Live data from Hacker News

Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

keybase.io

121–130 of 170 posts

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#121

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,…

> If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines

Now you just said "whatever Deutsche picks win" with other words.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#122
post #85
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…

Easy there. Don't you think your prejudice against cryptocurrency is clouding your judgement here? Keybase is an identity tool and it makes every sense for it to make a wallet. Also, you provided no reasons that being involved in cryptocurrency will undermine keybase's security. Do you think?

The main problem is that dealing with money has all sorts of legal implications for businesses.

By adding cryptocurrency to a communication/identity client, a jurisdiction will probably classify your business as a money transmitter, financial institution, and/or stock broker. After reclassifying your business, they then fine you into the stone age for not registering and following all of the laws associated with that status. While technically, it might be no different than handling money via your bank, the law has not caught up with that yet in quite a few jurisdictions.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#123
post #68

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?

This is a vast oversimplification, which only sounds plausible if you pretend that energy production scales linearly with demand. In the real world, if there's a plant producing more than its consumers demand, the reason for the excess capacity is to accommodate spikes and future growth. If you come along and build a BTC mining rig next door, that "future growth" has arrived sooner than expected, forcing the utility to build new capacity years ahead of schedule (presuming it's feasible to build it at all), resulting in significant price increases, their refusal to sell you as much electricity as you want to buy, or both.

The (amortized) cost of building out new supply is a major[0] part of the cost of electricity - this is why most big energy producers spend millions of dollars per year on energy efficiency incentives. Haven't you ever wondered why your power company will give you a $50 rebate on an EnergyStar dishwasher? Isn't it counter-intuitive that they would pay you to buy less energy, when they have excess? It's not because they're tree-huggers - it's because decreasing demand growth delays the day when they need to build a new plant to meet demand, which increases the profitability of the current plant enough to make those incentives cost-effective[1].

0: I can't find a good estimate and it varies by fuel type, but I rememeber an environmental engineer at a former job telling me it was about half. Look up "Levelized Cost of Electricity" for more info.

1: If you're not convinced, instead of demanding more details, I urge you to just stop and ask whether the proposition "There is a lot of excess energy production lying around which BTC miners can soak up without impacting everyone else very much" really passes the sniff test.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#124

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…

Note that in general there is no way to name a particular branch of a blockchain fork. In cases with a protocol change coordinated well in advance, a counterparty anticipating the fork could announce that their tokens on one branch will be useless. However, if you just have two competing mining pools duking it out with the same protocol, there will be no way to name the branches ahead of time.

What's worse is that colored coins could distort the incentive structure to make it profitable to bribe miners, because the benefit to an attacker of subverting consensus could far outweigh the value of 12.5 BTC/block.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#125

This post is very oblique in a way that makes me suspicious. 1. Is Keybase still a for-profit corporation? 2. No actual technology is announced here. Is the purpose of this post to announce funding? If so, how much funding is it and what are the conditions under which it is provided? 3. How is Stellar compatible with privacy? Keybase mentions MobileCoin in this blog post, but they are only using Stellar's consensus p…

I think the translation is:

1. We are now taking money from Stellar, so...

2. We will support UserA/FiatX to UserB/FiatY in app, whenever we're allowed to talk about it.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#126
post #62

I've stopped recommending keybase since they removed all references to being able to do operations directly with gpg (which is a real shame - it worked incredibly well and was the best example I've ever seen of web/CLI integration). The whole thing is becoming very opaque and startup-y and hey-we're-an-app have-you-downloaded-our-app why-not-app-our-app app-app-app-app... I'm really not a fan of these "minimal" growt…

Just curious, around how long ago was this change made? Can you find web.archive.org links for a page which was changed? I'd find them useful for discussions with my peers.

The gpg approach was available in September 2017, when I used it to setup my account. I can't tell you any better than that though, and that's part of the nature of opaque aggressive growth startups today. Things just disappear or change with no acknowledgement of the past unless it's part of the story the company wants to tell about itself today. It's reasons like this that I tend to lose all interest in a project as soon as I hear they've taken VC.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand this comment. It doesn’t seem to address any of the key technical points behind the Stellar project as it is actively used today, but instead tries to imply that the foundation is some group of fly-by-night scammers that have won over keybase by nothing more than a twinkle in their eye. My impression was that Lumens seemed to be solving one of the legitimate problems of the world—the inefficiency o…

It's possible more than one system could replace SWIFT, but why would it be Stellar/Lumens who are still in the gate with their fork when Ripple/XRP seem to be already round the first bend with seemingly very large momentum in terms of interest, trials and actual production use by financial institutions?

How is Stellar still "in the gate," more than two years after deploying their decentralized Byzantine agreement algorithm?

Ripple has only just now, in 2018, published their decentralized consensus algorithm (Cobalt), which as far as I know is not even in production use yet, and doesn't provide optimal safety. (In settings where Cobalt is guaranteed Safe, SCP would be too, but not vice versa.) Their production network still uses a protocol that, by Ripple's own analysis (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07242), fails to guarantee safety without >90% agreement on the UNL.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#128
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding electricity consumption, what do you think of the argument that mining is so competitive that it can only be profitable by subsidized electricity, and that electricity is only subsidized when the local jurisdiction is creating more of it than it needs anyway? In other words, mining doesn't actually create new demand for electricity, it just soaks up the remainder already available.

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.

The Energy Waste Fallacy: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/wiki/Energy-Waste-F...

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#129
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could maybe see your concern if Keybase were announcing an ICO for their own token, but that is not what this is. This really is about Keybase bringing expertise with identity to the table and it makes a lot of sense for the two teams to work together. The currency side of things is still going to be handled by Stellar as far as I can tell.

I understand what they are doing. Here's how normal people look at something like this. It's not "oh, but they're just facilitating ," it's "why is there cryptocoin crap in this thing we use for work?". Then it's "Ed, why is this thing you recommended and spoke so highly about doing this? Are they cryptomining on our computers now?". Then, even after an explanation, they're probably still suspicious and probably righ…

If you are so allergic to cryptocurrency, why didn't it bother you when Keybase started writing their root into the Bitcoin blockchain (https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...)?

There are obviously annoying ways in which keybase could support cryptocurrency, but you are making a lot of assumptions about what Keybase is going to do that are not based on the blog post. For example, wallets do not mine coins and Stellar does not support mining.

Why don't you wait to see what comes out and submit a feature request if you don't like it, instead of flipping out about some hypothetical feature you won't like.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#130

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,…

Didn't the "tokens backed by something off-chain, and then a fork happens" already happen with Digix?

I believe they just basically said "we are treating the tokens on Ethereum, not on Ethereum Classic, as being the ones which are redeemable". I don't see what the problem with this is. It is inconvenient for the people who prefer to use Ethereum Classic, yes, but they didn't lose their tokens. They still have control of those tokens on the Ethereum (ETH(F)) chain, and can sell those if they want to end up only using Ethereum Classic.

This is unfortunate for them, and if this inconvenience could be avoided for free, then that would be better, but I don't think it is unfair to them. They still have the same control over the same tokens that are accepted as legitimate as they did before.

Post reply on HN