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Stellar

stripe.com

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Re: Stellar

#341

Post by rdl »

I'm really excited about this (I talked to Jed a few months ago, before joining CloudFlare).

I think there will need to be a strong client wallet, rather than just the web client, but that's obvious, and the web client was an easy place to start.

I'd really like to see how one would integrate chaumian blinded tokens into this. I may be an outlier in thinking unlinkability and anonymity are critical for "real currencies" over time, but I think recent events have shown this to be correct.

I liked Ripple 1.0; Ripple-of-today not as much, so since this seems to be basically Ripple 1.0 plus some lessons learned, it should be interesting.

Re: Stellar

#342

Post by gdb »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #94
joyce wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I work at Stellar. The FB auth is the first of several methods to receive stellars so we will add more methods soon. Also, mining obviously has many benefits, but it's still limited to people who are highly technical and/or who have money to spend. We wanted to provide much broader access to digital currency, and so stellars will be given away for free at the click of a button. To encourage transparency, anyone c…

Without the inclusion of mining and the incentives to establish a mining infrastructure, how do you intend to provide safe decentralized verification of transactions?

The system currently uses the same consensus algorithm as Ripple. However, one thing David Mazières is currently spearheading is development of a provably-correct version of consensus.

(I think it's very important that whatever primitives you're building on have solid theoretical foundations, and I'm pretty excited to see the infrastructure improvements Stellar is going to introduce there.)

Re: Stellar

#344

Post by kordless »

jxf wrote: post #228
pc wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patrick Collison here. I think that Stellar's governance is going to be one of its strong suits. (And something that we thought was lacking in other efforts.) Stellar is a nonprofit organization and will have public financials and governance documents. It will also hold just 5% of the stellars -- 95% is being given away as quickly as possible. The board is composed of Jed, Keith Rabois, and me. A number of other advi…

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…

I'm not sure anyone in a high profile position can guarantee exclusion from being criticized. Having said that, I don't think it's fair to come in here an parrot some vague negative statement and then use it to question their motives. If you've got a specific beef with him, then you should just say what you mean instead of saying something that only serves to lay blame without rational.

95% of the coin is being given away and the effort is decentralized in nature. A 5% fee for the continued development of this platform and a fair amount of control over it's direction seems overly reasonable to me. Clearly Jed and his team care about creating something that is beneficial to everyone. I'd rather see speculation about the possible benefits than a rathole over something someone got bent about during the Ripple deal.

Re: Stellar

#345

Post by kordless »

omghi2u wrote: post #104
kordless wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, any site with any bug in it should never been launched. If it broke, report the bug. It's Open Source: https://github.com/stellar .

No. They dropped the ball in my opinion from what should be a really savvy group of people who "get it" when it comes to identity/etc.

No what? You won't report a bug? That's idiotic.

Re: Stellar

#346

Post by patrickk »

gdb wrote: post #325
spacefight wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Just out of curiosity, how did you get your Stellars?

The same way as everyone else — OAuth'd with Facebook :).

Would appreciate some also. The connect with Facebook button on the Stellar dashboard isn't working. Username is keanemachine ;)

Re: Stellar

#347

Post by gdb »

mrb wrote: post #332
gdb wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gateways actually don't have to be trusted by the network. Think of them as similar to stores issuing credit: the gateway just says "the user has a credit for 100 USD, redeemable at my store". That credit is tradable, but only to other users who trust credit from that gateway. This means there needs to emerge a good system for users to decide which gateways to trust, but a malicious gateway can only directly harm the…

"The network does not need to trust gateways, but users need to trust them" -> a subtle difference, but it does not change my point: trusting a gateway's honesty is required. So let's say I choose to not trust any gateway and their currencies, and instead decide to transact in the native stellar currency directly. This is a strange choice: why have support for alternate currencies if the Stellar protocol in itself ca…

Stellar is built to be a bridge from the physical one to the digital one. There certainly are tradeoffs there, particularly that the kinds of trust relationships needed for your life today have direct analogues. But, as I mentioned in https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective, it's not obvious that the Bitcoin technology on its own will end up being enough to avoid having to reintroduce trust in some form. (There is a chance that we'll figure out how to do trust in a distributed fashion, which would be awesome for both Bitcoin and Stellar.)

So I'm with you — there are real tradeoffs here, and I'd encourage everyone interested in this stuff to mull them over (and I'm also happy to discuss: gdb@stripe.com). But one thing I really respect about the Stellar organization is the very deliberate approach they've taken to these choices, and how they've found a happy middle that feels like a translation of the existing physical world into the new digital one. If it works, I think it'll make Bitcoin and other digital currencies even more successful.

Re: Stellar

#348

Post by [deleted] »

jqueryin wrote: post #18

Feel free to send me 1000 stellar in step 4 of the signup process. Username: corey . Had to be the first to ask :) Thanks in advance!

[deleted]

Re: Stellar

#349

Post by patrickaljord »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #268

I have to assume that becoming a gateway requires navigating the Byzantine Hellscape of multinational financial and banking regulations. Have they discovered some non-obvious way to avoid this or are the gateways expected to be run primarily by existing financial institutions?

From what I understand, the bitcoin network could be a gateway so if you want to exchange bitcoin that would not require any regulation hell. If you want to exchange fiat money, that would. But that will always be the case even without stellar.

Re: Stellar

#350

Post by eridius »

gdb wrote: post #248
mrb wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If so, then doesn't it have all the same problems and concerns as Ripple?" Correct. Like Ripple, Stellar requires special (and dangerous) trust in certain nodes. For example, gateways ( https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/#gateways ) have to be trusted by the Stellar network as they send messages like "a user deposited 100 USD via a bank wire transfer, so please accept this digital representation of 100…

Gateways actually don't have to be trusted by the network. Think of them as similar to stores issuing credit: the gateway just says "the user has a credit for 100 USD, redeemable at my store". That credit is tradable, but only to other users who trust credit from that gateway. This means there needs to emerge a good system for users to decide which gateways to trust, but a malicious gateway can only directly harm the…

> The beauty of this model is anyone can become a gateway at any time.

If this takes off, then you could use this to build the killer "spot me $5" app. A few weeks ago when some friends were describing the spreadsheet they used to track who owes what to who, I proposed a micro-virtual currency limited to just the circle of friends that all trust each other, whereby exchanging the virtual currency you can transfer debts, and trivially find out who owes money and who is owed just by looking at the current account ledger. Seems like Stellar enables that on a massive scale, without everyone needing to trust each other, because the coins are all tagged with the issuer.

Stellar uses real-world currencies to denote the held values. Does it limit these currencies to actual known entities, or could I become an issuer and start issuing credits in a fake currency? If I can do that, then it seems like there's an opportunity here to use Stellar to track things other than monetary exchanges. As a hypothetical example, if I had several kids, they could all trust each other to issue units of a fake currency called "Chore". If I ask one of them to do something, they could instead pay 1 Chore to their sibling to have them do it instead. This can of course be redeemed later if I ask the sibling to do something. Since it's a fake currency, it has no real value and can't be traded outside of the small group of kids (as nobody would accept it). This sort of thing can't be done with e.g. USD because the proxy money could be traded to someone else who doesn't realize that I won't actually accept it back for money.

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