4 ms·

Bitcoin does precisely one thing (a big ledger), on top of which people are trying to bootstrap many things (currency, asset exchange, smart contracts, notary,

by shazow 12y ago

Bitcoin does precisely one thing (a big ledger), on top of which people are trying to bootstrap many things (currency, asset exchange, smart contracts, notary, other things). Bitcoin is a distributed trustless ledger tracking inputs and outputs of transactions. It stores it in a blockchain, and determines transaction values using a script that takes some inputs and produces some outputs. --- As far as I can tell, Stellar does many things (gateways, trust/debt graph, asset mapping, quality conversion between assets, stellar currency), on top of which people are trying to bootstrap one thing (a big exchange). Stellar is a centralized trust-based debt graph of arbitrarily-defined assets hopefully backed by trusted gateways. It uses consumer-defined trust and quality (exchange rate) values per asset to other nodes which creates a debit cap for the peer. The roles between the technology vs ecosystem of Bitcoin vs Stellar are inverted. Clearly Stellar's approach has some benefits (fast transactions, regulation-compatible gateway infrastructure) at some costs (trusted/centralized, bootstrapping risks). This is about as good of an oversimplification as I can come up with right now.

eridius 12y ago
Reasonable simplification, though you're describing this from the point of view of the technology. Yes, technically, bitcoin is a big ledger. But in terms of how people use it, bitcoin is a whole mess of different things that actually conflict with each other (bitcoin as an investment vehicle vs bitcoin as a currency have incompatible goals). Stellar, technically, is a bunch of things; gateways, trust graph, etc. But in terms of how people use it, it's a single thing: a mechanism for sending real-world money over the internet. And it is real-world money. It's represented by credit, but most people are already operating on credit; they keep all their money in a bank, and the bank tells them how much credit they have, and when they pay for something the vendor accepts their credit and redeems it from the bank (typically by accepting credit from their own bank, rather than physically receiving paper money).
rattray 12y ago
I found this a fascinating simplification, and (hopefully) quite a helpful one. It doesn't quite lean me one way or the other between the two, actually. This does suggest to me, though, that it would have been nice if Stellar had used simple technology (just a distributed ledger, like bitcoin) to bring about the simple use-case (an exchange). Perhaps that isn't possible, and Stellar truly is the best we could do. But I'm not convinced it is.

by shazow 12y ago

eridius 12y ago

Reasonable simplification, though you're describing this from the point of view of the technology. Yes, technically, bitcoin is a big ledger. But in terms of how people use it, bitcoin is a whole mess of different things that actually conflict with each other (bitcoin as an investment vehicle vs bitcoin as a currency have incompatible goals). Stellar, technically, is a bunch of things; gateways, trust graph, etc. But in terms of how people use it, it's a single thing: a mechanism for sending real-world money over the internet. And it is real-world money. It's represented by credit, but most people are already operating on credit; they keep all their money in a bank, and the bank tells them how much credit they have, and when they pay for something the vendor accepts their credit and redeems it from the bank (typically by accepting credit from their own bank, rather than physically receiving paper money).

rattray 12y ago

I found this a fascinating simplification, and (hopefully) quite a helpful one. It doesn't quite lean me one way or the other between the two, actually. This does suggest to me, though, that it would have been nice if Stellar had used simple technology (just a distributed ledger, like bitcoin) to bring about the simple use-case (an exchange). Perhaps that isn't possible, and Stellar truly is the best we could do. But I'm not convinced it is.