it. The board and advisors represent a diverse group of people in tech, finance, nonprofit and academia to encourage cross-pollination of ideas. The board is also required to expand to 5 members by year-end.
- Almost all the stellars will be given away for free (95%) because the goal is to educate and provide access to digital currency/financial services. This is really good for cryptocurrency as a whole because it provides access to a huge segment of the world that would not have access to digital currency otherwise.
This should all help the effort be open and transparent.
I keep hearing the argument about being a non-profit. It really means little in terms of accountability or credibility. Even in a for-profit public company shareholders have some amount of say on who gets elected to the board. But this board is entirely self-selected; which seems contrary to the inherently democratic if not flat idea behind crypto currencies.
And we are talking about a full fledged monetary system here with legal repercussions in terms of international law. With Bitcoin, no one was technically "responsible" for what folks did with Bitcoin. Will the Stellar organization be responsible for oversight and arbitration for any legal or financial fraud? And will the board BE held accountable or responsible for any systemic issues rising from speculation or any other activity?
And Stripe got their USD 3M loan repaid in 2% of the pre-mined stellars, valuating the whole pre-mined lot at USD 150M. How did they arrive at this number?
So this is pseudo-decentralized in the same way CA certificates or domain names are? I thought we were trying to move away from that model after Bitcoin made it possible to.
Ripple's XRP value plummeted after one of the founders of Ripple, and now founder of Steller, sold off his holdings within 2 weeks. I hope someone can explain to me how this is better than a decentralized variant?
Well, I don't know who is Jed or Jeb, but the original Ripple was started by Ryan Fugger[1].
The original Ripple was a much more loose unfinished idea for a much more reliable solid decentralized means-of-trade. It wasn't even a currency, only a protocol, a scheme, a nice good thing[2]. Then this bad Ripple came and got the name from him and he accepted their proposal, maybe because he thought his project was dead, but in the minds of the people who thought about it it will never die!
Thanks for the mention. I was happy for the new Ripple project because it is a good implementation of my original vision for an open, decentralized payment network. Now there's a fork called Stellar, which uses the same software, and so is also a good implementation of the original vision. The difference between Ripple and Stellar at this point is down to distribution strategy for the underlying cryptocurrency of their platforms, which, from my perspective, is just an implementation detail. I'm just happy to see smart, motivated people working on this.
Jed was a part of Ripple, which premined 50% of XRP and held said XRP for themselves while giving away the other 50%. Over time people realized Ripple and OpenCoin, Inc. are not exactly FOSS. Eventually, XRP slowly faded into scamcoin status. Finally, Jed decided to jump ship and dumped his billions (with a B) of XRP for millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Step 4 (after Step 2: ??? and Step 3: Profit!) apparently is to fork Ripple software into an entirely rebranded version of Ripple called Stellar.
For what it's worth, I signed up and connected Facebook and got 0 STR. Something broke, but now they have all my FB data so that's fun.
It's funny to me that even though I doubt Stellar will be more than a flash in the pan (due to the reasons you mention and what they imply) I'm still willing to give up privacy for the shot that 5000 STR might buy me a sandwich one day.
Hi karl, Andrew from Stellar here. We're aware of the problem that's causing some users not to receive their 5000 Stellar reward. We're working on a fix - you'll have your Stellars in your wallet soon :)
It's also surprising that just because I have just a handful of friends on facebook, no profile picture and don't post anything on facebook, I'm marked as a spam account. Are you just interested in big social graphs?
It seems to me Stellar (the organization) will be "the Central Bank" a la Bank for International Settlements at the global level or Federal Reserve for Stellar (the cryptocurrency).
This is what makes me uncomfortable. The biggest point about cryptocurrencies is that they are not centralized. In that sense Stellar seems a lot worse than regular currency. With a regular currency, at least the respective Central Bank or other monetary regulatory authority has credibility and accountability in the sense that they are indirectly elected by citizens as they are selected by the elected government. As such they have to have a history of integrity and monetary experience, and can be removed if they act unethically.
Stellar's board, on the other hand, is self-elected, and with all due respect, don't need to have the level of accountability or have the credibility of running such an organization, which even if it owns "just 5%" (+2% of Stripe's) of the currency can potentially have substantial control over it. And being a non-profit doesn't add a stamp of either, means little.
Thanks for sharing the details. My core problem isn't with the details, mainly because I haven't gone through it or even what percentage of Stellar is controlled by the organization. My problem is with the basis of having such a self-selected organization which seems to have given itself the de facto control over the flow of the monetary system.
As a good example what you mentioned: "As needed, the organization will also hold open auctions to raise funds from its remaining pool of stellars".
This is a huge thing! Who decides when "as needed" is? If it's the board, what's the basis of their authority? Just being a non=profit doesn't stop one or more of the board members to act in self-interest.
>The Stellar Foundation will actually control relatively little. The creation of new stellars, for example, will be done in a fully distributed fashion
It's not fully distributed. All the decision-making nodes are controlled by Stellar. Just because there is stake-based voting involved does not mean the underlying system is distributed.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your objection, but you can actually run your own stellard, which is a first-class member of the network: https://github.com/stellar/stellard. The Foundation runs a public stellard for convenience, but you're under no obligation to use it. The client and wallet powering launch.stellar.org are similarly open-source, and can be hooked up to your local stellard.
Stellar is a fork of Ripple. It is not a decentralized system, in the sense that, if you want to use any given currency (such as stellars), you must trust a number of centralized, trusted nodes. This is Ripple's/Stellar's "solution" to the double-spend problem.
How is that worse than trusting that the top 2 BTC mining pools aren't colliding?
I'll take a semi-centralized system with respected public figures as advisors over a theoretically decentralized system that is actually ran by a few anonymous miners.
That thread understates just how centralized the consensus system is. If your node isn't on the trust list of the official Stellar Foundation nodes, they do not participate in the consensus-building process of those nodes and cannot affect their consensus. Those official nodes have the ability to freeze accounts, change the fees charged, and probably to issue new money arbitrarily if they collude.
Now, technically your node can have a different trust list and come to a different consensus. You don't want to do that, though, because then you're stuck on a different version of the transaction history from the one everyone else accepts and any money you receive is likely worthless because it's not recognised by the rest of the network.
Meh, I'm not that big on 'totally decentralized'. Most of the time when nobody is in charge, it just ends up as a clusterfuck (bitcoin being an obvious example, or Occupy Wall Street which had a governance structure so impossibly idealistic that it was doomed to failure...by design, IMHO). So yeah, you have a small self-appointed elite of 'leaders' who essentially have more power than everyone else. That's how human society functions, most of the time. If enough people like it, it will take off and that self-appointed elite will become disproportionately powerful and rich...but at least you know who they are and they're in a well-defined governance structure subject to specific laws and can be challenged well-defined procedural tactics. The creates a large degree of predictability, and business likes predictability, as do consumers. So while it may fall short of purely democratic ideals, if more poeple use it and it actually results ina greater consumer suprlues, then it enhances the lives of mroe people to a greater degree than an ideologically pure alternative that never acquires sufficient traction to deliver a significant economic benefit.
Cynical, maybe, but as a good utilitarian I'll take results over ideals any day.
This kind of looks like a re-branding of Ripple. Ripple had a lot of image issues after one of the founders quit accusing the company of unethical behavior. Kind of unfortunate that Stripe would through their weight behind Ripple in any way.
Yeah, the image issues were unfortunate -- but the tech is good, and Jed and David have a lot of promising ideas about how to make it even better. Jed and Joyce have been scrupulous about being fair and transparent in how the Stellar Foundation is structured. There's more about this (including governance documents) at https://www.stellar.org/about/.
I'm actually more excited about David joining this effort (and entering the cryptocurrency space) than anything else. Stellar, also, looks promising (-:
To put this in some perspective, 9 billion XRP is from what I can tell slightly more than the total amount in circulation prior to him dumping all his. It was fairly damaging to Ripple overall and anyone holding XRP lost quite a bit from it.
The password recovery scheme is so poorly designed, that's borderline scary: You can't use the recovery code sent by email after registration without validating your email first (but since you have the code, your email is obviously valid)... which requires you to login (but if you don't have your password, well, you can't log in)... Great!... one lost account for me.
+1, the recovery code shouldn't go out in plain text email. Also, I picked a weak password just to quickly make an account and I can't seem to change it, hmmm.
While I am not too familiar with how Stellar/Ripple work, I assume they are sending an un-encrypted version of your Stellar private key, or perhaps the equivalent of a bitcoin master private key [1].
I say un-encrypted based on their claim that the code + username can be used to gain access; typically sites will encrypt the recovery code with your password. Based on this, I conjecture that they decided in favor of usability in the usability-security tradeoff.
Pretty strange how Stellar is paying people to sign up with Facebook. Facebook is very centralized. These modern currencies are very decentralized. I don't mind myself, but it seems like paying someone to sign up with the enemy...
Its not strange at all, otherwise it would be too easy to create a bunch of email accounts and "mine" stellar with them. With Facebook they have account history, number of friends, activity, etc as proof of validity. Its not a perfect measure but its much better than just allowing arbitrary email signups.
The signup with FB to get 5000 stellars pushed me off. Why should I give a totally new non-profit organisation access to my FB profile? I guess most of the devs here know, what that mean in terms of privacy.
Same here .. why does a currency exchange need access to my FB friends and photos? For all I know the whole thing has been set up as a ruse to show that idiot tech-heads will give away their ID and family photos for "magic beans" in the form of potentially worthless private currency.
Of course I'm happy to beg for "money" .. so you're still reading gdb, please give me some stellar (username: pbhj). Thanks!
Yep, for sure. The goal is to get stellars into the hands of as many people as possible, and so moving beyond just FB is definitely a priority. (If you want, I'd be happy to send you a few stellar to play with in the meanwhile.)
I absolutely hate Facebook but I have a Facebook account which I never use (mostly used to look up people). I tried to use this account during the Stellar registration process and I am getting "Facebook account is too new to qualify". Can you please help?
They are increasing within any one user database, but there are many of these databases. So useridA < useridB only implies B is newer than A if dbid(useridA) == dbid(useridB).
Unfortunately, I don't have a FB account either. It isn't clear that one is required at signup. Any chance of at least a partial allotment? Username is joninasheville. Thanks.
I'd love to see some https://keybase.io/ integration. There's some nice overlap with the federation concept, even if the "one-account-per-physical-person" story isn't as compelling.
It's hard to establish identity without using one of these centralized services. As someone without a Facebook account I'm also a little sad. I don't know if other centralized accounts have as many good ways to prevent new accounts from signing up. For example, Google and Microsoft accounts might not be so easy to associate with a real history.
University accounts might be another way. Some people who don't like centralized services like Facebook and Google will still have a university email address.
Hello, I tried signing up but kept getting the error message "Oops Please verify your facebook account and try again" I typed in my correct facebook user and password. Not sure why it is not working correctly. Please advise. If you can send me some stellars to play with meanwhile my user name is uprun478 Thanks
I bailed at the first page after the registration screen when I couldn't get any further due to the facebook requirement. I don't have a facebook account, who in tech has a facebook account these days?
I just find it strange that a supposedly forward-thinking new platform would require technology most people I know abandoned last decade. You don't appeal to early-adopters by requiring they use dead-tech.
well, you know, apart from those who actually work for facebook. or zynga.
I remember when we all had to create fake facebook accounts about 5 yrs ago when zynga tried to 'acqui-hire' our company just so we could see what farmville was like.
Site seems to have broken. It never finished connecting to Facebook, and now when I go to the dashboard the steps are missing entirely. When I go to Settings and try and enable password recovery I get "Server error". In the Console it says it got a 502 from api.stellar.org.
That's in Chrome. In Safari, I don't even get a response to clicking on a settings toggle. Merely loading the dashboard gives me a CORS error.
Edit: Spoke too soon. My wife can't sign up. Button just says "Sending" indefinitely.
Edit 2: She just got an email confirmation code, despite the signup eventually failing outright. But she can't log in, says the username is invalid. So what is the confirmation code associated with?
Seems to be responding better but the recovery code process is a little off. Says that the email address I'm trying to use is taken (it's the one I used at registration after the nag message) and that my recovery code is invalid.
The barrier to creating an unlimited number of facebook accounts is a half step above creating an unlimited number of gmail or hotmail accounts.
No, the whole point of connecting with facebook is to focus on the UX of making electronic payments. Who's going to remember their coffee date's wallet is 1BeX1pVAjD94hNs6C5d2dB3TRnLx53dXg3? QR codes are cute, but haven't quite hit the mainstream. It's a lot easier to say "Ben Bitdiddle" and have Ben's facebook picture pop up.
The network effects of scanning your entire social graph (and the data contained within) doesn't hurt either. Works fantastically for Venmo.
Other discussions here are saying that Stellar scans the Facebook account to check whether it looks like a spam account set up to exploit the giveaway. It rejects accounts that are newly registered, for instance.
I'd be surprised if that's true. I signed up with my fake FB account and it worked just fine. The account is a complete spammy mess so if they are attempting that, they are not doing a very good job. I would say more likely no new accounts allowed and that's it...
Why of course? Since when has the existence/linking of an FB account to some other service been the only way to get more free Stellars? And who said, a Stellar has a real value other than being pre-mined bits and bytes?
Bummer. I just signed up but got to there and can't go any further since I don't have an account. I wonder if there will be other identify-provers in the future? I wouldn't mind hooking up LinkedIn or Twitter, or a phone number or something like that. (Or my Stripe account!)
Tried signing up but after a minute of waiting I was told my username was already taken. Then, I received an email saying I successfully signed up (with that same username), with a broken link to "forums.stellar.org". Managed to visit "forum.stellar.org" without an issue. I think you may have launched a little soon...
EDIT: now unable to log in with my username and password combination.
Same issue for me, I can't even log into the forums to get technical assistance. I got an email confirming my account, but can't log in with my password, and can't re-register with the same username.
Hi Peter, we are aware of this issue affecting a minority of users and are actively working to provide a fix. If you signed up with your email, we will also contact you soon with instructions on how to retrieve your account. Thank you for your patience!
I am one of the folks working at Stellar. Yes, FB isn't a login method that will work for everyone. Today is just day 1; we plan on adding more methods soon.
Also, anyone can create an account/wallet without even registering your email. FB auth is only for the giveaway.
That makes sense - to get any stellars from the giveaway (either from the initial sign up or from setting up password recovery), you need to confirm your identity. Otherwise, you'd be able to create a bunch of accounts and just get the 1k from password recovery on each.
So when other methods are introduced will those of us that signed up on day 1 but don't have facebook accounts still be eligible for the giveaway and for the same amount?
Hi, I work at Stellar. The FB auth is the first of several methods to receive stellars so we will add more methods soon.
Also, mining obviously has many benefits, but it's still limited to people who are highly technical and/or who have money to spend. We wanted to provide much broader access to digital currency, and so stellars will be given away for free at the click of a button.
Without the inclusion of mining and the incentives to establish a mining infrastructure, how do you intend to provide safe decentralized verification of transactions?
The system currently uses the same consensus algorithm as Ripple. However, one thing David Mazières is currently spearheading is development of a provably-correct version of consensus.
(I think it's very important that whatever primitives you're building on have solid theoretical foundations, and I'm pretty excited to see the infrastructure improvements Stellar is going to introduce there.)
Which isn't all that decentralized. The only nodes that participate in the consensus are a handful of "trusted" nodes run by - well, in this case I don't think we know yet, but the Stellar foundation gets to pick who can run them. Those nodes get to decide which transactions are accepted, what fees are charged, the money creation policies, etc.
Hi Joyce, would you ask your bf Jed where his MtGox profits are? Its known that Jed sold MtGox to Mark Karpeles, and had access to a privileged account which allowed him to audit the total trading volume (and collect his agreed profit share).
This is a Bitcoin-like, distributed, secure payment system WITH a federated protocol for gateways/exchanges. A federated exchange network allows anyone to participate, similar to email servers. But since trust is so much more important in this case, I think that network effects will result in a relatively small set of gateways that anyone will actually interact with.
No this is not Bitcoin-like. It's premined and requires trust. Besides, it's just a fork of Ripple, which has already failed after being dumped by its creator.
Bitcoin also requires trust, specifically the trust that miners will not collude to double spend.
There is also nothing fundamental about the idea of issuing coins as a reward for mining. It's just one possibility among many, there's nothing intrinsically "fair" about it.
In Bitcoin, you trust the way the network as defined by the code has been set up, not the miners specifically.
In this situation you have the code to audit but you also have to trust the Stellar Foundation... I have to trust they are telling me the truth about how they are distributing the currency, that they won't sell their shares early, that these 3 people heading the foundation are going to act in my interests, etc.
What if the Stellar Foundation dissolves in a month? What happens to the currency?
No, you don't have to trust the miners because there are no known collusive schemes that would make more money for that volume of miners than playing by the rules would.
Maybe you think that some scheme will be discovered, but that's pretty speculative at this point. It's been many years and not a whiff of one.
>No, you don't have to trust the miners because there are no known collusive schemes that would make more money for that volume of miners than playing by the rules would.
Yes there is, coordinated conditional double spending on gambling websites.
There are also non pecuniary reasons to attack the network, such as vandalism (miners could be pressured into colluding by a government for instance)
Yup, obviously a fork of Ripple. While at Ripple, Jed acqui-hired his gf Joyce (SimpleHoney). Then MtGox blew up (Jed still had his profit-sharing agreement with MtGox from his sale to Mark Karpeles). Then Jed announced he was going to dump his 9 billion XRPs ("fyi, XRP dump incoming") because he didn't like the direction his co-founder Chris was taking Ripple.
Then he launches Stellar, the XRP clone. Didn't even bother to change the total token amount (both XRP and Stellar have a cap of 100 billion tokens).
I have my own documentation of what I would consider to be Jed's dubious history as a trustworthy part of the digital currency world. Having been one of the early miners of BTC when it was under 25 cents and then an eager proponent of Ripple at its inception I feel disgusted and betrayed by the behavior of two particular people: Jed and Mark Karpeles. And yes, they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. I was one of the lucky ones who did not lose any money, so this isn’t about sour grapes. I trust them about as far as I could throw a heavy safe, and I'm not very strong. Protocols may be game-changing and robust, but I learned the hard way that if the people behind them suck, supporting their schemes will likely make you a sucker. Protocols don’t create trust, people do. I’ll acquire stellars for free, but no more putting USD behind another one of Jed’s self-enriching money-making schemes. He’s very good at profit-taking for himself and is fearless in the art of self-promotion.
Dumping Stellar coins should be prevented for at least five years provided the creators adhere to the agreement described in their Mandate page:
"In order to provide additional stability to the system, the nonprofit founders and Stripe have voluntarily agreed not sell any of the stellars initially received (either via employee grants in the case of the founders or via repayment of the loan) for at least five years; however, Stripe may auction any of their stellars, provided the recipients also agree not to sell their stellars for five years, and net profits are returned to the Foundation."[1]
Is anyone else having trouble with the client? My whole team is trying to sign up and are having a myriad of issues, but I can't submit to the forum because my username and password keep not working even when I make new ones.
Whoa. There is absolutely no stripe.com URL boost, or any other kind of URL boost.
The stellar.org post set off HN's voting ring detector.
Edit: I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed the parent meant that HN itself was boosting certain URLs, as opposed to, say, name-recognition by users. The latter kind of thing is no doubt a factor.
Parent may have just meant an organic boost--I certainly notice submissions from certain domains above others, and from the looks of things it appears that others do, too. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but it does seem to be an observable effect.
> The stellar.org post set off HN's voting ring detector.
My understanding of the detector is that (among other things, presumably) it applies a penalty when visitors follow a link directly to the submission from a page other than "new", "news", etc. Is it possible that there is a bug (at least, I think it would be a bug) by which it also penalizes submissions where the visitor has followed a link from elsewhere on HN (eg. parent's link)? I followed the link and upvoted the story, and I assume several others used that path as well.
I posted this on the support forum as well, but myself and at least one other user have had this problem: I created an account, but it timed out and never took me to the next page, however I received the two confirmation emails (including the pw recovery code). When I try to log in though, I get invalid username or password, and the password recovery code is useless. So it looks like it's possible to create an account which is completely inaccessible.
EDIT: Looks like more folks are reporting the same issue.
I have to assume that becoming a gateway requires navigating the Byzantine Hellscape of multinational financial and banking regulations. Have they discovered some non-obvious way to avoid this or are the gateways expected to be run primarily by existing financial institutions?
From what I understand, the bitcoin network could be a gateway so if you want to exchange bitcoin that would not require any regulation hell. If you want to exchange fiat money, that would. But that will always be the case even without stellar.
This is something they unfortunately do not address, but it's the biggest problem with such systems and a major part of the reason Ripple hasn't caught on.
This confused me as well. Stellars are stored in fixed point, as millionths of a stellar. But there's a tiny anti-spam fee for each payment transaction, so if you've sent money somewhere you may find an extra 0.000010 gone.
Not a great sign up experience - I signed up and linked my Facebook account. Then, I went to click on the link to confirm my e-mail address (from the confirmation e-mail) and got logged out. Now, my login isn't working, nor is password recovery. Impossible to figure out whether I mistyped my username or there is some other issue, and no "Forgot My Username"-type feature to be able to make sure.
This is very exciting if it pans out. An interchange layer for money that isn't controlled by the incumbent organizations could enable all sorts of interesting innovations. <3
"The network has been initialized with a supply of 100 billion stellars. 5% will be used to fund operations of the nonprofit (its spending, including employee compensation, will be public), and the remaining 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free as quickly as we can manage."
IIRC Ripple's founders (including Jed) kept about 20% of XRP, and Ripple Labs kept about 25%, so only 5% is a lot better, but it's still a very centralized solution to distribution.
We hope that it'll end up being considerably more even than Bitcoin distribution. One note is that of the 5%, 2% is currently held by Stripe. We're going to auction off most of our Stellars, and return the proceeds to the Foundation.
We wish Stellar all the best and it's certainly a huge improvement on Ripple Labs, but we're also working on a (not directly competitive, but related) project http://hyperledger.com/ without any native currency or pre-allocation at all.
Hope we can integrate with Stellar as soon as possible.
I got this message when signing up with my Facebook account (which I only use for signing in to services, not to connect with people, which may be why I got it):
Oops!
Our spam detection checks say your Facebook account isn't eligible. If you are a legitimate user, we apologize and are improving our detection algorithms. And we will release new ways to grab stellars soon, so please check back.
Is there any way to prove that my account is legitimate? Maybe my Github account, where I manage a somewhat popular open-source project, Min (http://minfwk.com) My username both on Github, HN and Stellar is owenversteeg. This seems like an interesting idea, and I'd like to play around with it.
Same message and my account is two and a half years old. I have no friends on the account, so maybe "too new" really means "not enough friends".
Edit: Because this is generating some discussion, I'll clarify that it is not actually my main account which is why I have no friends or photos, but I don't like giving third parties access to my private main account information. The spam detection seems to have worked well on me, I was just pointing out that account age is not the only filter.
Yeah, see, I would probably find that incredibly suspicious as well. Though, most spam accounts try to get around this by sending out hundreds of friend requests to random people.
Hello, we check various properties of your Facebook account to determine that this was not a spam account created simply to exploit the giveaway. This is our first day out, and we apologize that legitimate users like yourself aren't able to receive the giveaway. Please check back in the coming days as we continue to improve our spam detection algorithms.
And what is with people, that don't have a Facebook account (yet)?
I guess, anybody that creates a new Facebook account now, because he wants to also get the Stellars will fall into the spam category.
tl;dr: Isn't it a legitimate interest, to get something that others get? Or is it just a giveaway for Facebook users? When so, would you please say so in the first place (, that your system is only for them). It does not foster my trust in this new system, when I am locked out, just because I am not inside some "special club" (I don't remember, that Facebook membership is now essential to interact in the internet -- .... I am at the verge to feel discriminated.).
I find it good, to have an alternate payment method to get out of the trap of traditional payment systems, that are dominated by a few big corporations .... and then, what happens, I have to bow to one even bigger monopolist. --> Does not foster my trust into a system that claims to be free and open.
Hello, Andrew from Stellar here. We're using Facebook as our identity verification mechanism for our giveaway, and we've added additional spam prevention checks to ensure lots of Facebook accounts aren't created just to claim the giveaway reward. We will be tweaking these checks in the coming days to ensure legitimate users like yourself will be let in. Please check back soon!
Hi, I'm excited about Stellar, but disappointed in the initial offering scheme. People with lots of real-looking Facebook accounts can grab some extra funny money and the rest of us get shafted. I'll check back later!
Hi, Andrew, please realize you are depending on the desire of people on HN not to be assholes to acquire imaginary currency.
A part of me was sorely tempted, out of annoyance, to simply acquire enough facebook accounts that would bypass your check just to point out how little value it has. I've long since quashed the urge but not everyone will.
I reactivated mine to attempt to get access to the Stellars as well. Its also "too new". Ah well. Still a neat idea, I'll just have no use for it until it matures since I can't use it.
I'm really excited about this (I talked to Jed a few months ago, before joining CloudFlare).
I think there will need to be a strong client wallet, rather than just the web client, but that's obvious, and the web client was an easy place to start.
I'd really like to see how one would integrate chaumian blinded tokens into this. I may be an outlier in thinking unlinkability and anonymity are critical for "real currencies" over time, but I think recent events have shown this to be correct.
I liked Ripple 1.0; Ripple-of-today not as much, so since this seems to be basically Ripple 1.0 plus some lessons learned, it should be interesting.
Something weird seems to be going on: at first I didn't get any compensation for making my first transaction, then I got 1000 STR from StellarFoundation 34 times. Now my account has 39000 STR in it...
Bug report: I was unable to get the 5000 initial coins. (The facebook auth failed twice, so I reloaded the page -- and was then unable to find the "free coins" page.)
Looks like the emails coming from stellar are delivered from an SMTP origin "mailgun.info" which uses an invalid client certificate; I'm getting errors:
SSL_accept error from mail-182-5.mailgun.info[23.253.182.5]: 0
warning: TLS library problem: XXX:error:XXX:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate:s3_pkt.c:1258:SSL alert number 42:
At least they retry without SSL aftwards, and manage to deliver the emails.
Hi 0x0, Russell from Mailgun here. Do you have a self signed certificate by any chance? We typically downgrade a connection if we are presented with a self signed certificate. That might be what you are seeing.
If you drop us an email at support [at] mailgun.com with your domain I can take a look at the specific issue we are having delivering over TLS to your domain.
As someone who is paying 5% to deposit a foreign check, and also lost a non-trivial amount when a ripple gateway folded, I can say I am still excited to see another iteration on the idea.
5% as a consumer spread on international transfers is ridiculous, and seemingly only avoided using some sort of forex exchange with high minimums and excessive red tape.
Bitcoin exchanges do not offer reliable or timely deposit/withdrawal in most local currencies to consider it an alternative.
The trust points are no worse than existing banks / currency exchange / forex models that allow this type of transfer to take place. If we are lucky, we can improve and decentralize those choke points further.
Yes, those who control the choke points have the potential to make stupid amounts of money based solely on traffic, much like existing banking models and many startups.
We want to give them away as fairly and to as many people as possible. Stellar doesn't require mining and so there's no need to give them away to the people with the most CPU cycles. Anyone can participate regardless of technical ability or income.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with premining, if it is done honestly and transparently and especially if your coin is using a consensus algorithm that has no need for regular mining in the first place. Let's evaluate the fairness of the distribution model on its merits. This one is quasi-centralized (relying on Facebook accounts), but I predict it will be among the most egalitarian.
The fact that this solves some of the problems of cryptocurrency, and the fact that Stripe is behind it, give me a very good feeling about this. To have the clout offered by Stripe while still being open source is very powerful, and I think it is what the cryptocurrency world has needed.
The "Connect with Facebook" button on Stellar's dashboard appears to be broken, or at least for me, anyway. Clicking it results in a "Loading..." message that never seems to go away.
who is their economist/fiscal policy/monetary policy adviser? I looked on the website and there doesn't seem to be anyone with this background amongst the advisers, board, or employees.
0.625% will be granted to employees for 4 years. Does this mean they won't be paid after 4 years? Also can you elaborate on how the 0.625% will be divided between developers & founders?
Anyone interested in setting up instant funding for Stellar with ACH, let me know. We've started doing it with some Ripple Gateways and would love to work with Stellar.
> Each week, the network will identify the winners. The winners are the 50 top voted for accounts that also received at last 1.5% of the vote. If no account has over 1.5% of the vote, then the top 50 accounts voted for are considered the winners. That week’s new stellars are then distributed pro-rata to the winners.
So does this mean that if one account has 5% of the vote and all remaining accounts have under 1.5%, that account will receive all of the inflation-creates Stellars?
As I read it, yes. But other account holders would have an incentive to band together in order to surpass 1.5% (or even 5%).
I wonder if it'll be possible to vote for an account that promises to immediately distribute new Stellar back to its voters. If so, newly-created Stellar may always end up being distributed in proportion to the Stellar wealth distribution.
I guess Incubus's song Stellar, Stellar.js, Stellar the band, any number of companies named Stellar, and "Stellar" the adjective describing pertinence to stars should all be upset too.
Oh wait, you're just using this as an opportunity to plug your own work... Move along then.
Stellar (and Ripple) are distributed ledger and exchange. The big difference from Bitcoin is that it records credits from gateways in multiple currencies. It can transfer money in regular currencies and exchange different currencies.
The other big difference is that consistency is not maintained by mining but with consensus between trusted servers. This makes theoretically scale to larger volumes and better latency while not being fully distributed.
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency people hate it because it uses fiat currencies and is more centralized. Most people will probably prefer Stellar since it can interface with existing bank accounts and monetary systems. It can be complement to Bitcoin as it can act as a distributed exchange.
just FYI - none of the sliders on the settings page work for me. The first one gives me a "Server Error" tooltip and the other 2 just do nothing.
Also, I linked my Facebook and didn't get any indication of whether it worked or not. Now when I log in I have 0 stellars and the welcome panel doesn't show up. did this happen to anyone else?
Registered, verified with FB, it says I'm in the queue and I should receive my Stellar tomorrow.
On the other hand verifying the email with the code received raises an error saying that I need to login before via FB (and I did it). Maybe it expects to see before the Stellar gained via FB login before releasing the other 1000
Very interesting. I always thought of Ripple as semi-scam, but I can see Stellar become a thing (be huge, actually), backed by Stripe and hopefully others soon enough.
Question.. how is the password used to decrypt the secret key? Which encryption algorithm is used? Can anyone technically explain?
Stellar is the "IP layer for credit" while Bitcoin is the "IP layer for money".
Stellar doesn't actually transfer funds (like Bitcoin), it only transfers IOUs, the settlement (actual value transfer) occurs outside the Stellar network.
Ok, so now they're promising me my free stellars "tomorrow".
Which is fine in one way - feel free to take your time handing me my free stuff. On the other hand, it doesn't give me much faith they can scale to the mass market...
If anyone wants to get a send-to-receive chain going for the learn to send free 1000 STR deal, reply to this with your username. I'll send 1000 STR to anyone who sends me 1000 STR. My username is tklovett on stellar.
There seems to be a session bug. I have to log in again every time I refresh the page. Of course, the page is updated automatically so the refresh is probably unnecessary, but the session bug is still there. :)
It makes sense. It looks like they've just added this message: "If you refresh you will be automatically logged out since it isn't safe to keep your password on disk."
The funny thing to this is, that keeping the password on disk isn't proclaimed safe but sending each user the recovery code over plain text mail withouth encryption is...
Too early to tell if Stella will work but their intentions appear good and the underlying concept solid. Was very surprised though that there isn't a single advisor to the board who's career has been in finance or banking.
Seems to me that stella will only work and achieve broad adoption if the network has solid gateways operated by entities people already know and trust. Who do most people trust with their money? Existing banks and other well known exchange/trading platforms (xe.com / etrade / western union). If you want these institutions to start operating stella gateways, surely it would be a good idea to have an advisor to the board that's from that world, well connected and understands it intimately?
Not sure why I'm being down voted. My understanding is the system works better (at least for currency X to currency Y transactions) the more trusted local currency gateways exist in the network. So if using stellar on the backend makes it theoretically easier/cheaper/faster for traditional money transfer platforms to transmit/receive funds for their clients and having trusted brands as gateways is good for stellar's adoption; then surely that's a win/win and they should have an insider from the banking/finance/forex world advising their board and helping them get one or two well known finance shops involved in a pilot.
Concrete example:
I use XE.com trade for making international wires to people (most of the time it's GBP to EUR wires). Using XE is easier and cheaper than using my bank for this but the process is still painful. After locking in an exchange rate for the trade, I then have to wire my funds in GBP to XE.com's GBP bank account (with a reference number for the trade) and they then wire the equivalent EUR amount to the recipient's EUR bank account. I have to provide loads of bank details for the recipient (branch address, IBAN, SWIFT, intermediary bank etc.) and it usually takes 48 hours before the money arrives in their account (sometimes longer if they have a weird bank). It's also often difficult to work out what fees intermediary banks will extract en-route.
I'd love it if XE.com had stellar GBP and EUR gateways. I could then dump some funds in their GBP gateway, give them the stellar username I want to send the equivalent EUR amount to and hit send. Instant and easy.
Or maybe I've completely misunderstood the purpose of gateways and how they work?
Based on the Stripe investment of 3 million for 3,002,289,306.81 Stellars (3% of 100,076,310,227) I am calculating 1 STR = $0.000999237 right now ... is that correct?
Who is running the consensus nodes? Will people choose their consensus node, and if so can you guarantee an overlap? Are the nodes maintaining a state or a full, auditable, ledger?
I signed up with friends all ok but now dashboard just keeps saying connecting and clicking seems says I have to be online to do this but I am.. Any ideas?
The cost of transaction might be an issue if one day 1 stellar > 20 USD or so (it becomes too expensive). Wondering if there is a way to fix it (other than simply merging multiple transactions), without having anything to do with the USD itself.
I work at Stellar. We wanted a method by which we could fund people once (to prevent someone from spinning up a lot of fake accounts to claim) hence the decision to move forward with Facebook. I know it isn't perfect, but we are doing our best to make the giveaway broadly accessible and not game-able. And we are working on other claim methods so yes, totally hear your concerns.
Feel free to send me 1000 stellar in step 4 of the signup process. Username zeljko. Comment so I can give you some good karma. Thank you! (btw credit to corey for coming up with this)
Looks like it was pre-mined. They are giving away up to 6k if you connect your Facebook and verify your email.
"One key difference is that 95% of the currency is being given away for free at the outset, the bulk of it from an initial issuance of 100 billion coins created by the not-for-profit foundation that will run the project. New coins will be later added at no cost to the circulation at a rate of 1% per year."
The reason I gave you 1000 was so that I got the one time 1000 bonus from Stellar, then you paid it back. The assumption was you had already given 1000, gained the 1000 from Stellar and then got it back again.
Now, someone would give me 1000, I'll pay it back and the chain goes on :)
As it's clear you weren't quite sure how that worked, I'll pay yours back :)
Would be interested in trying this, but can't obtain any yet due to (intentional) lack of Facebook account. Happy to pay it forward in the inevitable HN article when they launch non-Facebook mechanisms.
Well, an interesting effect down below: tens of messages (as of this writing) of people sharing their username and sending money to each other. Sounds like fun.
It also helps with HN's karma, which I'm sure was not intentional.
However, I am curious about something else: these people below left a clear trace from their HN username to their Stellar username. What's Stellar's stance on privacy, and on anonymity?
> Development is led by Jed McCaleb and Dr. David Mazieres in collaboration with a small team of others. (The technology is based on the open-source Ripple project, originally created by Jed a few years ago.)
So, is Stellar fundamentally the same thing as and/or a fork of Ripple? They've hired the same guy who started Ripple (Jed McCaleb), and as I recall there were a lot of concerns around that, as noted in a WSJ article [0] and other places. Jed is also on the Stellar board, too, one of only three members -- and so wields a considerable amount of influence.
If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple? Centralized authority holding a large chunk of initial funds, questionable governance decisions, etc., just to name a few of the political problems, not just the technical ones.
I'd love to see the "IP layer for currency" described by Stripe succeed, but I'm not sure that this implementation of it represents a good idea. And I'm also concerned about whether Jed, the cofounder of both MtGox and Ripple, has the best interests of Stellar at heart.
[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/05/22/ripple-alternative...