I used to huge advocate for Keybase. I was drawn in initially by the elegance of their social identity proof, and the chat that came from that. The idea of bein

I used to huge advocate for Keybase. I was drawn in initially by the elegance of their social identity proof, and the chat that came from that. The idea of being able to send a message to someone and know it was them struck me as very powerful. When they then announced KBFS I was excited. It was just as useful as chat, and makes a ton of sense as a next step for the product. My second thought was hoping that I'd be able to pay for a "pro" tier and they'd then become profitable and sustainable. Teams I also think was a very natural progression and definetely felt like the next thing for them. Especially with sub-teams, it opened a lot of doors when combined with KBFS and chat. To me it seemed to be gearing towards an eventual free personal tier with paid-for teams funding the platform. This would be similar to the model we've seen work with GitHub and such. What came next was months of hoping that Keybase would become more stable and easier to use. The apps were buggy, but I could deal with it. The UI/UX wasn't very intuitive but with some effort I, as a technical person, could figure it out. I could even explain the concepts to non-technical friends and get them excited for it. But the quality just never picked up. The pain my friends experienced came from a crappy user experience, an incredibly flakey app (mobile and desktop). They all stopped using it, and so my usage became limited as well. Then after months of waiting and hoping for improvements, they announced Stellar integrat. I was confused, it didn't really seem to have a straight forward commercial aspect. In my mind, you can sell keybase with file storage and teams, it seems like an attractive offering! Especially with hard line gaurentees of identity, that's a huge problem which is suddenly solved. But cryptocurrency, while fitting with the cryptography theme, didn't feel like it fit with the product they'd built. What's more, the apps still hadn't become more usable or stable. I think my frustration with Keybase is that I thought they were using cryptography to solve problems with communication and collaboration. Instead it seems to be an excuse to for some crytopgrahy enthusiasts to build more things with cryptography. There doesn't seem to be a commercial approach, nor a true desire to make the power of cryptography accessible to the masses. I really wish they'd invest in making teams, kbfs, chat, and identity easier to use and more stable. If they did, I'd find it really easy to convince my employer to give them money for the product suite. But instead they seem to want to throw in any feature related to cryptography, rather than building a product suite and applying cryptography to solve common issues. I hope someone will one day take what Keybase has started, and will focus on the product rather than the tech. I'm not a cryto expert, most of what I learned was from being inspired by the Keybase articles. But at the end of the day I want to leverage this tech to it's maximum, not just use it because it's "fun".