Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone

Same here. It was my first and only entry into the coin space. I figured I would let the coins sit there and see what happens. Good thing I didn't try to acquire more coins because I ran into the same issue. It was a cheap first lesson (free) but it has kept me from wading in further anywhere else.

I think this goes back to a critical point in the crypto space.

If you don't have your key pair, then you don't own the coins. I think everyone who lost coins had wallet issues. Maybe there would still have been issues even if you had your key pair, but the general rule still stands.

Back when Stellar got stared, you had to use the API to create a key pair and then you needed the API again to interact with that address (send coins from it.)

I know, and I use PayID frequently; but it has shortcomings, mostly that nobody seems to know about it. Additionally, PayID only works within Australia, and effectively only to people you know personally (mobile numbers are not typically public information).

I love PayID for what it is, but it could be well improved in my first example, and doesn’t work at all for the latter.

Understandable. But you have to consider that the Stellar foundation has been supporting keybase.io financially.

Also, your association of cryptocurrencies with scams is understandable given the sorry state of e.g. the Ethereum and EOS ecosystems which are dominated by get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, gambling apps, and other stuff. Not exactly enthusiastic about that myself.

However, among its peers, Stellar is relatively respectable in the sense that it has some serious corporate partners (i.e. normal legal entities in normal jurisdictions) and quite a few stable coins issued by fintech companies for the purpose of supporting international payments. And with support/involvement of regulators in many countries.

Additionally there seem to be some serious use cases emerging. The most significant of those would be IBM building a SEPA competitor on top of stellar with dozens of international banks. But there are other applications as well.

Keybase associating with Stellar is not necessarily a bad deal for them as they get money without giving away shares (presumably). And given the nature of their technology, crypto wallets are a natural use case for them as the whole point of their platform is making key management usable for end users and crypto wallets are literally nothing else than key pairs.

This is one of those things that comes up frequently in discussions about Stellar. It's simply not true. It's neither centralized nor limited to a few partners. You can start your own validator easily. The way the Stellar consensus protocol works is that when you do that, you specify which other validators to trust.

The consensus in the network of validators is based on the network of who is trusting whom. Right now there are a few dozen companies running validators: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html that trust each other directly or indirectly.

Most of the companies running these validators are doing so because they have business dependencies on the network. Running a validator is not actually free and comes with a bit of devops overhead. So you need a good business reason to do so as mining is just not a thing in Stellar. If you are doing business on Stellar, trusting your direct business partners is probably a smart thing. E.g. IBM and the banks they are partnering likely have ironclad contracts between them and good reasons to trust each other's validators. Most nodes also trust the SDF and trusting additional nodes for resilience is basically something you can do based on your judgment of who is running those nodes and how well they are running them (up time).

Lots of new nodes start with a default configuration that includes the Stellar foundation's own nodes. This is a bit of a problem. Stellar foundation is actually considering shutting down their own validators at this point as there are now plenty of reliable other validators around that they don't need to be there by default anymore. Over time, the number of validators and companies using them is likely to grow substantially. The network gets more robust as the network grows organically.

Of course for a malicious node the trick is getting others to trust you back. This only happens when people actually trust you. This makes e.g. 51% attacks really hard because you can spin up all the nodes you want but if people think you are a scammer, your nodes won't have any decision power. Mostly that's a good thing. Stellar is very resilient against this kind of thing; unlike other networks.

I don't mean to attack you. It's just that there is a large gap between well-engineered and easy to use.

I am 100% certain you're a better developer than I, and that lightning is not a result of poor engineering. But if a layman can't pick it up and use it in under 5 minutes, it's unworkable (if you're targeting laymen).

Crypto is full of genius engineers, and product folks, but I think there is (and always has been) a usability crisis.

Thanks for your work on both Linux and Lightning. I look forward to the day you can point to this comment on HN as being ridiculously dated.