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Two days ago, Stripe announced they were dropping Bitcoin. And now Stellar (A Stripe-seeded company) announces their 2018 plans. Good job on the guy that saw it

Two days ago, Stripe announced they were dropping Bitcoin. And now Stellar (A Stripe-seeded company) announces their 2018 plans. Good job on the guy that saw it coming in HN comments! Note: I'm not bashing Stellar, I'm actually a big fan. : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329

j_s 9y ago
Not sure which comment you're referring to specifically, perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329#16217304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329#16217304? >swanson: Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel >>ChristianBundy: FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar
tzakrajs 9y ago
I feel really stupid. Back in 2015, their lead scientist David Mazières explained Stellar consensus protocol inside the Gates computer science building at Stanford to a small group of people back when Lumens were worthless. I was in that group of people and I completely missed the boat.
- atomical 9y ago
  The Stripe blog post mentions OmiseGo. OmiseGo hasn't even launched their product and Stripe is considering using them. That's a little worrying, but suggests it's still early.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  And here‘s the problem with cryptocurrencies: They might have all kinds of use cases, but people just see a quick way to get rich.
  - tzakrajs 9y ago
    I agree with you in general but in my case, Bitcoin had already experienced several booms and I was aware of the crypto-[mb]illionaires back then. Either way, if I would've jumped on the "get rich" bandwagon, I might actually be today.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Don't feel bad. I made and lost 30k speculating on dumb stuff like Mazacoin and Auroracoin. I avoided looking up any numbers for a long time, but my non-tech friend asked me the other day what it would have been worth. If I had invested 20k of that in the Ethereum presale, it would be worth 30 to 40 million dollars (or would have been when the market was high). Could kick yourself for stuff like that (I read the initial posts about Eth here on HN, figured it would be valuable, didn't know how soon it would be valuable), but the market was scammy even then. Mazacoin was supposedly going to be the first official coin of one of the Sioux reservations; that was exaggerated, didn't keep it from spiking 10x overnight. There's nothing special about making a fortune gambling and taking money off other dummies throwing money into the hype. Regular people are getting hurt by this. For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. Maybe that's post hoc justification of missing out, but there's nothing to be proud of. edit: doing the math as of today; $24k would have bought you about 80k Ether at the presale price of 2k eth per Bitcoin (about $600). 1 eth is about $1050 today, at a value of $1k that's 80 million dollars. The fortunes that people can and have made at out of this are absurd.
      - BrazeBeefNoodle 9y ago
        >> For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. That's silly. Just look at the growth in the total crypto market cap over the last few years (or even over the last six months) and it's clear that this can't be true. The vast majority of people who have been involved are way ahead.
        specialist 9y ago
- wmf 9y ago
  The price has nothing to do with the science. Otherwise, why didn't it explode back in 2015 when SCP was released?
- AceJohnny2 9y ago
  It's all speculation. There are tons of markets out there seeing similar inflation, though the geek crowd only focuses on the cryptocurrencies. Like all speculation, for every winner there are hundreds of losers, and hindsight is 20/20 but it's impossible to reasonably predict the future outcome. Don't worry about it :)
  - BrazeBeefNoodle 9y ago
    I think, given the extreme bullishness of this area over the past few years, the opposite is more likely true: for every loser there are hundreds of winners.
    - watoc 9y ago
      That's because a lot of current crypto holders are potential future losers. If you settle all crypto in USD today, most people will be left with close to 0.
      - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
        This is exactly why I pulled my initial plus 150%. I figured if the bubble pops tomorrow I'm still up.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Isn't this insane though? When else would anybody be at a lunch talk where somebody goes over a consensus protocol and the idea would be "holy shit we are going to be rich by buying some tokens". If Dan was giving a talk on some new thing using multilinear maps nobody would say "oh fuck I've gotta get in on this and I'm going to be a billionaire". If Alex was giving a talk about some new way of doing superoptimization you wouldn't be interested in buying "STOKEcoin". Even when Dawson was doing the early stuff that turned into Coverity, nobody looked at the foundational algorithms and said that they should invest in the algorithms. You need to build a company that does something with a product. Dave is a brilliant guy. But the response to a lunch talk shouldn't be to invest in tokens.
solean 9y ago
In 2014, Stripe gave Stellar a $3 million loan in exchange for 2 billion lumens, which is now worth around $2 billion. They still have those lumens. I wonder why they would drop bitcoin support and start pushing Stellar...
- stale2002 9y ago
  They dropped Bitcoin because transaction fees are really high, and the bitcoin core team has no intention of solving the problem. Maybe in 18 months, when the mythical lightning network gets released they will add it back. But not now.
  - sonoffett 9y ago
    You do realize that there are literally people buying coffee in meatspace today using lightning? https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736 https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      is it being used to transfer funds from one exchange to the other? because tbh that seems to be the #1 utility of cryptocoins at the moment.
    - tobltobs 9y ago
      From your link: > but it's just a test version so it could easily break. > There’s no mainnet wallets available for regular users, but you can try testnet. > This is all a work in progress, Somewhere in a lab on this planet they might have a flying car, that doesn't mean you can use one any time soon.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      The literal lightning network developers do not recommend that you use lighting right now because you could lose money. When the actual devs tell me not to use a buggy, in working, piece of software, I am going to listen to them.
sjs382 9y ago
It's been public since about Jan 3 that the roadmap would be released on/around Jan 25. Here's the earliest mention I can find (it might not be the earliest mention, though): https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7ntt4w/notes_from_ella_qiangs_live/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7ntt4w/notes_from_...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

j_s 9y ago

Not sure which comment you're referring to specifically, perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329#16217304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216329#16217304? >swanson: Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel >>ChristianBundy: FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar

tzakrajs 9y ago

I feel really stupid. Back in 2015, their lead scientist David Mazières explained Stellar consensus protocol inside the Gates computer science building at Stanford to a small group of people back when Lumens were worthless. I was in that group of people and I completely missed the boat.

atomical 9y ago
The Stripe blog post mentions OmiseGo. OmiseGo hasn't even launched their product and Stripe is considering using them. That's a little worrying, but suggests it's still early.
jakobegger 9y ago
And here‘s the problem with cryptocurrencies: They might have all kinds of use cases, but people just see a quick way to get rich.
- tzakrajs 9y ago
  I agree with you in general but in my case, Bitcoin had already experienced several booms and I was aware of the crypto-[mb]illionaires back then. Either way, if I would've jumped on the "get rich" bandwagon, I might actually be today.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Don't feel bad. I made and lost 30k speculating on dumb stuff like Mazacoin and Auroracoin. I avoided looking up any numbers for a long time, but my non-tech friend asked me the other day what it would have been worth. If I had invested 20k of that in the Ethereum presale, it would be worth 30 to 40 million dollars (or would have been when the market was high). Could kick yourself for stuff like that (I read the initial posts about Eth here on HN, figured it would be valuable, didn't know how soon it would be valuable), but the market was scammy even then. Mazacoin was supposedly going to be the first official coin of one of the Sioux reservations; that was exaggerated, didn't keep it from spiking 10x overnight. There's nothing special about making a fortune gambling and taking money off other dummies throwing money into the hype. Regular people are getting hurt by this. For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. Maybe that's post hoc justification of missing out, but there's nothing to be proud of. edit: doing the math as of today; $24k would have bought you about 80k Ether at the presale price of 2k eth per Bitcoin (about $600). 1 eth is about $1050 today, at a value of $1k that's 80 million dollars. The fortunes that people can and have made at out of this are absurd.
    - BrazeBeefNoodle 9y ago
      >> For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. That's silly. Just look at the growth in the total crypto market cap over the last few years (or even over the last six months) and it's clear that this can't be true. The vast majority of people who have been involved are way ahead.
      - specialist 9y ago
wmf 9y ago
The price has nothing to do with the science. Otherwise, why didn't it explode back in 2015 when SCP was released?
AceJohnny2 9y ago
It's all speculation. There are tons of markets out there seeing similar inflation, though the geek crowd only focuses on the cryptocurrencies. Like all speculation, for every winner there are hundreds of losers, and hindsight is 20/20 but it's impossible to reasonably predict the future outcome. Don't worry about it :)
- BrazeBeefNoodle 9y ago
  I think, given the extreme bullishness of this area over the past few years, the opposite is more likely true: for every loser there are hundreds of winners.
  - watoc 9y ago
    That's because a lot of current crypto holders are potential future losers. If you settle all crypto in USD today, most people will be left with close to 0.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      This is exactly why I pulled my initial plus 150%. I figured if the bubble pops tomorrow I'm still up.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
UncleMeat 9y ago
Isn't this insane though? When else would anybody be at a lunch talk where somebody goes over a consensus protocol and the idea would be "holy shit we are going to be rich by buying some tokens". If Dan was giving a talk on some new thing using multilinear maps nobody would say "oh fuck I've gotta get in on this and I'm going to be a billionaire". If Alex was giving a talk about some new way of doing superoptimization you wouldn't be interested in buying "STOKEcoin". Even when Dawson was doing the early stuff that turned into Coverity, nobody looked at the foundational algorithms and said that they should invest in the algorithms. You need to build a company that does something with a product. Dave is a brilliant guy. But the response to a lunch talk shouldn't be to invest in tokens.

solean 9y ago

In 2014, Stripe gave Stellar a $3 million loan in exchange for 2 billion lumens, which is now worth around $2 billion. They still have those lumens. I wonder why they would drop bitcoin support and start pushing Stellar...

stale2002 9y ago
They dropped Bitcoin because transaction fees are really high, and the bitcoin core team has no intention of solving the problem. Maybe in 18 months, when the mythical lightning network gets released they will add it back. But not now.
- sonoffett 9y ago
  You do realize that there are literally people buying coffee in meatspace today using lightning? https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736 https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    is it being used to transfer funds from one exchange to the other? because tbh that seems to be the #1 utility of cryptocoins at the moment.
  - tobltobs 9y ago
    From your link: > but it's just a test version so it could easily break. > There’s no mainnet wallets available for regular users, but you can try testnet. > This is all a work in progress, Somewhere in a lab on this planet they might have a flying car, that doesn't mean you can use one any time soon.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    The literal lightning network developers do not recommend that you use lighting right now because you could lose money. When the actual devs tell me not to use a buggy, in working, piece of software, I am going to listen to them.

sjs382 9y ago

It's been public since about Jan 3 that the roadmap would be released on/around Jan 25. Here's the earliest mention I can find (it might not be the earliest mention, though): https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7ntt4w/notes_from_ella_qiangs_live/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7ntt4w/notes_from_...

deleted 9y ago

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