Stellar • Hacker News Board

Re: Stellar

#311

Post by lowglow » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:29 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #239

jxf wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> 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 essent…

> If a distributed financial network is going to succeed, I believe that it has to be run by an impartial organization.

Re: Stellar

#312

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:30 PM UTC

pieton wrote: post #294

dang wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry -- didn't mean to suggest that. Just a little in-joking about the inevitable popularity of Stripe articles here.. (and thank antiprocrast for my throwaway..)

Oh good.

You can always email us for a noprocrast indulgence. :)

Re: Stellar

#313

Post by kanzure » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:36 PM UTC

gdb wrote: post #292

eordano wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I smell compatibility hell. "Hey, take my credit from X gateway" "Sorry, I don't trust X"

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.

> (and worst case, your gateway should be willing to do so)

Isn't the worst case that the gateway goes belly up?

Re: Stellar

#314

Post by wmf » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:36 PM UTC

anuragbiyani wrote: post #293

https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program How does that work for someone who has bitcoins in an e-wallet, like Coinbase ?

Either use a real wallet or pester Coinbase to support signing.

Re: Stellar

#315

Post by Taek » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:37 PM UTC

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #262

So after giving them access to my facebook account I was told "Your Facebook account is too new to qualify. Stay tuned for new ways to grab stellars." How unfortunate. And strange seeing as the account is many years old.

Do you have enough friends? A common spam prevention measure checks for 100+ friends. It may just assume that if you have less, the account is 'new'

Re: Stellar

#316

Post by gojomo » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:39 PM UTC

lifeeth_ wrote: post #291

This just reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala and nothing else.

Yes, but also more generally, highly-liquid IOUs ("bills of exchange") as were widely used before the rise of modern banking:

http://jpkoning.blogspot.de/2013/02/ripple-or-bills-of-excha...

Re: Stellar

#317

Post by jscheel » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

Came here to say, "that looks an awful lot like Ripple." Looks like I am in good company :)

Re: Stellar

#318

Post by joshAg » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Stellar

#319

Post by dmix » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

joyce wrote: post #190

jxf wrote: post #175

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 o…

Great question - here are the two key items: - 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…

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.

Re: Stellar

#320

Post by marcell » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:48 PM UTC

voronoff wrote: post #283

Anyone else concerned that there seems to be a permanent confirmation code for resetting pw sent in plain text over email? "Keep this code SAFE. Anyone with this code and your username can gain access to your account" Where I'm from, that is a password.

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.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...