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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

#131

Post by rickycook »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #99
huslage wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

i wouldn’t say that’s true at all. proof of work isn’t the only “artificial scarcity” that we can have... its paying money to compute some thing to get a vote... why not just put money for a vote? or better yet, prove that you have the means to pay a lot of money for a vote.

if you have to hold a lot of limited thing X (that’s difficult to get; eg $10m worth of ETH) on the very chain you’re securing, then that’s scarcity too.

another benefit here is that you can make a trusted network; that way you don’t have nodes coming and going, you have a group of trusted parties with their own network, and there’s less potential for a 51% attack

electricity and work isn’t the only thing that can be scarce

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#132

Post by cyphar »

wyager wrote: post #128
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.

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

That argument makes no sense to me. It essentially boils down to "people can choose whatever level of security they want, so given that they chose the current level of security that must be the most energy efficient -- and since merchants have to pay for this system they always choose the cheapest fees which must therefore mean they choose the miner with the cheapest energy source". I'm not sure what this argument is meant to prove other than PoW chooses the most energy efficient way of doing PoW, but it doesn't prove the PoW isn't an energy hog.

This argument also explicitly ignores schemes such as PoS that don't have this massive power drain, and also ignores interesting schemes like PoC (Proof of Capacity)[1] that also don't have this power drain (apparently).

[1]: https://www.burst-coin.org/proof-of-capacity

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#133

Post by mikekchar »

rickycook wrote: post #131
zitterbewegung wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

i wouldn’t say that’s true at all. proof of work isn’t the only “artificial scarcity” that we can have... its paying money to compute some thing to get a vote... why not just put money for a vote? or better yet, prove that you have the means to pay a lot of money for a vote. if you have to hold a lot of limited thing X (that’s difficult to get; eg $10m worth of ETH) on the very chain you’re securing, then that’s scar…

I think scarcity is a bit of a red herring. The key is that it has to be more lucrative to play fairly than to cheat (well, it also has to resist attacks that are simply trying to destroy the service). Proof of work by itself is not enough. It's the scaling of the difficulty to the potential gain -- the implication being that more people mining == more money to be gained by cheating.

The other thing that is compelling about Bitcoin's proof of work protocol is the ideal that every participant is equal. The whole point is to avoid the circumstance where more money means more control. Now, I think we can probably all agree that this didn't pan out -- whoever controls the big mining pools controls the system. I think that if anyone is going to go to the next level they probably have to step back and look at the problem with fresh eyes. Substituting X into "Proof of X" is unlikely to provide the solution, IMHO.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#134

Post by xerxe-sans-s »

Attaching a transaction history and wallet to an identity perfectly positions keybase as a player in the credit scoring industry.

I’m excited to see this, and hopeful that it takes off. However, I’ve enjoyed utilizing keybase as an identity tool. I’ve had a decent experience with the system as a workplace productivity tool (chat, git). I’m worried that the team will lose focus by branching into a third, and potentially fourth area of focus.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#136

Post by mirimir »

eropple wrote: post #45
baker_miller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it would be helpful to consider what it means to have a crypto wallet (because that's the likely endpoint here, otherwise why would they have to partner with Stellar?) on production servers. Consider explaining to a client that, no, it's totally fine, it doesn't do anything. I promise. Doable, I'll grant you. Consider explaining that to an auditor . No, nobody can ever compromise this, nobody could use this for…

> Maybe it would be helpful to consider what it means to have a crypto wallet ... on production servers.

Why would anyone install the Keybase app on production servers?

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#137

Post by mirimir »

ris wrote: post #126
andrewjw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I recently used the terminal/gpg method to update my keys.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#138

Post by twothamendment »

StavrosK wrote: post #13
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…

Why are you disappointed if Keybase includes a wallet or a way to send people Lumens? Can you not just not use it?

It would be kinda nice if keybase had a setting to turn off features. My mom doesn't care what git is, but she is a regular for chat and interested in keybasefs. Same with a wallet, if a user could hide it and forget about it there wouldn't be any reason for it to bother them.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#139

Post by flashmob »

I wasn't convinced about Stellar in that article. Some arguments given were strawman like, especially when attacking proof of work (PoW) or other things that are irrelevant because Stellar is something completely different. Besides, I found the overall tone to be somewhat condescending, especially due to the Monero snide at the end.

There are plenty of other low-fee, non-PoW coins out there, that the article should have spent more time comparing to instead; So we know that stellar doesn't use PoW - what I want to know is why the Stellar consensus algorithm is better when compared to the other similar alternatives out there, and what makes it faster and more secure. They also leave an elephant in the room - how is Stellar more resistant to censorship? What I'd really be interested in reading is why they chose it based on technical merits, rather than talking down other projects.

Re: Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

#140

Post by xiaochi »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #58
beaner wrote: 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.

Water power generated electricity
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