from Hacker News

Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone

by malgorithms on 5/14/19, 8:21 PM with 81 comments

  • by andrewstuart on 5/14/19, 9:36 PM

    I'm not convinced that association with cryptocurrency does much to give the appearance of credibility, trustworthiness and stability to keybase.io

    I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category.

    I guess it depends on what the corporate goals of keybase.io are - I think it was identity management or something rather being a crypto player.

    edit: I should qualify that I've always seen and continue to see keybase.io as being a really reputable and stable company and not shonky. I guess I was a bit jaded by being flooded with crypto ads on every social media platform 12 months ago or so.

  • by drexlspivey on 5/14/19, 10:51 PM

    Stellar is a pretty cool platform. Here are some features:

    Any node can issue tokens pretty easily. Tokens are basically IOUs and come with counterparty risk. For example you want to issue tokens for carbon emission trading, you can do that with a few lines of code but people have to trust you to redeem them for whatever they are worth at the end. The only asset that comes without counterparty risk is the native asset XLM.

    It uses the Stellar consensus protocol (not proof of work) with a new ledger being closed every 3-5 seconds. SCP favors safety over liveness (no progress until consensus is reached)

    Stellar has a decentralized exchange built-in in the protocol layer. That means that market orders are p2p messages and are part of consensus for each new ledger.

  • by icelancer on 5/14/19, 10:57 PM

    I won't repost my entire comment here, but I noted in 2017 on Hacker News some pretty shady stuff going on with Stellar/XLM and their customer support team / developers.

    You can read the entire account here:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174

    It starts with this:

    ---

    I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:

    "I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.

    You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ....

    Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.

    Apologies we cannot be of further help."

  • by filleokus on 5/14/19, 9:12 PM

    If I have a good understanding of how the bitcoin protocol works, and is well versed in cryptography, does anyone have a tip on what to read to understand about the Stellar protocol?

    Just some quick Googling on my phone led me down cryptobro low quality content, unsurprisingly.

    EDIT: And also, this implementation looks really neat, congrats! It made me excited about crypto currency again!

  • by elamje on 5/14/19, 10:05 PM

    Keybase is a really cool application regardless of Stellar, so don’t be deterred by the comments!

    Free, encrypted git repos and file storage as well as ID assertion and chat.

  • by sealthedeal on 5/14/19, 11:25 PM

    I <3 Keybase. I have been beta testing this for a year or so. It came out during the last crypto boom, it is a great feature.

  • by andyburke on 5/14/19, 10:25 PM

    As a relatively long-time Keybase user, I went in and set up my Stellar wallet on my phone. There does not appear to be any way to fund this wallet, though. Reading the comments here, I guess I'd have to buy Stellar on some other exchange and ... transfer it to my wallet? (So I'd have a wallet on an exchange, and a wallet on Keybase?)

    This is not good UX.

  • by giancarlostoro on 5/15/19, 1:08 AM

    I like Keybase, I just find the name a little odd to push as a cool IM to normal people. I'm also still waiting to see them release their own email service, maybe something that can cleanly interface with ProtonMail?

  • by byproxy on 5/14/19, 8:42 PM

    I wonder how the Lumen value is being derived. I assume whatever current worth is on Coinbase Pro at the time the amount is sent, considering they namedrop Coinbase Pro as a place to buy Lumens.

  • by yarrel on 5/14/19, 10:22 PM

    Keybase is now a wire transmitter.

    Just without KYC/AML.

    Yet.

  • by zeroxfe on 5/15/19, 1:05 AM

    For folks that want to learn more about stellar: https://github.com/0xfe/hacking-stellar

  • by intpbro on 5/14/19, 10:55 PM

    Stellar was one of the only cryptos I actually spent some money on, and it seems like one of the few that are still trying to progress

  • by alexnewman on 5/14/19, 9:57 PM

    Is interstellar still around? I love the tech, but I believe keybase affixed horse to wrong cart.

  • by coldacid on 5/14/19, 9:01 PM

    When will open proof be available for everyone?

  • by xof711 on 5/14/19, 10:28 PM

    Exciting news! Can't wait to start using it!

  • by giacaglia on 5/14/19, 9:02 PM

    This is super cool! Making it easier to send or receive crypto is a worthy cause! :-)