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Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation

565 points by jamessun 9y ago

malgorithms 9y ago
Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion! There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork, if there are tokens which are supposed to be redeemable with a counterparty. Let's say Deutsche Bank had put €1 billion into colored coins on Bitcoin. Suddenly, after a fork (e.g. bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash), there would be €2 billion IOU's in the wild. The people on each side of that fork would not roll over and die, and it's not simple to say "Oh, whoever Deutsche picks wins." Or even "Whoever has the strongest chain wins." I have a hard time imagining a company would ever take that risk. I worry big companies would never dare to put anything real-world redeemable directly onto, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum, for this reason. They'd just get sued over and over again. The Stellar federated consensus story (HN debates about SCP below [1][2]) has Deutsche Bank as an actual player on the network. If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines / quorum slices, and if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side. All said, it seems significantly faster and more stable for cryptocurrency-to-real-world mappings, both for the consumer and counterparty. Fun discussions: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 -- of particular note, because it has David Mazières, Vitalik Buterin, and Greg Maxwell all weighing in. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Your justification for the Th/s being an issue for electricity consumption is one I have seen bounced around a bunch but other than the justification of the environment there are other issues. But, the idea of cryptocurrencies is that without some kind of artificial scarcity you will have other incentives. If you are really concerned about electricity consumption what about using a ledger technology that is designed for low resource consumption such as Sawtooth? I'm not sure how Stellar helps you in this regard. Also, why are you seeking more funding in the first place?
  - huslage 9y ago
    Electricity consumption is not an "artificial scarcity"
    - zitterbewegung 9y ago
      I mean that artificial scarcity is enforced by a distributed ledger system is by using the concept of a miner. The best implementation we have so far that is electricity consumption because this makes people consume electricity which costs them money. If you don't have this piece then people will subvert the proof of work some other way. For example if you have some type of mathematical problem (the unknotting problem) to take the place of the proof of work then you have to worry that that problem is actually hard to perform. Hypothetically that problem could be quite easy and you can subvert the system by having some shortcut. But inverting a hash is known to be hard. Through this hardness you get artificial scarcity by making people efficiently design systems to consume electricity.
      - rickycook 9y ago
        i wouldn’t say that’s true at all. proof of work isn’t the only “artificial scarcity” that we can have... its paying money to compute some thing to get a vote... why not just put money for a vote? or better yet, prove that you have the means to pay a lot of money for a vote. if you have to hold a lot of limited thing X (that’s difficult to get; eg $10m worth of ETH) on the very chain you’re securing, then that’s scarcity too. another benefit here is that you can make a trusted network; that way you don’t have nodes coming and going, you have a group of trusted parties with their own network, and there’s less potential for a 51% attack electricity and work isn’t the only thing that can be scarce
        mikekchar 9y ago
        I think scarcity is a bit of a red herring. The key is that it has to be more lucrative to play fairly than to cheat (well, it also has to resist attacks that are simply trying to destroy the service). Proof of work by itself is not enough. It's the scaling of the difficulty to the potential gain -- the implication being that more people mining == more money to be gained by cheating. The other thing that is compelling about Bitcoin's proof of work protocol is the ideal that every participant is equal. The whole point is to avoid the circumstance where more money means more control. Now, I think we can probably all agree that this didn't pan out -- whoever controls the big mining pools controls the system. I think that if anyone is going to go to the next level they probably have to step back and look at the problem with fresh eyes. Substituting X into "Proof of X" is unlikely to provide the solution, IMHO.
- ploggingdev 9y ago
  Have there been changes to Stellar to address the topology trust issue that `nullc brought up in the linked thread?
- shivpat 9y ago
  Why won't keybase address requests for Monero?
  - vesak 9y ago
    Perhaps they'd be worried that their tool would be used primarily for narcotics trade. Oh wait, they already have zcash. Well, perhaps it's the redundancy between those two.
  - saintbellarmine 9y ago
    I was wondering the same, why not add more options, just make it easy for people to get paid by whatever they want. Its also possible to simply just put a .txt on your public shared library and you can always list everything and anything you want there. Its just nice to see all that nice verification in the public profile nice and easy to see for everyone else.
- staplers 9y ago
  I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team As someone who's been in the cryptocurrency space for a long time I can guarantee you got swindled. Countless investors I have seen move to centralized "blockchains" due to buzzword powerpoint presentations and floating_nodes.jpg bootstrap landing pages. This is no different than what current financial institutions do other than a new UI.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ordinaryradical 9y ago
    I don’t understand this comment. It doesn’t seem to address any of the key technical points behind the Stellar project as it is actively used today, but instead tries to imply that the foundation is some group of fly-by-night scammers that have won over keybase by nothing more than a twinkle in their eye. My impression was that Lumens seemed to be solving one of the legitimate problems of the world—the inefficiency of the SWIFT system for cross-border transactions—and appears to have a viable model for doing so. I don’t see how whether or not it’s centralized makes it a swindle?
    - diakritikal 9y ago
      It's possible more than one system could replace SWIFT, but why would it be Stellar/Lumens who are still in the gate with their fork when Ripple/XRP seem to be already round the first bend with seemingly very large momentum in terms of interest, trials and actual production use by financial institutions?
      - ordinaryradical 9y ago
        Yes, but perhaps your framework for approaching this is a little too old school? When SWIFT was devised, the idea of having a singular system for resolving these transactions not only made sense but was (probably?) technically necessary. I think given where we are today, multiple competing protocols, each with their own advantages, may be viable. Lastly, for finance, consumer choice is valuable: I like being able to Venmo my friends, autodeposit my landlord, slow mail my bills, and Apple Pay my retail purchases. I don’t send money overseas but I could imagine a similar bifurcation of solutions in this space, all with their own advantages.
- redspectre 9y ago
  I don't understand how the stellar case and the bitcoin case differ in a network partition. You said "if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side." How is that different from a network fork happening, and DB saying "We only accept tokens from ETH and not ETH classic". At the end of the day, DB is deciding on a network partition to support, and you either support the network partition DB is supporting, or you don't do business with the DB tokens.
  - theptip 9y ago
    I'm not familiar with the "trustlines determine partition choice" feature of Stellar, but I am with trustlines in general; they are explicit app-level concepts that you define on your wallet, which in this case would say something like "I trust DB to redeem up to 1m worth of EUR credits". If the Stellar client's behaviour in the face of a partition takes trustlines into account, that's much safer than the default behaviour in bitcoin, which I believe is "pick a partition at (pseudo)random". It's possible to manually coax the client to pick a partition, but that requires user interaction, i.e. it's not fail-safe, it's fail-unsafe.
  - mazieres 9y ago
    Note that in general there is no way to name a particular branch of a blockchain fork. In cases with a protocol change coordinated well in advance, a counterparty anticipating the fork could announce that their tokens on one branch will be useless. However, if you just have two competing mining pools duking it out with the same protocol, there will be no way to name the branches ahead of time. What's worse is that colored coins could distort the incentive structure to make it profitable to bribe miners, because the benefit to an attacker of subverting consensus could far outweigh the value of 12.5 BTC/block.
- beaner 9y ago
  Regarding electricity consumption, what do you think of the argument that mining is so competitive that it can only be profitable by subsidized electricity, and that electricity is only subsidized when the local jurisdiction is creating more of it than it needs anyway? In other words, mining doesn't actually create new demand for electricity, it just soaks up the remainder already available.
  - lalaland1125 9y ago
    There is no such thing as "excess electricity". If that power wasn't being wasted on useless cryptocurrencies, then we could have used it for useful purposes, such as processing aluminum.
    - panarky 9y ago
      If a hydroelectric power station produces 30 TWh per year, but demand including aluminum smelters is only 20 TWh, then there's 10 TWh excess. This is use-it-or-lose-it. Should they just allow the river to flow and bypass the turbines?
      - mynameisvlad 9y ago
        With massive regional grids like what's present in North America, it's not just as simple as that. Someone on the other side of the continent could use your 10TWh excess and curtail their own fossil fuel use instead.
      - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
        No, they can store it in some Tesla batteries.
      - cbhl 9y ago
        Hydroelectric is one of the oldest electrical storage systems there is -- you can store more electricity as gravitational energy by pumping the water back uphill, and then letting it flow back down during peak times. There's a reason why hydroelectric plants and dams go together.
- derefr 9y ago
  This doesn't exist right now, but theoretically a network like Ethereum whose tokens exist as state within Turing-complete contracts, could solve "counterparty redemption across forks" by simply allowing each contract to react to the fork "event" independently on each resultant forked chain. It'd be a lot like how the actual POSIX fork(3) call works! Presumably, the default implementation of such a fork-event handler would have all but one of the contracts destroy themselves (and not in the common Ethereum sense of a contract "suicide", with the owner getting returned any held value; but instead with the contract simply blackholing all its value and state.)
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    I think this would create a bunch of security concerns and make the state of the contracts not immutable and would result in even more problems. Even though the contracts are deployed on a chain it they also take resources to execute (which is represented by gas) so at the end of the day if this occurred you would basically have one master contract with all the resources which would be a huge security concern since who is enforcing that people are honest?
    - derefr 9y ago
      Contract state isn't immutable. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by "state" here? The storage slots in an EVM contract can be freely written to by said contract. That's how ERC20 tokens work—the balances of the token in people's accounts are simply storage slots, that get updated by the contract when the tokens are moved around. (Yes, actual slots. EVM arrays are weird; they actually expand out into the contract's storage-slot keyspace by hashing all the array indices together and storing the result at the slot identified by the hash.) > they also take resources to execute (which is represented by gas) ...and so you'd need to pay to fork, proportionally to the number of contracts that wanted to react to your fork. Though keep in mind that the forked network on the "new" side would have a low hashpower, and so a low gasPrice, and so could afford the required gas quite easily (the base-case being one where the forking entity temporarily controls 100% of the hash power of the network, and thereby can just "pay themselves" the gas, just like when bootstrapping a new Ethereum private chain.) The more questionable aspect is that the network "being forked against" would also need to pay. Somehow, you'd need to make it such that the whole of the network would "want" to execute such transactions. Mind you, gas just prioritizes which transactions go through; if the "right of way" of fork-event contract-input transactions is hardcoded, it doesn't matter how much gas goes along with it—the network will run them. You can even just add some code that means that the network can't make progress until those transactions are in. (I.e. that chain consensus will treat chains that had the same fork-event transactions appear "earlier" in them as better, so it's useless to put work besides inserting a fork-event transaction in, knowing that the branch you'll be creating by doing so will be outcompeted by one that just executed the fork-event transaction first.) > you would basically have one master contract with all the resources I don't see how this implies that. The fork-er doesn't get to decide what's happening inside the contract, on either side of the fork. The network, on each side, is just sending an event—"hey, the network forked, you {are/aren't} on the forked side"—to each contract that wants to know, and it's up to the contract to decide what to do with that information. Each contract is still a standalone program with its own private memory-space that nothing else can touch.
- xorcist 9y ago
  > If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines Now you just said "whatever Deutsche picks win" with other words.
- drdeca 9y ago
  Didn't the "tokens backed by something off-chain, and then a fork happens" already happen with Digix? I believe they just basically said "we are treating the tokens on Ethereum, not on Ethereum Classic, as being the ones which are redeemable". I don't see what the problem with this is. It is inconvenient for the people who prefer to use Ethereum Classic, yes, but they didn't lose their tokens. They still have control of those tokens on the Ethereum (ETH(F)) chain, and can sell those if they want to end up only using Ethereum Classic. This is unfortunate for them, and if this inconvenience could be avoided for free, then that would be better, but I don't think it is unfair to them. They still have the same control over the same tokens that are accepted as legitimate as they did before.
  - oelmekki 9y ago
    Indeed, I don't think it's a deal breaker as well. There is a huge potential for scams, here, though (people buying invalid tokens for near than nothing on ethereum classic, then luring unawared people to buy them at full price misrepresenting them as the real thing). In this case, forks basically create counterfeits.
chasemiller 9y ago
As a long time Keybase user and Stellar holder, I couldn't be more excited for this news! Congratulations to all!
cmonfeat 9y ago
Very cool news. It's always exciting to see Keybase introduce new features, and the thought process behind them is usually pretty interesting to read. There's definitely a very real need for an anchored cryptocurrency that isn't a huge scam like Tether. It's cool that Stellar seems to solve this in a way that doesn't require me to hand over all of my trust to the currency creator. Also, that FAQ was awesome.
redka 9y ago
I feel like there's a very real synergy possible here. Keybase has a solution covering security, identity, chat and multi-device usage that could be very interesting when combined with a crypto-currency like Stellar Lumen. I wonder what they have in mind in terms of features. Any guesses?
- askmike 9y ago
  Given keybase is a social product around cryptographic security my bet is on some kind of a social platform where stellar tokens play a big role.
eropple 9y ago
Last time Keybase came up I made sure to post about how great using it is and that I am super-duper enthused about Keybase. I entreated 'malgorithms to let me give him money for Keybase. And I have recommended Keybase to a ton of people and a bunch of my clients, using it in a bunch of workflows. Now those people and those clients are going to have cryptocoin bullshit stuffed into a work tool? Thanks, Chris. You're doing a great job of making me look like an asshole for believing in you guys. I don't want your "monetization plays" and my clients don't either. Giving you guys money for Keybase is infinitely preferable to having cryptocoin crap, Stellar or otherwise, being jammed into a tool I use for work. (Or anything else, really, that I ever have to touch.) And I feel like a sap for being an enthusiastic user of Keybase and recommending it to people when this sort of garbage is coming down the pike. I am really, really disappointed.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Why are you disappointed if Keybase includes a wallet or a way to send people Lumens? Can you not just not use it?
  - eropple 9y ago
    I recommended Keybase to people as a security tool. This isn't security. There is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist in tools I rely upon. There is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist things that I use in production capacities. It is the pure addition of risk to my operations and my clients' operations and offers nothing to me except a ding to my reputation, because I now look like an asshole because a security tool I recommended and spoke highly of is now going to be flogging funbux.
    - jeffthemaximum 9y ago
      Keybase is also an identity tool, and I see value in having proof of identity when making crypto transactions.
      - eropple 9y ago
bkolobara 9y ago
I first heard about Stellar from Patrick's (patio11) Harry Potter post around 3 years ago: Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars[1]. I have been following Stellar closely since then and am also running one of the biggest Stellar communities. It's one of the rear cryptocurrency and "blockchain" technologies that actually make sense to me. They have a simple structure: you are able to issue assets/tokens on the network and you are able to send and trade them for other tokens. I think that this simplicity allowed it to gain a lot of credibility with bigger companies (Stripe, IBM, now Keybase, ...), while other technologies like Bitcoin/Ethereum are getting just more and more complicated with 2nd layer networks and locking up tokens in them. They stayed true to the original ideas without introducing a bunch of buzzwords around them and trying to avoid hype in their announcements[2]: > Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming years. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cryptocurrency-of-stars/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cr... [2] https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership...
- jerguismi 9y ago
  You know what is even better? A SQL database. Very simple and you can do almost anything with it. Also very proven technology.
  - leonsmith 9y ago
    Stellar is a postgres database under the hood and its just the stellar concensus protocol (SCP) that determins which queries/transaction to apply to your database in tandem with all the other nodes
    - bkolobara 9y ago
      Exactly! That's the best part. :)
tgb 9y ago
> And traditional banking, with its branches and offices and free dog treats, uses even more electricity than Bitcoin. Isn't this disingenuous, to say the least? First, traditional banking uses more (for now) but also performs orders of magnitude more transactions. I'd be surprised if banking used more per transaction. Secondly, a bank does a lot of things that Bitcoin doesn't even try to do. I can walk into my local bank and get quarters for me laundry, Euros for my trip, a loan for my house, set up a retirement savings account and get advice on what to do with it, request help if I've been defrauded, and probably a lot more I haven't ever considered.
oelmekki 9y ago
The thing I love the most about Stellar is how its founders want it to become "the SMTP of payment". It's kind of amazing we still haven't such kind of protocol widely available, and have to rely on private companies like Paypal, Stripe or any bank's IPN to send money on the internet, decades after its creation.
johnny_1010 9y ago
Why someone use this kind of chat? Same Slack, Hipchat it's look to me like expansive irc. And this "blog post" is more Stellar commercial.
- vpupkin2017 9y ago
  I agree, but somehow people are fascinated by yet another centralized project
- 0xCMP 9y ago
  Because it's end-to-end encrypted for just the people in the chat. Slack and Hipchat store the logs in the clear for themselves and the contents could be revealed if they were ever hacked. Since they're also centralized this poses an issue because they're an easier target than say a member of the chat's device. Since keybase is all encrypted, signed, and authenticated the fact it's centralized only matters as far as the service going down, but the content is all secure.
weinzierl 9y ago
>Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze? >It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example? Well played!
exabrial 9y ago
I <3 Keybase, though I wish I could generate my device keys with pgp rather than only having keybase do it for me. And of course, I'd love to store an ssh key with keybase...
SteveJS 9y ago
How does this change the threat model for using keybase? It would seem to increase the target value of compromising the client. Is that immediate impression wrong?
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Yes. I don't believe Keybase will not store Stellar private keys in any way, this would be horrible.
  - xchaotic 9y ago
    what does prevent you from storing your private keys today? Nothing. The association with Stellar might imply a higher likelyhood of something valuable crypto related being there. However, I don't care, if the security of keybase is somehow broken, I'd rather find out early on and with the increased exposure, they may be getting free pen testing.
smart94dude 9y ago
yes
desireco42 9y ago
I was just thinking this morning how keybase would be useful as a tie-in for crypto identity on blockchain, when this is desirable. This is fantastic news. Just confirms that Stellar is great platform.
diakritikal 9y ago
Given that stellar/lumen is a fork of ripple/xrp, and ripple/xrp seem to have a massive head start with what 100+? bank and payment providers already on board - are stellar/lumen not just competing head to head with Ripple with essentially the same technology but with a handicap of being behind in terms of development and not having an in-use production network and settlement solution?
- arianvanp 9y ago
  Is the current code still a fork? I thought stellar switched to their own thing quite early alreaxy
  - nullstyle 9y ago
    Yeah, it hasn't been a fork for a long time. Disclosure: I work for stellar and took part in the big rewrite.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  My understanding is that no banks are on board for the XRP bit of Ripple yet, but instead Ripple's non-xrp tech https://ripple.com/solutions/process-payments/ https://ripple.com/solutions/process-payments/
fullsage 9y ago
This post is very oblique in a way that makes me suspicious. 1. Is Keybase still a for-profit corporation? 2. No actual technology is announced here. Is the purpose of this post to announce funding? If so, how much funding is it and what are the conditions under which it is provided? 3. How is Stellar compatible with privacy? Keybase mentions MobileCoin in this blog post, but they are only using Stellar's consensus protocol, not the full Stellar protocol. I think that is because Stellar isn't private. What is Keybase doing to solve that if they are using the Stellar network?
- nipponese 9y ago
  I think the translation is: 1. We are now taking money from Stellar, so... 2. We will support UserA/FiatX to UserB/FiatY in app, whenever we're allowed to talk about it.
blocked_again 9y ago
You get a sense of positivity by just going through the stellar website and documentation (eerily similar to Stripe). It is beautifully designed and easy to understand. Kind of gives the feeling that they are in it for the long run unlike many other get rich quick Ponzi cryptocurrencies out there.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I recently had extensive contact with someone on their support staff(Robert) regarding issues with my stellar coins(issued back in 2014 which I had completely forgotten about until a month ago). We exchanged probably 10-20 emails trying to resolve my issue, which was eventually satisfiable resolved. I came away with a very positive opinion about the seriousness of the team.
- dannyw 9y ago
  Stripe invested in Stellar, and might have helped out with design.
koko775 9y ago
Welp, time to uninstall. I like Keybase a lot, but there are zero ways in which I want my crypto to mix with my cryptocurrency.
- ghostwreck 9y ago
  Probably should have done some more research before you installed the first time. Keybase has been mixed with cryptocurrency since 2014 [1] [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitcoin_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
  - floatboth 9y ago
    eh, publishing audit log hashes into the buttchain doesn't really "mix" it on the users' side
vpupkin2017 9y ago
Coins without prooof of work are as “decentralized” as facebook is - it is run as as distributed app but controlled by founder whales via “trusted” gateways/witnesses. PayPal integration would be as good as stellar here. To the other hand keybase is a centralized for profit authority e.g. facebook Of identities so it is a match.
ris 9y ago
I've stopped recommending keybase since they removed all references to being able to do operations directly with gpg (which is a real shame - it worked incredibly well and was the best example I've ever seen of web/CLI integration). The whole thing is becoming very opaque and startup-y and hey-we're-an-app have-you-downloaded-our-app why-not-app-our-app app-app-app-app... I'm really not a fan of these "minimal" growth-hack-y websites which seem so popular these days.
- andrewjw 9y ago
  Just curious, around how long ago was this change made? Can you find web.archive.org links for a page which was changed? I'd find them useful for discussions with my peers.
  - ris 9y ago
    The gpg approach was available in September 2017, when I used it to setup my account. I can't tell you any better than that though, and that's part of the nature of opaque aggressive growth startups today. Things just disappear or change with no acknowledgement of the past unless it's part of the story the company wants to tell about itself today. It's reasons like this that I tend to lose all interest in a project as soon as I hear they've taken VC.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      I recently used the terminal/gpg method to update my keys.
donquichotte 9y ago
Read the announcement of the Stellar Foundation [1] for more detail. TLDR: "We see a future where, say, I can send my friend 100XLM, and, via Keybase, I can send it to her by knowing only her Twitter or Reddit handle." [1] https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership...
ndreckshage 9y ago
I'd be really interested in adding Twitter (etc) support to Lumenette with help of Keybase, if possible. Hoping there will be an API for other wallets to interact with the features Keybase is working on. I've been using Keybase git and file storage for some time now. Really excited about this partnership! Lumenette wallet, for reference: https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-android-ios-stellar-lumens-wallet https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-android-ios-stella...
jasonmp85 9y ago
> But Stellar is not Turing complete… Ok This made me smile.
curo 9y ago
In response to the environmental backlash argument, isn't the lightning network supposed to substantially mitigate those concerns?
- wmf 9y ago
  Lightning doesn't reduce mining in any way. Note that energy consumption of mining is not related to transaction throughput.
kang 9y ago
Stellar doesn't work. Disturbed by energy consumption, their solution is to divide(shard) the blockchain graph. Does that result in a consensus though? Not in their own prior version. Will the topology they are claiming emerge? There is no proof.
zapita 9y ago
Isn't Keybase a for-profit corporation? What does it mean for a non-profit to support a for-profit? An emtry in the FAQ explaining this would be appreciated.
drgenus 9y ago
awesome!
bigcoin 9y ago
That's a very good partnership! Since Keybase maps social media identities to encryption keys in a publicly auditable manner, as well as Stellar implements Lumens as a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets
tristanho 9y ago
The FAQs are the bottom are amazing. Seems to cover just about every HN objection ever: > Does Keybase itself have Lumens? Thus far, SDF has supported us with cash — "dirty fiat" — which is what it takes to build software. But yes, we will hold Lumens later. > But Stellar is not Turing complete Ok > Hodl on a second - aren't these anchored currencies the same thing as "tethers" (USDT)? I hear bad things about them. Sort of. How Stellar's view of real-world currencies is different: you choose which issuing parties to trust. No one seems to know if Tethers are redeemable. the exchange itself is decentralized; you can change your trust lines whenever you like, and you can trade away the rubbish. This is very different from being stuck in a centralized exchange with one questionable currency-pegged token. > What about Keybase profiles' support of Bitcoin and Zcash addresses? This won't change. We continue to be big fans of Zcash (for all the reasons mentioned here), Ethereum (for its flexibility), and Bitcoin (for its relative stability). We're also excited for Filecoin. We really are pro cryptocurrency across the board. > Where can I learn about Stellar? Here's a Talk at Google about it. After the video, you could read the Stellar Consensus Protocol paper. And here's their blog post announcing their support of us. > Won't this distract the Keybase team from its other work? All of our existing product (chat, teams, files, identity, etc.) should only get better, with more total resources put into them. > So are you launching a coin, like MobileCoin or Kik's? No. We will be helping Stellar in general, not launching our own coin. > Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze? It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example? > Any advice on storing cryptocurrency today? Advice we've gotten is the Ledger Nano S. > WHAT ABOUT MONERO?? ...
xerxe-sans-s 9y ago
Attaching a transaction history and wallet to an identity perfectly positions keybase as a player in the credit scoring industry. I’m excited to see this, and hopeful that it takes off. However, I’ve enjoyed utilizing keybase as an identity tool. I’ve had a decent experience with the system as a workplace productivity tool (chat, git). I’m worried that the team will lose focus by branching into a third, and potentially fourth area of focus.
Cambridgeport90 9y ago
this is going to be awesome. I need to look at that now. So many coins to be aware of and to study to navigate a seemingly confusing new world, though.
flashmob 9y ago
I wasn't convinced about Stellar in that article. Some arguments given were strawman like, especially when attacking proof of work (PoW) or other things that are irrelevant because Stellar is something completely different. Besides, I found the overall tone to be somewhat condescending, especially due to the Monero snide at the end. There are plenty of other low-fee, non-PoW coins out there, that the article should have spent more time comparing to instead; So we know that stellar doesn't use PoW - what I want to know is why the Stellar consensus algorithm is better when compared to the other similar alternatives out there, and what makes it faster and more secure. They also leave an elephant in the room - how is Stellar more resistant to censorship? What I'd really be interested in reading is why they chose it based on technical merits, rather than talking down other projects.
vongesell 9y ago
Beware of anything Jed McCaleb touches. The author of eDonkey, the horrid PHP code that was MTGox, ripple and now stellar.
- superobserver 9y ago
  Perhaps truer words were never spoken...
CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>We think Stellar can fulfill Bitcoin's original goal of fast, cheap, worldwide payments. Stellar will not remain fast, cheap and global. It has counterparty risk in the form of the trusted third parties that form its consensus nodes. These TTPs will censor transactions and introduce costly registration requirements for the same reason traditional fintech companies do: to comply with the demands of regulatory agencies. The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum.
- sethgecko 9y ago
  Only the third party issued tokens have counterparty risk i.e you trust the issuer to redeem them somehow. Is that different than an ethereum ERC20 token? The native asset itself (XLM) has no counterparty risk. > The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum. IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability. Bitcoin requires no trust but has a costly PoW consensus algorithm which does not allow instant transactions and has a very low tps limit. You can't have both (unless someone comes up with a better consensus mechanism)
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    XLM and everything else on a ledger like Stellar's has counterparty risk, because consensus on these types of ledgers is established by a set of trusted third parties. The TTPs are counterparties, and if they fail, the ledger fails. >>IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability. In my opinion, the right approach to managing this trade-off is to build more centralized platforms on top of the decentralized base layer. That way they have a highly immutable/trustworthy base layer they can all interact on. An example of this approach is the POA Network, which uses a set of US public notaries to run high throughput validator nodes for a permissioned instance of Ethereum. This permissioned ledger is a side chain of the Ethereum main chain, which can interoperate with it, and has the advantage of being able to scale to 1000s of transactions per second. One could envision multiple trusted or semi-trusted ledgers operating on top of a decentralized ledger that acts as the settlement layer.
SZJX 9y ago
Sorry if this question is a bit stupid but could somebody enlighten me on why Keybase seem to regard Monero quite poorly? From what I've heard it seems that its anonimity is more trusted than that of Zcash at least, and both it and Zcash are proof-of-work coins anyways. Is it simply because they already had Zcash, so they'd rather not put something similar in there?
ldiracdelta 9y ago
Is Stellar private by default, or do you have to add tumblers to gain some semblance of privacy?

565 points by jamessun 9y ago

Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion! There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the shitshow after a truly contentious fork, if there are tokens which are supposed to be redeemable with a counterparty. Let's say Deutsche Bank had put €1 billion into colored coins on Bitcoin. Suddenly, after a fork (e.g. bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash), there would be €2 billion IOU's in the wild. The people on each side of that fork would not roll over and die, and it's not simple to say "Oh, whoever Deutsche picks wins." Or even "Whoever has the strongest chain wins." I have a hard time imagining a company would ever take that risk. I worry big companies would never dare to put anything real-world redeemable directly onto, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum, for this reason. They'd just get sued over and over again. The Stellar federated consensus story (HN debates about SCP below [1][2]) has Deutsche Bank as an actual player on the network. If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines / quorum slices, and if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side. All said, it seems significantly faster and more stable for cryptocurrency-to-real-world mappings, both for the consumer and counterparty. Fun discussions: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687 -- of particular note, because it has David Mazières, Vitalik Buterin, and Greg Maxwell all weighing in. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Your justification for the Th/s being an issue for electricity consumption is one I have seen bounced around a bunch but other than the justification of the environment there are other issues. But, the idea of cryptocurrencies is that without some kind of artificial scarcity you will have other incentives. If you are really concerned about electricity consumption what about using a ledger technology that is designed for low resource consumption such as Sawtooth? I'm not sure how Stellar helps you in this regard. Also, why are you seeking more funding in the first place?
- huslage 9y ago
  Electricity consumption is not an "artificial scarcity"
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    I mean that artificial scarcity is enforced by a distributed ledger system is by using the concept of a miner. The best implementation we have so far that is electricity consumption because this makes people consume electricity which costs them money. If you don't have this piece then people will subvert the proof of work some other way. For example if you have some type of mathematical problem (the unknotting problem) to take the place of the proof of work then you have to worry that that problem is actually hard to perform. Hypothetically that problem could be quite easy and you can subvert the system by having some shortcut. But inverting a hash is known to be hard. Through this hardness you get artificial scarcity by making people efficiently design systems to consume electricity.
    - rickycook 9y ago
      i wouldn’t say that’s true at all. proof of work isn’t the only “artificial scarcity” that we can have... its paying money to compute some thing to get a vote... why not just put money for a vote? or better yet, prove that you have the means to pay a lot of money for a vote. if you have to hold a lot of limited thing X (that’s difficult to get; eg $10m worth of ETH) on the very chain you’re securing, then that’s scarcity too. another benefit here is that you can make a trusted network; that way you don’t have nodes coming and going, you have a group of trusted parties with their own network, and there’s less potential for a 51% attack electricity and work isn’t the only thing that can be scarce
      - mikekchar 9y ago
        I think scarcity is a bit of a red herring. The key is that it has to be more lucrative to play fairly than to cheat (well, it also has to resist attacks that are simply trying to destroy the service). Proof of work by itself is not enough. It's the scaling of the difficulty to the potential gain -- the implication being that more people mining == more money to be gained by cheating. The other thing that is compelling about Bitcoin's proof of work protocol is the ideal that every participant is equal. The whole point is to avoid the circumstance where more money means more control. Now, I think we can probably all agree that this didn't pan out -- whoever controls the big mining pools controls the system. I think that if anyone is going to go to the next level they probably have to step back and look at the problem with fresh eyes. Substituting X into "Proof of X" is unlikely to provide the solution, IMHO.
ploggingdev 9y ago
Have there been changes to Stellar to address the topology trust issue that `nullc brought up in the linked thread?
shivpat 9y ago
Why won't keybase address requests for Monero?
- vesak 9y ago
  Perhaps they'd be worried that their tool would be used primarily for narcotics trade. Oh wait, they already have zcash. Well, perhaps it's the redundancy between those two.
- saintbellarmine 9y ago
  I was wondering the same, why not add more options, just make it easy for people to get paid by whatever they want. Its also possible to simply just put a .txt on your public shared library and you can always list everything and anything you want there. Its just nice to see all that nice verification in the public profile nice and easy to see for everyone else.
staplers 9y ago
I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team As someone who's been in the cryptocurrency space for a long time I can guarantee you got swindled. Countless investors I have seen move to centralized "blockchains" due to buzzword powerpoint presentations and floating_nodes.jpg bootstrap landing pages. This is no different than what current financial institutions do other than a new UI.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ordinaryradical 9y ago
  I don’t understand this comment. It doesn’t seem to address any of the key technical points behind the Stellar project as it is actively used today, but instead tries to imply that the foundation is some group of fly-by-night scammers that have won over keybase by nothing more than a twinkle in their eye. My impression was that Lumens seemed to be solving one of the legitimate problems of the world—the inefficiency of the SWIFT system for cross-border transactions—and appears to have a viable model for doing so. I don’t see how whether or not it’s centralized makes it a swindle?
  - diakritikal 9y ago
    It's possible more than one system could replace SWIFT, but why would it be Stellar/Lumens who are still in the gate with their fork when Ripple/XRP seem to be already round the first bend with seemingly very large momentum in terms of interest, trials and actual production use by financial institutions?
    - ordinaryradical 9y ago
      Yes, but perhaps your framework for approaching this is a little too old school? When SWIFT was devised, the idea of having a singular system for resolving these transactions not only made sense but was (probably?) technically necessary. I think given where we are today, multiple competing protocols, each with their own advantages, may be viable. Lastly, for finance, consumer choice is valuable: I like being able to Venmo my friends, autodeposit my landlord, slow mail my bills, and Apple Pay my retail purchases. I don’t send money overseas but I could imagine a similar bifurcation of solutions in this space, all with their own advantages.
redspectre 9y ago
I don't understand how the stellar case and the bitcoin case differ in a network partition. You said "if Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side." How is that different from a network fork happening, and DB saying "We only accept tokens from ETH and not ETH classic". At the end of the day, DB is deciding on a network partition to support, and you either support the network partition DB is supporting, or you don't do business with the DB tokens.
- theptip 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the "trustlines determine partition choice" feature of Stellar, but I am with trustlines in general; they are explicit app-level concepts that you define on your wallet, which in this case would say something like "I trust DB to redeem up to 1m worth of EUR credits". If the Stellar client's behaviour in the face of a partition takes trustlines into account, that's much safer than the default behaviour in bitcoin, which I believe is "pick a partition at (pseudo)random". It's possible to manually coax the client to pick a partition, but that requires user interaction, i.e. it's not fail-safe, it's fail-unsafe.
- mazieres 9y ago
  Note that in general there is no way to name a particular branch of a blockchain fork. In cases with a protocol change coordinated well in advance, a counterparty anticipating the fork could announce that their tokens on one branch will be useless. However, if you just have two competing mining pools duking it out with the same protocol, there will be no way to name the branches ahead of time. What's worse is that colored coins could distort the incentive structure to make it profitable to bribe miners, because the benefit to an attacker of subverting consensus could far outweigh the value of 12.5 BTC/block.
beaner 9y ago
Regarding electricity consumption, what do you think of the argument that mining is so competitive that it can only be profitable by subsidized electricity, and that electricity is only subsidized when the local jurisdiction is creating more of it than it needs anyway? In other words, mining doesn't actually create new demand for electricity, it just soaks up the remainder already available.
- lalaland1125 9y ago
  There is no such thing as "excess electricity". If that power wasn't being wasted on useless cryptocurrencies, then we could have used it for useful purposes, such as processing aluminum.
  - panarky 9y ago
    If a hydroelectric power station produces 30 TWh per year, but demand including aluminum smelters is only 20 TWh, then there's 10 TWh excess. This is use-it-or-lose-it. Should they just allow the river to flow and bypass the turbines?
    - mynameisvlad 9y ago
      With massive regional grids like what's present in North America, it's not just as simple as that. Someone on the other side of the continent could use your 10TWh excess and curtail their own fossil fuel use instead.
    - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
      No, they can store it in some Tesla batteries.
    - cbhl 9y ago
      Hydroelectric is one of the oldest electrical storage systems there is -- you can store more electricity as gravitational energy by pumping the water back uphill, and then letting it flow back down during peak times. There's a reason why hydroelectric plants and dams go together.
derefr 9y ago
This doesn't exist right now, but theoretically a network like Ethereum whose tokens exist as state within Turing-complete contracts, could solve "counterparty redemption across forks" by simply allowing each contract to react to the fork "event" independently on each resultant forked chain. It'd be a lot like how the actual POSIX fork(3) call works! Presumably, the default implementation of such a fork-event handler would have all but one of the contracts destroy themselves (and not in the common Ethereum sense of a contract "suicide", with the owner getting returned any held value; but instead with the contract simply blackholing all its value and state.)
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  I think this would create a bunch of security concerns and make the state of the contracts not immutable and would result in even more problems. Even though the contracts are deployed on a chain it they also take resources to execute (which is represented by gas) so at the end of the day if this occurred you would basically have one master contract with all the resources which would be a huge security concern since who is enforcing that people are honest?
  - derefr 9y ago
    Contract state isn't immutable. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by "state" here? The storage slots in an EVM contract can be freely written to by said contract. That's how ERC20 tokens work—the balances of the token in people's accounts are simply storage slots, that get updated by the contract when the tokens are moved around. (Yes, actual slots. EVM arrays are weird; they actually expand out into the contract's storage-slot keyspace by hashing all the array indices together and storing the result at the slot identified by the hash.) > they also take resources to execute (which is represented by gas) ...and so you'd need to pay to fork, proportionally to the number of contracts that wanted to react to your fork. Though keep in mind that the forked network on the "new" side would have a low hashpower, and so a low gasPrice, and so could afford the required gas quite easily (the base-case being one where the forking entity temporarily controls 100% of the hash power of the network, and thereby can just "pay themselves" the gas, just like when bootstrapping a new Ethereum private chain.) The more questionable aspect is that the network "being forked against" would also need to pay. Somehow, you'd need to make it such that the whole of the network would "want" to execute such transactions. Mind you, gas just prioritizes which transactions go through; if the "right of way" of fork-event contract-input transactions is hardcoded, it doesn't matter how much gas goes along with it—the network will run them. You can even just add some code that means that the network can't make progress until those transactions are in. (I.e. that chain consensus will treat chains that had the same fork-event transactions appear "earlier" in them as better, so it's useless to put work besides inserting a fork-event transaction in, knowing that the branch you'll be creating by doing so will be outcompeted by one that just executed the fork-event transaction first.) > you would basically have one master contract with all the resources I don't see how this implies that. The fork-er doesn't get to decide what's happening inside the contract, on either side of the fork. The network, on each side, is just sending an event—"hey, the network forked, you {are/aren't} on the forked side"—to each contract that wants to know, and it's up to the contract to decide what to do with that information. Each contract is still a standalone program with its own private memory-space that nothing else can touch.
xorcist 9y ago
> If you want DB redemptions then you would include them in your trust lines Now you just said "whatever Deutsche picks win" with other words.
drdeca 9y ago
Didn't the "tokens backed by something off-chain, and then a fork happens" already happen with Digix? I believe they just basically said "we are treating the tokens on Ethereum, not on Ethereum Classic, as being the ones which are redeemable". I don't see what the problem with this is. It is inconvenient for the people who prefer to use Ethereum Classic, yes, but they didn't lose their tokens. They still have control of those tokens on the Ethereum (ETH(F)) chain, and can sell those if they want to end up only using Ethereum Classic. This is unfortunate for them, and if this inconvenience could be avoided for free, then that would be better, but I don't think it is unfair to them. They still have the same control over the same tokens that are accepted as legitimate as they did before.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Indeed, I don't think it's a deal breaker as well. There is a huge potential for scams, here, though (people buying invalid tokens for near than nothing on ethereum classic, then luring unawared people to buy them at full price misrepresenting them as the real thing). In this case, forks basically create counterfeits.

chasemiller 9y ago

As a long time Keybase user and Stellar holder, I couldn't be more excited for this news! Congratulations to all!

cmonfeat 9y ago

Very cool news. It's always exciting to see Keybase introduce new features, and the thought process behind them is usually pretty interesting to read. There's definitely a very real need for an anchored cryptocurrency that isn't a huge scam like Tether. It's cool that Stellar seems to solve this in a way that doesn't require me to hand over all of my trust to the currency creator. Also, that FAQ was awesome.

redka 9y ago

I feel like there's a very real synergy possible here. Keybase has a solution covering security, identity, chat and multi-device usage that could be very interesting when combined with a crypto-currency like Stellar Lumen. I wonder what they have in mind in terms of features. Any guesses?

askmike 9y ago
Given keybase is a social product around cryptographic security my bet is on some kind of a social platform where stellar tokens play a big role.

eropple 9y ago

Last time Keybase came up I made sure to post about how great using it is and that I am super-duper enthused about Keybase. I entreated 'malgorithms to let me give him money for Keybase. And I have recommended Keybase to a ton of people and a bunch of my clients, using it in a bunch of workflows. Now those people and those clients are going to have cryptocoin bullshit stuffed into a work tool? Thanks, Chris. You're doing a great job of making me look like an asshole for believing in you guys. I don't want your "monetization plays" and my clients don't either. Giving you guys money for Keybase is infinitely preferable to having cryptocoin crap, Stellar or otherwise, being jammed into a tool I use for work. (Or anything else, really, that I ever have to touch.) And I feel like a sap for being an enthusiastic user of Keybase and recommending it to people when this sort of garbage is coming down the pike. I am really, really disappointed.

StavrosK 9y ago
Why are you disappointed if Keybase includes a wallet or a way to send people Lumens? Can you not just not use it?
- eropple 9y ago
  I recommended Keybase to people as a security tool. This isn't security. There is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist in tools I rely upon. There is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist things that I use in production capacities. It is the pure addition of risk to my operations and my clients' operations and offers nothing to me except a ding to my reputation, because I now look like an asshole because a security tool I recommended and spoke highly of is now going to be flogging funbux.
  - jeffthemaximum 9y ago
    Keybase is also an identity tool, and I see value in having proof of identity when making crypto transactions.
    - eropple 9y ago

bkolobara 9y ago

I first heard about Stellar from Patrick's (patio11) Harry Potter post around 3 years ago: Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars[1]. I have been following Stellar closely since then and am also running one of the biggest Stellar communities. It's one of the rear cryptocurrency and "blockchain" technologies that actually make sense to me. They have a simple structure: you are able to issue assets/tokens on the network and you are able to send and trade them for other tokens. I think that this simplicity allowed it to gain a lot of credibility with bigger companies (Stripe, IBM, now Keybase, ...), while other technologies like Bitcoin/Ethereum are getting just more and more complicated with 2nd layer networks and locking up tokens in them. They stayed true to the original ideas without introducing a bunch of buzzwords around them and trying to avoid hype in their announcements[2]: > Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming years. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cryptocurrency-of-stars/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cr... [2] https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership...

jerguismi 9y ago
You know what is even better? A SQL database. Very simple and you can do almost anything with it. Also very proven technology.
- leonsmith 9y ago
  Stellar is a postgres database under the hood and its just the stellar concensus protocol (SCP) that determins which queries/transaction to apply to your database in tandem with all the other nodes
  - bkolobara 9y ago
    Exactly! That's the best part. :)

tgb 9y ago

> And traditional banking, with its branches and offices and free dog treats, uses even more electricity than Bitcoin. Isn't this disingenuous, to say the least? First, traditional banking uses more (for now) but also performs orders of magnitude more transactions. I'd be surprised if banking used more per transaction. Secondly, a bank does a lot of things that Bitcoin doesn't even try to do. I can walk into my local bank and get quarters for me laundry, Euros for my trip, a loan for my house, set up a retirement savings account and get advice on what to do with it, request help if I've been defrauded, and probably a lot more I haven't ever considered.

oelmekki 9y ago

The thing I love the most about Stellar is how its founders want it to become "the SMTP of payment". It's kind of amazing we still haven't such kind of protocol widely available, and have to rely on private companies like Paypal, Stripe or any bank's IPN to send money on the internet, decades after its creation.

johnny_1010 9y ago

Why someone use this kind of chat? Same Slack, Hipchat it's look to me like expansive irc. And this "blog post" is more Stellar commercial.

vpupkin2017 9y ago
I agree, but somehow people are fascinated by yet another centralized project
0xCMP 9y ago
Because it's end-to-end encrypted for just the people in the chat. Slack and Hipchat store the logs in the clear for themselves and the contents could be revealed if they were ever hacked. Since they're also centralized this poses an issue because they're an easier target than say a member of the chat's device. Since keybase is all encrypted, signed, and authenticated the fact it's centralized only matters as far as the service going down, but the content is all secure.

weinzierl 9y ago

>Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze? >It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example? Well played!

exabrial 9y ago

I <3 Keybase, though I wish I could generate my device keys with pgp rather than only having keybase do it for me. And of course, I'd love to store an ssh key with keybase...

SteveJS 9y ago

How does this change the threat model for using keybase? It would seem to increase the target value of compromising the client. Is that immediate impression wrong?

fiatjaf 9y ago
Yes. I don't believe Keybase will not store Stellar private keys in any way, this would be horrible.
- xchaotic 9y ago
  what does prevent you from storing your private keys today? Nothing. The association with Stellar might imply a higher likelyhood of something valuable crypto related being there. However, I don't care, if the security of keybase is somehow broken, I'd rather find out early on and with the increased exposure, they may be getting free pen testing.

smart94dude 9y ago

yes

desireco42 9y ago

I was just thinking this morning how keybase would be useful as a tie-in for crypto identity on blockchain, when this is desirable. This is fantastic news. Just confirms that Stellar is great platform.

diakritikal 9y ago

Given that stellar/lumen is a fork of ripple/xrp, and ripple/xrp seem to have a massive head start with what 100+? bank and payment providers already on board - are stellar/lumen not just competing head to head with Ripple with essentially the same technology but with a handicap of being behind in terms of development and not having an in-use production network and settlement solution?

arianvanp 9y ago
Is the current code still a fork? I thought stellar switched to their own thing quite early alreaxy
- nullstyle 9y ago
  Yeah, it hasn't been a fork for a long time. Disclosure: I work for stellar and took part in the big rewrite.
bpicolo 9y ago
My understanding is that no banks are on board for the XRP bit of Ripple yet, but instead Ripple's non-xrp tech https://ripple.com/solutions/process-payments/ https://ripple.com/solutions/process-payments/

fullsage 9y ago

This post is very oblique in a way that makes me suspicious. 1. Is Keybase still a for-profit corporation? 2. No actual technology is announced here. Is the purpose of this post to announce funding? If so, how much funding is it and what are the conditions under which it is provided? 3. How is Stellar compatible with privacy? Keybase mentions MobileCoin in this blog post, but they are only using Stellar's consensus protocol, not the full Stellar protocol. I think that is because Stellar isn't private. What is Keybase doing to solve that if they are using the Stellar network?

nipponese 9y ago
I think the translation is: 1. We are now taking money from Stellar, so... 2. We will support UserA/FiatX to UserB/FiatY in app, whenever we're allowed to talk about it.

blocked_again 9y ago

You get a sense of positivity by just going through the stellar website and documentation (eerily similar to Stripe). It is beautifully designed and easy to understand. Kind of gives the feeling that they are in it for the long run unlike many other get rich quick Ponzi cryptocurrencies out there.

oh_sigh 9y ago
I recently had extensive contact with someone on their support staff(Robert) regarding issues with my stellar coins(issued back in 2014 which I had completely forgotten about until a month ago). We exchanged probably 10-20 emails trying to resolve my issue, which was eventually satisfiable resolved. I came away with a very positive opinion about the seriousness of the team.
dannyw 9y ago
Stripe invested in Stellar, and might have helped out with design.

koko775 9y ago

Welp, time to uninstall. I like Keybase a lot, but there are zero ways in which I want my crypto to mix with my cryptocurrency.

ghostwreck 9y ago
Probably should have done some more research before you installed the first time. Keybase has been mixed with cryptocurrency since 2014 [1] [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitcoin_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
- floatboth 9y ago
  eh, publishing audit log hashes into the buttchain doesn't really "mix" it on the users' side

vpupkin2017 9y ago

Coins without prooof of work are as “decentralized” as facebook is - it is run as as distributed app but controlled by founder whales via “trusted” gateways/witnesses. PayPal integration would be as good as stellar here. To the other hand keybase is a centralized for profit authority e.g. facebook Of identities so it is a match.

ris 9y ago

I've stopped recommending keybase since they removed all references to being able to do operations directly with gpg (which is a real shame - it worked incredibly well and was the best example I've ever seen of web/CLI integration). The whole thing is becoming very opaque and startup-y and hey-we're-an-app have-you-downloaded-our-app why-not-app-our-app app-app-app-app... I'm really not a fan of these "minimal" growth-hack-y websites which seem so popular these days.

andrewjw 9y ago
Just curious, around how long ago was this change made? Can you find web.archive.org links for a page which was changed? I'd find them useful for discussions with my peers.
- ris 9y ago
  The gpg approach was available in September 2017, when I used it to setup my account. I can't tell you any better than that though, and that's part of the nature of opaque aggressive growth startups today. Things just disappear or change with no acknowledgement of the past unless it's part of the story the company wants to tell about itself today. It's reasons like this that I tend to lose all interest in a project as soon as I hear they've taken VC.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    I recently used the terminal/gpg method to update my keys.

donquichotte 9y ago

Read the announcement of the Stellar Foundation [1] for more detail. TLDR: "We see a future where, say, I can send my friend 100XLM, and, via Keybase, I can send it to her by knowing only her Twitter or Reddit handle." [1] https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership...

ndreckshage 9y ago

I'd be really interested in adding Twitter (etc) support to Lumenette with help of Keybase, if possible. Hoping there will be an API for other wallets to interact with the features Keybase is working on. I've been using Keybase git and file storage for some time now. Really excited about this partnership! Lumenette wallet, for reference: https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-android-ios-stellar-lumens-wallet https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-android-ios-stella...

jasonmp85 9y ago

> But Stellar is not Turing complete… Ok This made me smile.

curo 9y ago

In response to the environmental backlash argument, isn't the lightning network supposed to substantially mitigate those concerns?

wmf 9y ago
Lightning doesn't reduce mining in any way. Note that energy consumption of mining is not related to transaction throughput.

kang 9y ago

Stellar doesn't work. Disturbed by energy consumption, their solution is to divide(shard) the blockchain graph. Does that result in a consensus though? Not in their own prior version. Will the topology they are claiming emerge? There is no proof.

zapita 9y ago

Isn't Keybase a for-profit corporation? What does it mean for a non-profit to support a for-profit? An emtry in the FAQ explaining this would be appreciated.

drgenus 9y ago

awesome!

bigcoin 9y ago

That's a very good partnership! Since Keybase maps social media identities to encryption keys in a publicly auditable manner, as well as Stellar implements Lumens as a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets

tristanho 9y ago

The FAQs are the bottom are amazing. Seems to cover just about every HN objection ever: > Does Keybase itself have Lumens? Thus far, SDF has supported us with cash — "dirty fiat" — which is what it takes to build software. But yes, we will hold Lumens later. > But Stellar is not Turing complete Ok > Hodl on a second - aren't these anchored currencies the same thing as "tethers" (USDT)? I hear bad things about them. Sort of. How Stellar's view of real-world currencies is different: you choose which issuing parties to trust. No one seems to know if Tethers are redeemable. the exchange itself is decentralized; you can change your trust lines whenever you like, and you can trade away the rubbish. This is very different from being stuck in a centralized exchange with one questionable currency-pegged token. > What about Keybase profiles' support of Bitcoin and Zcash addresses? This won't change. We continue to be big fans of Zcash (for all the reasons mentioned here), Ethereum (for its flexibility), and Bitcoin (for its relative stability). We're also excited for Filecoin. We really are pro cryptocurrency across the board. > Where can I learn about Stellar? Here's a Talk at Google about it. After the video, you could read the Stellar Consensus Protocol paper. And here's their blog post announcing their support of us. > Won't this distract the Keybase team from its other work? All of our existing product (chat, teams, files, identity, etc.) should only get better, with more total resources put into them. > So are you launching a coin, like MobileCoin or Kik's? No. We will be helping Stellar in general, not launching our own coin. > Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze? It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example? > Any advice on storing cryptocurrency today? Advice we've gotten is the Ledger Nano S. > WHAT ABOUT MONERO?? ...

xerxe-sans-s 9y ago

Attaching a transaction history and wallet to an identity perfectly positions keybase as a player in the credit scoring industry. I’m excited to see this, and hopeful that it takes off. However, I’ve enjoyed utilizing keybase as an identity tool. I’ve had a decent experience with the system as a workplace productivity tool (chat, git). I’m worried that the team will lose focus by branching into a third, and potentially fourth area of focus.

Cambridgeport90 9y ago

this is going to be awesome. I need to look at that now. So many coins to be aware of and to study to navigate a seemingly confusing new world, though.

flashmob 9y ago

I wasn't convinced about Stellar in that article. Some arguments given were strawman like, especially when attacking proof of work (PoW) or other things that are irrelevant because Stellar is something completely different. Besides, I found the overall tone to be somewhat condescending, especially due to the Monero snide at the end. There are plenty of other low-fee, non-PoW coins out there, that the article should have spent more time comparing to instead; So we know that stellar doesn't use PoW - what I want to know is why the Stellar consensus algorithm is better when compared to the other similar alternatives out there, and what makes it faster and more secure. They also leave an elephant in the room - how is Stellar more resistant to censorship? What I'd really be interested in reading is why they chose it based on technical merits, rather than talking down other projects.

vongesell 9y ago

Beware of anything Jed McCaleb touches. The author of eDonkey, the horrid PHP code that was MTGox, ripple and now stellar.

superobserver 9y ago
Perhaps truer words were never spoken...

CryptoPunk 9y ago

>>We think Stellar can fulfill Bitcoin's original goal of fast, cheap, worldwide payments. Stellar will not remain fast, cheap and global. It has counterparty risk in the form of the trusted third parties that form its consensus nodes. These TTPs will censor transactions and introduce costly registration requirements for the same reason traditional fintech companies do: to comply with the demands of regulatory agencies. The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum.

sethgecko 9y ago
Only the third party issued tokens have counterparty risk i.e you trust the issuer to redeem them somehow. Is that different than an ethereum ERC20 token? The native asset itself (XLM) has no counterparty risk. > The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum. IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability. Bitcoin requires no trust but has a costly PoW consensus algorithm which does not allow instant transactions and has a very low tps limit. You can't have both (unless someone comes up with a better consensus mechanism)
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  XLM and everything else on a ledger like Stellar's has counterparty risk, because consensus on these types of ledgers is established by a set of trusted third parties. The TTPs are counterparties, and if they fail, the ledger fails. >>IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability. In my opinion, the right approach to managing this trade-off is to build more centralized platforms on top of the decentralized base layer. That way they have a highly immutable/trustworthy base layer they can all interact on. An example of this approach is the POA Network, which uses a set of US public notaries to run high throughput validator nodes for a permissioned instance of Ethereum. This permissioned ledger is a side chain of the Ethereum main chain, which can interoperate with it, and has the advantage of being able to scale to 1000s of transactions per second. One could envision multiple trusted or semi-trusted ledgers operating on top of a decentralized ledger that acts as the settlement layer.

SZJX 9y ago

Sorry if this question is a bit stupid but could somebody enlighten me on why Keybase seem to regard Monero quite poorly? From what I've heard it seems that its anonimity is more trusted than that of Zcash at least, and both it and Zcash are proof-of-work coins anyways. Is it simply because they already had Zcash, so they'd rather not put something similar in there?

ldiracdelta 9y ago

Is Stellar private by default, or do you have to add tumblers to gain some semblance of privacy?