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When Stellar's codebase was still just a fork of Ripple (entire codebase was completely re-written from scratch in 2015), it experienced many divergent forks of

When Stellar's codebase was still just a fork of Ripple (entire codebase was completely re-written from scratch in 2015), it experienced many divergent forks of the network due to weaknesses in the Ripple consensus protocol. Those weaknesses have been eliminated in the new SCP described in this paper, but AFAIK Ripple still has these systemic problems. The new Stellar codebase is actually a joy to work with.

desireco42 9y ago
I know their api is really nice and I was surprised how easy was to work with it, whether it is a test net or public.
- nullstyle 9y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! (disclosure: I designed most of the API) We're not done yet. IMO it's still not easy enough to build great software on top of our work.
  - desireco42 9y ago
    Whoa, awesome, well, thank you personally. I find it surprising the UI is pretty rudimentary taking into account how API is easy to work with. I am looking to do something, not 100% what on Stellar Network, mostly due to the fact that I am familiar with it and I like api among other things.
  - jcfrei 9y ago
    Are there future plans to add smart contracts (with a "Turing-complete" virtual machine) to Stellar? I think that the Stellar consensus protocol with its speed would be perfect for overcoming the current limitations of Ethereum.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      I hope not. Stellar's appeal is its simplicity, and shipping a full programming environment with all the baggage of maintenance over time seems overly complex, and prone to causing issues down the line. There's very likely a way to achieve similar smart contracts, albeit without network consensus à la Ethereum, in the current Stellar world.
    - hossbeast 9y ago
      Turing completeness is not a virtue in a smart contracts language.
    - nullstyle 9y ago
      Not so much concrete plans around smart contracts (that I know of); I would characterize stellar as having aspirations and some early stage work and research with the intentions of enabling smart contracts on top of stellar. For example, we've done some work on "simple contracts" as described here: https://www.stellar.org/blog/multisig-and-simple-contracts-stellar/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/multisig-and-simple-contracts-s.... Rant Incoming: I don't think building a turing-complete VM into stellar anytime soon is prudent. The work the ethereum folks have done is crazy impressive, and certainly it is beyond anything I myself could create, but IMO they are also too cavalier. I don't think we (programmers in general) have the collective smarts, wisdom, discipline, and ethical codes needed to build a safe "world computer" yet, and I don't think we've got a good grasp of the potential ramifications of an unsafe solution. I imagine there are many unknown unknowns to encounter as the world stumbles in the dark, greedily, from where we are today in the direction of skynet. All that said, I'd really like to see a world with more decentralizing forces and where decentralized applications can more feasibly compete with centralized services. I think stellar can help make this happen one day. I'm sick of being forced to trust the googles and facebooks of the world with my personal data while not having viable alternatives, and I think one way to work towards breaking their outsized influence on humanity's digital culture is to enable and make accessible more decentralized interactions of increasing richness. Instead of building one turing-complete decentralized protocol to rule them all, I'd love to see us continue to develop a constellation of focused decentralized systems that we can consider/develop/verify/maintain in isolation first. Then, as our comfort with each system grows, we can work to carefully combine and layer them in increasingly useful ways. There's such a long way to go. On a related note, IMO we too often think that what we're doing on a day to day basis is just computer science and don't often enough consider the social science-y aspects of our work. From how we structure our APIs to how we communicate with users about the responsibilities involved with participating in decentralized systems, we have tons of soft problems to overcome that can't easily be fed into a compiler or reasoned about formally to determine the quality of our solutions. For evidence, look at what occurred recently with the parity wallet/solidity or -- an example that hits closer to home for me -- the snafus around the account recovery system in stellar's original web client. --- Please take the above with a grain of salt. I realize that the above isn't supported with citations and in the end I'm just some random fuckhead coder. I'm sure plenty of people here can point to why my thoughts on the subject are wrong and why ethereum is taking the correct approach to smart contracts; I don't pretend to be able to hang with the big brains of the cryptocurrency space. All of the above is also not representative of stellar's official positions... these opinions are 100% my own.
- ChristianBundy 9y ago
  Seriously: Stellar is _by far_ the easiest asset exchange platform I've ever worked with. It's completely silly, but it took me five minutes to create an IOU for a beer and send it to a friend (which they can "withdraw" as a free beer IRL at any time). I'm deeply skeptical of most altcoins, but Stellar is going places.
edem 9y ago
Can Stellars be mined? I received some before 2015 when they were giving it away for free. Now I'm happy that I can turn them into BTC and withdraw cash...
- grandmczeb 9y ago
  > Can Stellars be mined? No.
dang 9y ago
Fine comment, but you can't make an account with a trollish name, even when it's the local superego you're trolling. If you want to participate on HN in good faith, that's great, but then please really do so. Continued abuse of HN will eventually get your main account banned too, so please just don't.

desireco42 9y ago

I know their api is really nice and I was surprised how easy was to work with it, whether it is a test net or public.

nullstyle 9y ago
Thanks for the kind words! (disclosure: I designed most of the API) We're not done yet. IMO it's still not easy enough to build great software on top of our work.
- desireco42 9y ago
  Whoa, awesome, well, thank you personally. I find it surprising the UI is pretty rudimentary taking into account how API is easy to work with. I am looking to do something, not 100% what on Stellar Network, mostly due to the fact that I am familiar with it and I like api among other things.
- jcfrei 9y ago
  Are there future plans to add smart contracts (with a "Turing-complete" virtual machine) to Stellar? I think that the Stellar consensus protocol with its speed would be perfect for overcoming the current limitations of Ethereum.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    I hope not. Stellar's appeal is its simplicity, and shipping a full programming environment with all the baggage of maintenance over time seems overly complex, and prone to causing issues down the line. There's very likely a way to achieve similar smart contracts, albeit without network consensus à la Ethereum, in the current Stellar world.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    Turing completeness is not a virtue in a smart contracts language.
  - nullstyle 9y ago
    Not so much concrete plans around smart contracts (that I know of); I would characterize stellar as having aspirations and some early stage work and research with the intentions of enabling smart contracts on top of stellar. For example, we've done some work on "simple contracts" as described here: https://www.stellar.org/blog/multisig-and-simple-contracts-stellar/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/multisig-and-simple-contracts-s.... Rant Incoming: I don't think building a turing-complete VM into stellar anytime soon is prudent. The work the ethereum folks have done is crazy impressive, and certainly it is beyond anything I myself could create, but IMO they are also too cavalier. I don't think we (programmers in general) have the collective smarts, wisdom, discipline, and ethical codes needed to build a safe "world computer" yet, and I don't think we've got a good grasp of the potential ramifications of an unsafe solution. I imagine there are many unknown unknowns to encounter as the world stumbles in the dark, greedily, from where we are today in the direction of skynet. All that said, I'd really like to see a world with more decentralizing forces and where decentralized applications can more feasibly compete with centralized services. I think stellar can help make this happen one day. I'm sick of being forced to trust the googles and facebooks of the world with my personal data while not having viable alternatives, and I think one way to work towards breaking their outsized influence on humanity's digital culture is to enable and make accessible more decentralized interactions of increasing richness. Instead of building one turing-complete decentralized protocol to rule them all, I'd love to see us continue to develop a constellation of focused decentralized systems that we can consider/develop/verify/maintain in isolation first. Then, as our comfort with each system grows, we can work to carefully combine and layer them in increasingly useful ways. There's such a long way to go. On a related note, IMO we too often think that what we're doing on a day to day basis is just computer science and don't often enough consider the social science-y aspects of our work. From how we structure our APIs to how we communicate with users about the responsibilities involved with participating in decentralized systems, we have tons of soft problems to overcome that can't easily be fed into a compiler or reasoned about formally to determine the quality of our solutions. For evidence, look at what occurred recently with the parity wallet/solidity or -- an example that hits closer to home for me -- the snafus around the account recovery system in stellar's original web client. --- Please take the above with a grain of salt. I realize that the above isn't supported with citations and in the end I'm just some random fuckhead coder. I'm sure plenty of people here can point to why my thoughts on the subject are wrong and why ethereum is taking the correct approach to smart contracts; I don't pretend to be able to hang with the big brains of the cryptocurrency space. All of the above is also not representative of stellar's official positions... these opinions are 100% my own.
ChristianBundy 9y ago
Seriously: Stellar is _by far_ the easiest asset exchange platform I've ever worked with. It's completely silly, but it took me five minutes to create an IOU for a beer and send it to a friend (which they can "withdraw" as a free beer IRL at any time). I'm deeply skeptical of most altcoins, but Stellar is going places.

edem 9y ago

Can Stellars be mined? I received some before 2015 when they were giving it away for free. Now I'm happy that I can turn them into BTC and withdraw cash...

grandmczeb 9y ago
> Can Stellars be mined? No.

dang 9y ago

Fine comment, but you can't make an account with a trollish name, even when it's the local superego you're trolling. If you want to participate on HN in good faith, that's great, but then please really do so. Continued abuse of HN will eventually get your main account banned too, so please just don't.