Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
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Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#2Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion!
There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork, if there are tokens which are supposed to be redeemable with a counterparty.
Let's say Deutsche Bank had put €1 billion into colored coins on Bitcoin. Suddenly, after a fork (e.g. bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash), there would be €2 billion IOU's in the wild. The people on each side of that fork would not roll over and die, and it's not simple to say "Oh, whoever Deutsche picks wins." Or even "Whoever has the strongest chain wins." I have a hard time imagining a company would ever take that risk. I worry big companies would never dare to put anything real-world redeemable directly onto, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum, for this reason. They'd just get sued over and over again.
The Stellar federated consensus story (HN debates about SCP below [1][2]) has Deutsche Bank as an actual player on the network. If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines / quorum slices, and if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side. All said, it seems significantly faster and more stable for cryptocurrency-to-real-world mappings, both for the consumer and counterparty.
Fun discussions:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 -- of particular note, because it has David Mazières, Vitalik Buterin, and Greg Maxwell all weighing in.
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#3Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion! There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork,…
Your justification for the Th/s being an issue for electricity consumption is one I have seen bounced around a bunch but other than the justification of the environment there are other issues. But, the idea of cryptocurrencies is that without some kind of artificial scarcity you will have other incentives. If you are really concerned about electricity consumption what about using a ledger technology that is designed for low resource consumption such as Sawtooth? I'm not sure how Stellar helps you in this regard. Also, why are you seeking more funding in the first place?
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#4As a long time Keybase user and Stellar holder, I couldn't be more excited for this news! Congratulations to all!
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#5Very cool news. It's always exciting to see Keybase introduce new features, and the thought process behind them is usually pretty interesting to read.
There's definitely a very real need for an anchored cryptocurrency that isn't a huge scam like Tether. It's cool that Stellar seems to solve this in a way that doesn't require me to hand over all of my trust to the currency creator.
Also, that FAQ was awesome.
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#6Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion! There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork,…
Have there been changes to Stellar to address the topology trust issue that `nullc brought up in the linked thread?
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#7I feel like there's a very real synergy possible here. Keybase has a solution covering security, identity, chat and multi-device usage that could be very interesting when combined with a crypto-currency like Stellar Lumen. I wonder what they have in mind in terms of features. Any guesses?
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#8Last time Keybase came up I made sure to post about how great using it is and that I am super-duper enthused about Keybase. I entreated 'malgorithms to let me give him money for Keybase. And I have recommended Keybase to a ton of people and a bunch of my clients, using it in a bunch of workflows. Now those people and those clients are going to have cryptocoin bullshit stuffed into a work tool?
Thanks, Chris. You're doing a great job of making me look like an asshole for believing in you guys.
I don't want your "monetization plays" and my clients don't either. Giving you guys money for Keybase is infinitely preferable to having cryptocoin crap, Stellar or otherwise, being jammed into a tool I use for work. (Or anything else, really, that I ever have to touch.) And I feel like a sap for being an enthusiastic user of Keybase and recommending it to people when this sort of garbage is coming down the pike.
I am really, really disappointed.
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#9I first heard about Stellar from Patrick's (patio11) Harry Potter post around 3 years ago: Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars[1]. I have been following Stellar closely since then and am also running one of the biggest Stellar communities.
It's one of the rear cryptocurrency and "blockchain" technologies that actually make sense to me. They have a simple structure: you are able to issue assets/tokens on the network and you are able to send and trade them for other tokens. I think that this simplicity allowed it to gain a lot of credibility with bigger companies (Stripe, IBM, now Keybase, ...), while other technologies like Bitcoin/Ethereum are getting just more and more complicated with 2nd layer networks and locking up tokens in them. They stayed true to the original ideas without introducing a bunch of buzzwords around them and trying to avoid hype in their announcements[2]:
> Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming years.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cr... [2] https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership...
Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation
#10I feel like there's a very real synergy possible here. Keybase has a solution covering security, identity, chat and multi-device usage that could be very interesting when combined with a crypto-currency like Stellar Lumen. I wonder what they have in mind in terms of features. Any guesses?
Given keybase is a social product around cryptographic security my bet is on some kind of a social platform where stellar tokens play a big role.