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Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

keybase.io

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Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#91

Post by cbhl »

panarky wrote: post #68
lalaland1125 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as "excess electricity". If that power wasn't being wasted on useless cryptocurrencies, then we could have used it for useful purposes, such as processing aluminum.

If a hydroelectric power station produces 30 TWh per year, but demand including aluminum smelters is only 20 TWh, then there's 10 TWh excess. This is use-it-or-lose-it. Should they just allow the river to flow and bypass the turbines?

Hydroelectric is one of the oldest electrical storage systems there is -- you can store more electricity as gravitational energy by pumping the water back uphill, and then letting it flow back down during peak times.

There's a reason why hydroelectric plants and dams go together.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#92

Post by web007 »

eropple wrote: post #25
jeffthemaximum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keybase is also an identity tool, and I see value in having proof of identity when making crypto transactions.

That's great--but I don't care about what value you see when making cryptocurrency transactions. I care about the security and uptime of my services, which is why we started using Keybase in the first place. If they wanted to build some whateverthing that leverages Keybase for identity? Sure, go nuts, I think it's silly but it's not my time. But injecting it "into their apps"? No. These are tools for production, for…

So adding a distributed change/audit log - don't forget, that's all any blockchain really is - is the deal breaker and will cause you to fail audits or break production systems? How is it different from the GPG chain that is the Keybase changelog?

What is it about this change that makes you assume you're going to have to deal with cryptomining et al?

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#93

Post by huslage »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #3
malgorithms wrote: post #2

Blog 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…

Electricity consumption is not an "artificial scarcity"

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#94

Post by QML »

eropple wrote: post #8

Last 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 d…

.. Bitcoin and Zcash have had integrations into Keybase for a long time.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#95

Post by redspectre »

malgorithms wrote: post #2

Blog 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,…

I don't understand how the stellar case and the bitcoin case differ in a network partition. You said "if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side."

How is that different from a network fork happening, and DB saying "We only accept tokens from ETH and not ETH classic".

At the end of the day, DB is deciding on a network partition to support, and you either support the network partition DB is supporting, or you don't do business with the DB tokens.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#96

Post by woolvalley »

baker_miller wrote: post #16
eropple wrote: post #8

Last 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 d…

Harsh. Nothing about this post implies a monetization play. The whole point of Keybase is identity verification. How is it not a natural evolution for them to explore trusted cross-border, multicurrency transactions? That's not to say you even have to use a payments feature if it's integrated into the primary Keybase application. You don't have to verify ownership of a domain or register a Bitcoin address, but both o…

Keybase started out with an identity system because it was the key foundational module to create their entire e2e encrypted software system.

After the user system, they created a network filesystem, which their git system is based upon, and I'm guessing it's also something their team chat system uses too. The entire groups system is also based on their user system.

It looked like they were building out a dependency tree bit by bit.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#97

Post by vesak »

shivpat wrote: post #12
malgorithms wrote: post #2

Blog 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,…

Why won't keybase address requests for Monero?

Perhaps they'd be worried that their tool would be used primarily for narcotics trade. Oh wait, they already have zcash. Well, perhaps it's the redundancy between those two.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#99

Post by zitterbewegung »

huslage wrote: post #93
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Electricity consumption is not an "artificial scarcity"

I mean that artificial scarcity is enforced by a distributed ledger system is by using the concept of a miner. The best implementation we have so far that is electricity consumption because this makes people consume electricity which costs them money. If you don't have this piece then people will subvert the proof of work some other way.

For example if you have some type of mathematical problem (the unknotting problem) to take the place of the proof of work then you have to worry that that problem is actually hard to perform. Hypothetically that problem could be quite easy and you can subvert the system by having some shortcut.

But inverting a hash is known to be hard. Through this hardness you get artificial scarcity by making people efficiently design systems to consume electricity.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#100

Post by theptip »

redspectre wrote: post #95
malgorithms wrote: post #2

Blog 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,…

I don't understand how the stellar case and the bitcoin case differ in a network partition. You said "if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side." How is that different from a network fork happening, and DB saying "We only accept tokens from ETH and not ETH classic". At the end of the day, DB is deciding on a network partition to support, and you either support the network partition DB…

I'm not familiar with the "trustlines determine partition choice" feature of Stellar, but I am with trustlines in general; they are explicit app-level concepts that you define on your wallet, which in this case would say something like "I trust DB to redeem up to 1m worth of EUR credits".

If the Stellar client's behaviour in the face of a partition takes trustlines into account, that's much safer than the default behaviour in bitcoin, which I believe is "pick a partition at (pseudo)random".

It's possible to manually coax the client to pick a partition, but that requires user interaction, i.e. it's not fail-safe, it's fail-unsafe.

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