40 ms·

Harry Potter and the Cryptocurrency of Stars

236 points by pc 12y ago

rubiquity 12y ago
Fantastic. I feel like I could send this to my family who are clueless about cryptos but fans of Harry Potter. Now all we need is for someone to explain monads by way of a conversation with Harry Potter.
- TrainedMonkey 12y ago
  Harry: So how do monads work? Hermione: Magic.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Stellar is like a burrito.
    - eridius 12y ago
      Apparently people here don't get monad references?
hempz 12y ago
TLDR on behalf of patio11; > Have I mentioned that I don’t like Bitcoin? I don’t like Bitcoin.
- sp332 12y ago
  This article is about Stellar, not bitcoin. Edit: although I have to admit it spends a lot of time complaining about drawbacks of bitcoin as well.
  - hempz 12y ago
    Let's recurse! Lo and behold, we have reached the base case, sir: it's `bitcoin'.
  - itsnotlupus 12y ago
    Speaking of what the article was and was not about, is it weird that it had exactly 0 mentions of Ripple, given that Stellar is a very recent fork of Ripple, which has itself been around for a few years?
JasonCEC 12y ago
This is (wonderfully) reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality[1]. Both are well worth the read. [1]http://hpmor.com/ http://hpmor.com/
- sirsar 12y ago
  P.S. If you don't like Chapter 1 of HPMOR, skip to Chapter 17. The writing style is toned down a little from that point, and there's an interesting use of magic in that chapter. If you don't like Chapter 17, give up. (If you like either, good for you! It's a polarizing piece of fiction.)
  - listic 12y ago
    I liked it the most from the beginning, though, and would welcome the return to that style.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Interesting analogy, and certainly an effective explanation. However, the dig at Bitcoin's distributed consensus seems out of place, given the lack of a corresponding observation of the advantage of that consensus. Stellar transactions do not work in the absence of a trust path; Bitcoin does. You can use Bitcoin to complete a transation using a similar process, and in particular several companies have created convenient currency "gateways", if you prefer to transact in your primary currency rather than in Bitcoin. Effectively, Stellar is federated among entities that (indirectly) trust each other, but does not work between entities who establish no trust relationships other than direct ones with currency exchanges.
- gdb 12y ago
  > Stellar transactions do not work in the absence of a trust path; Bitcoin does This isn't quite accurate: a lot of Stellar's mechanisms are set up to allow transactions to flow despite the lack of a trust path. For example, this is the main function of the stellar currency. As well, the distributed exchange doesn't require trust between the parties — just a mutual desire for the exchange to occur.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    > This isn't quite accurate: a lot of Stellar's mechanisms are set up to allow transactions to flow despite the lack of a trust path. For example, this is the main function of the stellar currency. I'm not talking just about the currency exchange process itself; I'm also talking about the "ledger" mechanism and maintenance of it. Stellar seems much more reliant on trusted third parties. This story gave a lot of detail about trusting specific third-parties, but treated Stellar as a magic inherently trusted mechanism for IOU exchange above reproach. Thus, it gives me no confidence or inclination to trust Stellar itself.
    - eridius 12y ago
      Holding credit on the stellar network requires trust. You need to trust the issuer of the credit to be willing to redeem real-world value for the credit. Given the requirement for trust already built in to Stellar, the consensus protocol seems like a natural extension of that. Just as you need to trust the issuer of credit, you also need to trust your stellar provider to have chosen peers that will not collude. In a sense, this is actually kind of like Tor. When you establish a circuit through the Tor network, you're trusting that all the relays on the circuit are not colluding together. If they are colluding then you've lost all your privacy. Ultimately, if Stellar takes off, I think it makes sense for real-world institutions like banks to start running stellard. If I hold an account at a bank, I'll use their stellard, and exchange credit issued by them. I've already trusted the bank to hold all my money, so I'm not really taking on any new risk by also trusting them to run stellard.
jchrisa 12y ago
Thanks for this! I'm half way through a quick read, and will have to read it again more slowly. I like the style of using user-stories to explain crypto. I've done something similar with a speculative web-of-trust crypto currency design here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNvU-ggBJ_Z-FNg0DZIA_c/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNv...
- jchrisa 12y ago
  Thanks for the downvote... patio11 if you are reading I mostly linked to the above to get your take on the idea that we can get even more subjective than transitive exchange rate finding. Maybe the Wired article is shorter: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
  - patio11 12y ago
    Since you asked: That feels like Klout meets blockchain meets Silicon Valley filter bubble. I'm not the world's biggest fan of any of these three things in isolation. Combining them does not obviously make the combination more useful than the sum of the parts.
    - jchrisa 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. I'm really just driven to explore the implications of a radically simple data structure. So hopefully it's possible to build something that's more useful than bubble. The short term goal is just to get people to think more broadly about what cryptocurrency can mean. Your essay does that brilliantly, thanks!
  - argonaut 12y ago
    > Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- moreati 12y ago
  You might like http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dialogue.html http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dialogue.html then
phillmv 12y ago
This compares nicely against Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic, in that it's not nearly as strident and self-satisfied and arrogant. That said, I have an vague high level technical understanding of btc, but none of Stellar, and I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve, or why patio11 hates btc. I'm actually inclined to dislike btc, and thus felt that the Defense Against The Dark Arts Professor is not an inapt caricature. But, the TLDR I got was: Stellar is some kind of sweet currency/asset agnostic market exchange. Also, btc boosters mix their metaphors/have incomplete pictures of the economy, warped by libertarianism. So far, so good. But Stellar still seems… awfully opaque.
- diego 12y ago
  I don't think patio11 hates BTC for any rational reasons. Nobody should hate or love BTC any more than, say, hacksaws. It's a tool, you decide whether you want to use it or not.
  - GrahamL 12y ago
    Advocating against certain tools absolutely makes sense. A well marketed but fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous. Whether or not someone uses Bitcoin is not merely a decision that affects the implementer. If Patrick believes that's what Bitcoin is then it makes sense for him to be strongly advocating against it.
    - hempz 12y ago
      While, I agree with your statement; that a "fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous". I was not aware that patio11 nor anyone for that matter, have presented any "fundamental flaw" within the "engineering artifact" known as bitcoin. Which apparently, has also been elected to the position of "foundational infrastructure". Advocation requires an argument, in this case one which I am actually quite interested in reading.
      - dublinben 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gwillen 12y ago
If you are familiar with Ripple, it seems like a curious omission from your story. If you are _not_ familiar with Ripple, you should learn about it before you get on board with Stellar. (Stellar is a clone of Ripple, so familiarize yourself with the controversy about Ripple in order to learn what the controversy about Stellar is going to be in short order.) I am a fan of both the Bitcoin and Stellar concepts; I hold a bunch of Bitcoins as well as some Stellars. I used to hold some Ripples; I may yet buy some more.
- eridius 12y ago
  Why is Ripple's controversy relevant to Stellar? As I understand it (and I may be wrong, I was not aware of Ripple until Stellar), the big issue was that the founders of Ripple Labs allocated 20% of all XPR to themselves. Stellar, on the other hand, is only holding 5% of STR in reserve, which is used to fund the nonprofit, and already sold off 2% of that to Stripe (who in turn is going to be auctioning off 50% of that). Ripple's approach looked like a pre-mined altcoin thing, but Stellar has a significantly smaller reserve that's very publicly being used to fund the operations of a nonprofit, rather than being used to enrich 3 individuals. Basically the only odd thing here is that using STR as a source of funding means that they care about the market value of STR, whereas most uses of Stellar don't care at all about the market value of STR but only use it as a medium of exchange. That said, all the Stellar Foundation really wants is for STR to remain relatively stable (which it should), whereas with Ripple's approach there's a genuine conflict of interest as the founders would get personally rich if they could boost the value of XRP (conflict of interest because it's in the network's best interest for XRP to remain stable, just as STR is expected to remain largely stable).
  - wyager 12y ago
    Stellar is a direct fork of Ripple, with basically zero significant changes.
    - FeepingCreature 12y ago
      I can't speak for others, but for me the politics, not the technology, of Ripple was always what I had an issue with.
Siecje 12y ago
The stellar test server seems to be down, even through the tutorial. One thing I don't understand is why do the rich people have more say than someone with less Stellars? https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation
jnbiche 12y ago
One of the most gratifying things about pondering the future is that I can easily foresee the day -- say 15-20 years down the road -- when utilities stop accepting local currency, and patio11 is forced to pay his electricity bill in Bitcoin. It's a long time, but I won't mind waiting for it.
- slig 12y ago
  When reading about bitcoins, I can never tell when people are being sarcastic or not.
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    Neither am I: https://twitter.com/shit_rbtc_says https://twitter.com/shit_rbtc_says and https://twitter.com/bitcoin_txt https://twitter.com/bitcoin_txt
- krapp 12y ago
  Why would someone be forced to pay for a service in anything other than the legal tender of the country they're in? For that matter, why would any business necessarily refuse to accept it? That said - if Bitcoin or something like it makes it less expensive for me to take on international clients then i'm all for it. But nobody's going to just ignore fiat like it isn't there.
  - tinco 12y ago
    You do realise that what is legal tender in a country can change right? He's dreaming about the day the United States, or whatever country patio lives in, changes its legal tender to be bitcoin. (btw: More logical than changing the tender of dollars to bitcoin would be to tie the value of the dollar to a fixed amount of bitcoin. Which would be the same thing but without losing the word 'dollar'.)
    - krapp 12y ago
      Fair enough. But 'legal tender' still implies the force of fiat. Switching to Bitcoin wouldn't be the same as switching to Euros, to me it would mean a government admitting to the rest of the world that it no longer has the means or the will to regulate its own economy.
toasted 12y ago
Bitcoin (& litecoin) are the sole currencies of dark net drug trade, which is a large, exponentially growing business. Bitcoin is working very effectively in the wild, and all the dorky conjecture doesn't change that. I only vaguely understand stellar (and ripple), but one thing i do know is that for all the hype over the last few years noone ever used ripple for anything other than speculation. Stellar is also shaping up in a similar way.
- wyager 12y ago
  Stellar doesn't deserve the title of "cryptocurrency". It is centralized. It's basically just a fork of Ripple; it was never used because it wasn't really an improvement over fiat systems in any way. A small number of nodes have all the power. If they want, they can freeze your funds or steal from you via arbitrary inflation. Stellar is just as bad.
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    CIS/Russian org crime groups can soon buy a bunch of Stellers with fraudulent cards through Stripe, cash them out through p2p methods. Why bother carding and fencing iphones and laptops when you can just buy Stellers and convert them to bitcoins or wire transfers directly.
    - wmf 12y ago
      For this exact reason, one may predict that Stripe will not allow people to buy stellars with credit cards. Stripe may issue (revocable) USD credit over Stellar, though.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Stellar and Ripple are fundamentally different from Bitcoin in that a central authority controls the creation of new coins. Stellar can easily change the amount of coins introduced in the future, and can freeze your funds. I like to call things like Stellar and Amazon Coins corpocurrencies :)
vomitcuddle 12y ago
Sorry. Not a dorky paranoid liberal type here. Me, i don't see any use for cryptocurrencies outside of darknet contraband trade/money laundering. Any politician excited about cryptocurrencies would probably use them to receive untraceable bribes. The idea that a public company (i'm talking about Mt. Gox) can hold an asset that can magically disappear without a trace and still receive bankruptcy protection from the government (without the ceo being arrested for theft) is a joke. i admit it's nice from an engineering standpoint and maybe if this imaginary liberal (does that word even mean anything concrete anymore?) utopia some people seem to be living in was true, it would actually be useful to people who don't want to wait 45 minutes at the supermarket checkout for their crypto-monopoly-money transaction to confirm.
djloche 12y ago
For those looking for additional reading: Nemo's series on BitCoin and Cryptography is a very balanced read. https://self-evident.org/?cat=12 https://self-evident.org/?cat=12
pgr1 12y ago
Does anyone else find it unethical the way that Stellar has forked the Ripple code with nothing but rebranding / cosmetic changes, and gives no credit or acknowledgement to the devs that have done all the work? https://github.com/stellar/stellard/graphs/contributors https://github.com/stellar/stellard/graphs/contributors
the_decider 12y ago
The number one currency of the drug-blackmarket/underworld isn't Bitcoin. It is cold, hard cash. I personally believe that if people are unwilling to bleed, cheat and steal for currency X, then currency X is worthless. Bitcoin's role in the drug-trade is not its downside; rather, it's a mark of its value. If dealers did not use Bitcoin, then it would be implicitly worthless.

236 points by pc 12y ago

Fantastic. I feel like I could send this to my family who are clueless about cryptos but fans of Harry Potter. Now all we need is for someone to explain monads by way of a conversation with Harry Potter.

TrainedMonkey 12y ago
Harry: So how do monads work? Hermione: Magic.
- eridius 12y ago
  Stellar is like a burrito.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Apparently people here don't get monad references?

hempz 12y ago

TLDR on behalf of patio11; > Have I mentioned that I don’t like Bitcoin? I don’t like Bitcoin.

sp332 12y ago
This article is about Stellar, not bitcoin. Edit: although I have to admit it spends a lot of time complaining about drawbacks of bitcoin as well.
- hempz 12y ago
  Let's recurse! Lo and behold, we have reached the base case, sir: it's `bitcoin'.
- itsnotlupus 12y ago
  Speaking of what the article was and was not about, is it weird that it had exactly 0 mentions of Ripple, given that Stellar is a very recent fork of Ripple, which has itself been around for a few years?

JasonCEC 12y ago

This is (wonderfully) reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality[1]. Both are well worth the read. [1]http://hpmor.com/ http://hpmor.com/

sirsar 12y ago
P.S. If you don't like Chapter 1 of HPMOR, skip to Chapter 17. The writing style is toned down a little from that point, and there's an interesting use of magic in that chapter. If you don't like Chapter 17, give up. (If you like either, good for you! It's a polarizing piece of fiction.)
- listic 12y ago
  I liked it the most from the beginning, though, and would welcome the return to that style.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Interesting analogy, and certainly an effective explanation. However, the dig at Bitcoin's distributed consensus seems out of place, given the lack of a corresponding observation of the advantage of that consensus. Stellar transactions do not work in the absence of a trust path; Bitcoin does. You can use Bitcoin to complete a transation using a similar process, and in particular several companies have created convenient currency "gateways", if you prefer to transact in your primary currency rather than in Bitcoin. Effectively, Stellar is federated among entities that (indirectly) trust each other, but does not work between entities who establish no trust relationships other than direct ones with currency exchanges.

gdb 12y ago
> Stellar transactions do not work in the absence of a trust path; Bitcoin does This isn't quite accurate: a lot of Stellar's mechanisms are set up to allow transactions to flow despite the lack of a trust path. For example, this is the main function of the stellar currency. As well, the distributed exchange doesn't require trust between the parties — just a mutual desire for the exchange to occur.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > This isn't quite accurate: a lot of Stellar's mechanisms are set up to allow transactions to flow despite the lack of a trust path. For example, this is the main function of the stellar currency. I'm not talking just about the currency exchange process itself; I'm also talking about the "ledger" mechanism and maintenance of it. Stellar seems much more reliant on trusted third parties. This story gave a lot of detail about trusting specific third-parties, but treated Stellar as a magic inherently trusted mechanism for IOU exchange above reproach. Thus, it gives me no confidence or inclination to trust Stellar itself.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Holding credit on the stellar network requires trust. You need to trust the issuer of the credit to be willing to redeem real-world value for the credit. Given the requirement for trust already built in to Stellar, the consensus protocol seems like a natural extension of that. Just as you need to trust the issuer of credit, you also need to trust your stellar provider to have chosen peers that will not collude. In a sense, this is actually kind of like Tor. When you establish a circuit through the Tor network, you're trusting that all the relays on the circuit are not colluding together. If they are colluding then you've lost all your privacy. Ultimately, if Stellar takes off, I think it makes sense for real-world institutions like banks to start running stellard. If I hold an account at a bank, I'll use their stellard, and exchange credit issued by them. I've already trusted the bank to hold all my money, so I'm not really taking on any new risk by also trusting them to run stellard.

jchrisa 12y ago

Thanks for this! I'm half way through a quick read, and will have to read it again more slowly. I like the style of using user-stories to explain crypto. I've done something similar with a speculative web-of-trust crypto currency design here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNvU-ggBJ_Z-FNg0DZIA_c/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0D75T4_xjMNDdMdgaeRPtNv...

jchrisa 12y ago
Thanks for the downvote... patio11 if you are reading I mostly linked to the above to get your take on the idea that we can get even more subjective than transitive exchange rate finding. Maybe the Wired article is shorter: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
- patio11 12y ago
  Since you asked: That feels like Klout meets blockchain meets Silicon Valley filter bubble. I'm not the world's biggest fan of any of these three things in isolation. Combining them does not obviously make the combination more useful than the sum of the parts.
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I'm really just driven to explore the implications of a radically simple data structure. So hopefully it's possible to build something that's more useful than bubble. The short term goal is just to get people to think more broadly about what cryptocurrency can mean. Your essay does that brilliantly, thanks!
- argonaut 12y ago
  > Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
moreati 12y ago
You might like http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dialogue.html http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/dialogue.html then

phillmv 12y ago

This compares nicely against Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic, in that it's not nearly as strident and self-satisfied and arrogant. That said, I have an vague high level technical understanding of btc, but none of Stellar, and I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve, or why patio11 hates btc. I'm actually inclined to dislike btc, and thus felt that the Defense Against The Dark Arts Professor is not an inapt caricature. But, the TLDR I got was: Stellar is some kind of sweet currency/asset agnostic market exchange. Also, btc boosters mix their metaphors/have incomplete pictures of the economy, warped by libertarianism. So far, so good. But Stellar still seems… awfully opaque.

diego 12y ago
I don't think patio11 hates BTC for any rational reasons. Nobody should hate or love BTC any more than, say, hacksaws. It's a tool, you decide whether you want to use it or not.
- GrahamL 12y ago
  Advocating against certain tools absolutely makes sense. A well marketed but fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous. Whether or not someone uses Bitcoin is not merely a decision that affects the implementer. If Patrick believes that's what Bitcoin is then it makes sense for him to be strongly advocating against it.
  - hempz 12y ago
    While, I agree with your statement; that a "fundamentally flawed piece of foundational infrastructure is incredibly dangerous". I was not aware that patio11 nor anyone for that matter, have presented any "fundamental flaw" within the "engineering artifact" known as bitcoin. Which apparently, has also been elected to the position of "foundational infrastructure". Advocation requires an argument, in this case one which I am actually quite interested in reading.
    - dublinben 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gwillen 12y ago

If you are familiar with Ripple, it seems like a curious omission from your story. If you are _not_ familiar with Ripple, you should learn about it before you get on board with Stellar. (Stellar is a clone of Ripple, so familiarize yourself with the controversy about Ripple in order to learn what the controversy about Stellar is going to be in short order.) I am a fan of both the Bitcoin and Stellar concepts; I hold a bunch of Bitcoins as well as some Stellars. I used to hold some Ripples; I may yet buy some more.

eridius 12y ago
Why is Ripple's controversy relevant to Stellar? As I understand it (and I may be wrong, I was not aware of Ripple until Stellar), the big issue was that the founders of Ripple Labs allocated 20% of all XPR to themselves. Stellar, on the other hand, is only holding 5% of STR in reserve, which is used to fund the nonprofit, and already sold off 2% of that to Stripe (who in turn is going to be auctioning off 50% of that). Ripple's approach looked like a pre-mined altcoin thing, but Stellar has a significantly smaller reserve that's very publicly being used to fund the operations of a nonprofit, rather than being used to enrich 3 individuals. Basically the only odd thing here is that using STR as a source of funding means that they care about the market value of STR, whereas most uses of Stellar don't care at all about the market value of STR but only use it as a medium of exchange. That said, all the Stellar Foundation really wants is for STR to remain relatively stable (which it should), whereas with Ripple's approach there's a genuine conflict of interest as the founders would get personally rich if they could boost the value of XRP (conflict of interest because it's in the network's best interest for XRP to remain stable, just as STR is expected to remain largely stable).
- wyager 12y ago
  Stellar is a direct fork of Ripple, with basically zero significant changes.
  - FeepingCreature 12y ago
    I can't speak for others, but for me the politics, not the technology, of Ripple was always what I had an issue with.

Siecje 12y ago

The stellar test server seems to be down, even through the tutorial. One thing I don't understand is why do the rich people have more say than someone with less Stellars? https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_creation

jnbiche 12y ago

One of the most gratifying things about pondering the future is that I can easily foresee the day -- say 15-20 years down the road -- when utilities stop accepting local currency, and patio11 is forced to pay his electricity bill in Bitcoin. It's a long time, but I won't mind waiting for it.

slig 12y ago
When reading about bitcoins, I can never tell when people are being sarcastic or not.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Neither am I: https://twitter.com/shit_rbtc_says https://twitter.com/shit_rbtc_says and https://twitter.com/bitcoin_txt https://twitter.com/bitcoin_txt
krapp 12y ago
Why would someone be forced to pay for a service in anything other than the legal tender of the country they're in? For that matter, why would any business necessarily refuse to accept it? That said - if Bitcoin or something like it makes it less expensive for me to take on international clients then i'm all for it. But nobody's going to just ignore fiat like it isn't there.
- tinco 12y ago
  You do realise that what is legal tender in a country can change right? He's dreaming about the day the United States, or whatever country patio lives in, changes its legal tender to be bitcoin. (btw: More logical than changing the tender of dollars to bitcoin would be to tie the value of the dollar to a fixed amount of bitcoin. Which would be the same thing but without losing the word 'dollar'.)
  - krapp 12y ago
    Fair enough. But 'legal tender' still implies the force of fiat. Switching to Bitcoin wouldn't be the same as switching to Euros, to me it would mean a government admitting to the rest of the world that it no longer has the means or the will to regulate its own economy.

toasted 12y ago

Bitcoin (& litecoin) are the sole currencies of dark net drug trade, which is a large, exponentially growing business. Bitcoin is working very effectively in the wild, and all the dorky conjecture doesn't change that. I only vaguely understand stellar (and ripple), but one thing i do know is that for all the hype over the last few years noone ever used ripple for anything other than speculation. Stellar is also shaping up in a similar way.

wyager 12y ago
Stellar doesn't deserve the title of "cryptocurrency". It is centralized. It's basically just a fork of Ripple; it was never used because it wasn't really an improvement over fiat systems in any way. A small number of nodes have all the power. If they want, they can freeze your funds or steal from you via arbitrary inflation. Stellar is just as bad.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  CIS/Russian org crime groups can soon buy a bunch of Stellers with fraudulent cards through Stripe, cash them out through p2p methods. Why bother carding and fencing iphones and laptops when you can just buy Stellers and convert them to bitcoins or wire transfers directly.
  - wmf 12y ago
    For this exact reason, one may predict that Stripe will not allow people to buy stellars with credit cards. Stripe may issue (revocable) USD credit over Stellar, though.
dreamdu5t 12y ago
Stellar and Ripple are fundamentally different from Bitcoin in that a central authority controls the creation of new coins. Stellar can easily change the amount of coins introduced in the future, and can freeze your funds. I like to call things like Stellar and Amazon Coins corpocurrencies :)

vomitcuddle 12y ago

Sorry. Not a dorky paranoid liberal type here. Me, i don't see any use for cryptocurrencies outside of darknet contraband trade/money laundering. Any politician excited about cryptocurrencies would probably use them to receive untraceable bribes. The idea that a public company (i'm talking about Mt. Gox) can hold an asset that can magically disappear without a trace and still receive bankruptcy protection from the government (without the ceo being arrested for theft) is a joke. i admit it's nice from an engineering standpoint and maybe if this imaginary liberal (does that word even mean anything concrete anymore?) utopia some people seem to be living in was true, it would actually be useful to people who don't want to wait 45 minutes at the supermarket checkout for their crypto-monopoly-money transaction to confirm.

djloche 12y ago

For those looking for additional reading: Nemo's series on BitCoin and Cryptography is a very balanced read. https://self-evident.org/?cat=12 https://self-evident.org/?cat=12

pgr1 12y ago

Does anyone else find it unethical the way that Stellar has forked the Ripple code with nothing but rebranding / cosmetic changes, and gives no credit or acknowledgement to the devs that have done all the work? https://github.com/stellar/stellard/graphs/contributors https://github.com/stellar/stellard/graphs/contributors

the_decider 12y ago

The number one currency of the drug-blackmarket/underworld isn't Bitcoin. It is cold, hard cash. I personally believe that if people are unwilling to bleed, cheat and steal for currency X, then currency X is worthless. Bitcoin's role in the drug-trade is not its downside; rather, it's a mark of its value. If dealers did not use Bitcoin, then it would be implicitly worthless.