6 ms·

Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone

169 points by malgorithms 7y ago

byproxy 7y ago
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.
- malgorithms 7y ago
  CoinMarketCap's paid API. We're open to considering other data sources.
  - modeless 7y ago
    I would suggest OpenMarketCap instead. CoinMarketCap is known to include exchanges that fake their volume and I wouldn't be surprised if their price data is somewhat manipulated too. https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq
    - electic 7y ago
      Correct. The price especially is wrong on CMC when there is high volume events. I also invite the OP to check out Blockmodo's API. We deliver this data to developers and institutional investors. https://blockmodo.com/docs/api https://blockmodo.com/docs/api We stream everything which includes the price, trades, news, social media and community posts, and code checkins. On the price side, we have two channels. We have a stream channel and a ticker channel. The stream channel derives the price of tokens by looking at raw trades from a select set of exchanges which have been vettted. We are based in SF and happy to help at no charge! Drop us a note.
coldacid 7y ago
When will open proof be available for everyone?
- songgao 7y ago
  You mean this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297
  - coldacid 7y ago
    I mean how they say all that but refuse to add fediverse sites and others that don't share the political views of the founders of Keybase or the mainstream Mastodon crowd.
giacaglia 7y ago
This is super cool! Making it easier to send or receive crypto is a worthy cause! :-)
filleokus 7y ago
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!
- thefreeman 7y ago
  Have you tried their white paper? https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
- vcarl 7y ago
  Bob Glickstein wrote a really phenomenal writeup https://medium.com/interstellar/understanding-the-stellar-consensus-protocol-423409aad32e https://medium.com/interstellar/understanding-the-stellar-co...
- malgorithms 7y ago
  David Mazières (designer of the protocol) has given a number of talks. Here's a good video of his talk at Google, and I believe it's the one I watched a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwnhZmEZjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwnhZmEZjc
- drexlspivey 7y ago
  This video does a good job explaining the stellar consensus protocol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Gj2nQZCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Gj2nQZCNM
- timerol 7y ago
  For an amusing walkthrough, I'd recommend 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...
cimbali33 7y ago
Yey, why not let's adding some cryptocurrency functionalities when the client/android application is still a mess. > On the android application is impossible to upload a file into the encrypted filesystem unless they are images or videos, really? > on the desktop and android chat is impossible to send audios > In the android application there are a lot of bugs relatives to the download of files > why should I use repositories on my phone?
andrewstuart 7y ago
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.
- feanaro 7y ago
  > I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category. This is unnecessary bias, though. If you look past the drama, cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.
  - dogecoinbase 7y ago
    If something is primarily used for scams, it's a perfectly reasonable heuristic to associate it with scams. I understand why Keybase is doing this (the attraction of cryptocurrency is profound, and not just because there's so much money being thrown around), but it not do anything for their credibility.
  - gumby 7y ago
    > cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention. Can you explain? Intellectually interesting? No question. But powerful or useful (I consider them synonyms)? I'd like to see some actual examples. This is genuine curiosity, not snark. I'm on the board of a blockchain startup who has a legitimate application for a blockchain -- an aspirin. But this application could have been done 20 years ago if there hadn't been patent issues for hash chains. And while the engineers are enthusiastic to do a coin nobody can explain why someone else would want to buy one, except in the hope that someone someday would pay more for it. I've seen a few vaguely interesting applications cor crypto currencies, but they are all been at best 'vitamins'. I've yet to see an 'aspirin'.
alexnewman 7y ago
Is interstellar still around? I love the tech, but I believe keybase affixed horse to wrong cart.
elamje 7y ago
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.
yarrel 7y ago
Keybase is now a wire transmitter. Just without KYC/AML. Yet.
- capybaraz 7y ago
  It's a non-custodial wallet. Per recent FinCEN guidance, non-custodial wallets are not regulated as money transmitters.
andyburke 7y ago
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.
- flatline 7y ago
  Keep in mind that the purchase of crypto in the US could be a taxable event, and the sell or transfer of it almost certainly is. I would look very closely at the Keybase/Stellar reporting tools and your tax situation to assess the impact before diving into the crypto pool, especially for casual, near-term transactions like this facilitates.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  It's like any other currency. If you wanted to buy GBP, you'd have to go to an exchange and transfer them to your bank, which had to support GBP for your account. Sure, it would be better UX if they could charge you some USD and give you Lumens, but I don't think it's worse than obtaining any other currency.
- mirimir 7y ago
  So how can I anonymously exchange Bitcoin for Stellar/Lumen? CoinBase Pro is useless. They want to know too much.
xof711 7y ago
Exciting news! Can't wait to start using it!
drexlspivey 7y ago
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.
- seibelj 7y ago
  My biggest problem with Stellar (and Ripple, which it was forked from) is that it's a centralized blockchain. Transactions are public, but you cannot become a block-producing node (validator). This allows censorship if they do not like the person proposing transactions, or the transaction itself, and could rollback if they wanted. I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.
  - drexlspivey 7y ago
    This is true for Ripple but not for stellar. In stellar you become part of consensus when any node adds you to their quorum slice. For example IBM runs a node, if they do business with your company they want to add you to their quorum and you are part of consensus.
  - jillesvangurp 7y ago
    This is one of those things that comes up frequently in discussions about Stellar. It's simply not true. It's neither centralized nor limited to a few partners. You can start your own validator easily. The way the Stellar consensus protocol works is that when you do that, you specify which other validators to trust. The consensus in the network of validators is based on the network of who is trusting whom. Right now there are a few dozen companies running validators: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html that trust each other directly or indirectly. Most of the companies running these validators are doing so because they have business dependencies on the network. Running a validator is not actually free and comes with a bit of devops overhead. So you need a good business reason to do so as mining is just not a thing in Stellar. If you are doing business on Stellar, trusting your direct business partners is probably a smart thing. E.g. IBM and the banks they are partnering likely have ironclad contracts between them and good reasons to trust each other's validators. Most nodes also trust the SDF and trusting additional nodes for resilience is basically something you can do based on your judgment of who is running those nodes and how well they are running them (up time). Lots of new nodes start with a default configuration that includes the Stellar foundation's own nodes. This is a bit of a problem. Stellar foundation is actually considering shutting down their own validators at this point as there are now plenty of reliable other validators around that they don't need to be there by default anymore. Over time, the number of validators and companies using them is likely to grow substantially. The network gets more robust as the network grows organically. Of course for a malicious node the trick is getting others to trust you back. This only happens when people actually trust you. This makes e.g. 51% attacks really hard because you can spin up all the nodes you want but if people think you are a scammer, your nodes won't have any decision power. Mostly that's a good thing. Stellar is very resilient against this kind of thing; unlike other networks.
intpbro 7y ago
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
icelancer 7y ago
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 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.. 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."
- thanatos_dem 7y ago
  Yup... I was part of one of the first XLM grants. I saved my credentials and stopped paying attention until recently when I tried to go to my account. There was some sort of wallet migration needed due to a security issue, and it needed to be done years ago, so it’s all just gone now. Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    So you're angry that the virtual money you got as a handout, from a system in early development, was lost four years later after you failed to act on an upgrade announced months in advance. Sounds fair.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      I don’t know about you, but the bank cannot arbitrarily decide that my money is gone because I didn’t deign to respond to them within a certain time period. The moment the bank starts doing that it’s not a bank any more, it’s a scam.
sealthedeal 7y ago
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.
zeroxfe 7y ago
For folks that want to learn more about stellar: https://github.com/0xfe/hacking-stellar https://github.com/0xfe/hacking-stellar
giancarlostoro 7y ago
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?

169 points by malgorithms 7y ago

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.

malgorithms 7y ago
CoinMarketCap's paid API. We're open to considering other data sources.
- modeless 7y ago
  I would suggest OpenMarketCap instead. CoinMarketCap is known to include exchanges that fake their volume and I wouldn't be surprised if their price data is somewhat manipulated too. https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq https://openmarketcap.com/exchanges/faq
  - electic 7y ago
    Correct. The price especially is wrong on CMC when there is high volume events. I also invite the OP to check out Blockmodo's API. We deliver this data to developers and institutional investors. https://blockmodo.com/docs/api https://blockmodo.com/docs/api We stream everything which includes the price, trades, news, social media and community posts, and code checkins. On the price side, we have two channels. We have a stream channel and a ticker channel. The stream channel derives the price of tokens by looking at raw trades from a select set of exchanges which have been vettted. We are based in SF and happy to help at no charge! Drop us a note.

coldacid 7y ago

When will open proof be available for everyone?

songgao 7y ago
You mean this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639297
- coldacid 7y ago
  I mean how they say all that but refuse to add fediverse sites and others that don't share the political views of the founders of Keybase or the mainstream Mastodon crowd.

giacaglia 7y ago

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

filleokus 7y ago

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!

thefreeman 7y ago
Have you tried their white paper? https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
vcarl 7y ago
Bob Glickstein wrote a really phenomenal writeup https://medium.com/interstellar/understanding-the-stellar-consensus-protocol-423409aad32e https://medium.com/interstellar/understanding-the-stellar-co...
malgorithms 7y ago
David Mazières (designer of the protocol) has given a number of talks. Here's a good video of his talk at Google, and I believe it's the one I watched a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwnhZmEZjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwnhZmEZjc
drexlspivey 7y ago
This video does a good job explaining the stellar consensus protocol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Gj2nQZCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Gj2nQZCNM
timerol 7y ago
For an amusing walkthrough, I'd recommend 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...

cimbali33 7y ago

Yey, why not let's adding some cryptocurrency functionalities when the client/android application is still a mess. > On the android application is impossible to upload a file into the encrypted filesystem unless they are images or videos, really? > on the desktop and android chat is impossible to send audios > In the android application there are a lot of bugs relatives to the download of files > why should I use repositories on my phone?

andrewstuart 7y ago

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.

feanaro 7y ago
> I associate crypto with shonk, which puts keybase.io in the "this is a crypto thing? Hmmm.... shonky." category. This is unnecessary bias, though. If you look past the drama, cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention.
- dogecoinbase 7y ago
  If something is primarily used for scams, it's a perfectly reasonable heuristic to associate it with scams. I understand why Keybase is doing this (the attraction of cryptocurrency is profound, and not just because there's so much money being thrown around), but it not do anything for their credibility.
- gumby 7y ago
  > cryptocurrency is a powerful and useful invention. Can you explain? Intellectually interesting? No question. But powerful or useful (I consider them synonyms)? I'd like to see some actual examples. This is genuine curiosity, not snark. I'm on the board of a blockchain startup who has a legitimate application for a blockchain -- an aspirin. But this application could have been done 20 years ago if there hadn't been patent issues for hash chains. And while the engineers are enthusiastic to do a coin nobody can explain why someone else would want to buy one, except in the hope that someone someday would pay more for it. I've seen a few vaguely interesting applications cor crypto currencies, but they are all been at best 'vitamins'. I've yet to see an 'aspirin'.

alexnewman 7y ago

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

elamje 7y ago

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.

yarrel 7y ago

Keybase is now a wire transmitter. Just without KYC/AML. Yet.

capybaraz 7y ago
It's a non-custodial wallet. Per recent FinCEN guidance, non-custodial wallets are not regulated as money transmitters.

andyburke 7y ago

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.

flatline 7y ago
Keep in mind that the purchase of crypto in the US could be a taxable event, and the sell or transfer of it almost certainly is. I would look very closely at the Keybase/Stellar reporting tools and your tax situation to assess the impact before diving into the crypto pool, especially for casual, near-term transactions like this facilitates.
StavrosK 7y ago
It's like any other currency. If you wanted to buy GBP, you'd have to go to an exchange and transfer them to your bank, which had to support GBP for your account. Sure, it would be better UX if they could charge you some USD and give you Lumens, but I don't think it's worse than obtaining any other currency.
mirimir 7y ago
So how can I anonymously exchange Bitcoin for Stellar/Lumen? CoinBase Pro is useless. They want to know too much.

xof711 7y ago

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

drexlspivey 7y ago

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.

seibelj 7y ago
My biggest problem with Stellar (and Ripple, which it was forked from) is that it's a centralized blockchain. Transactions are public, but you cannot become a block-producing node (validator). This allows censorship if they do not like the person proposing transactions, or the transaction itself, and could rollback if they wanted. I'm a much bigger fan of Cosmos and (future) PoS Ethereum, which is permissionless to become a block producer - you just need to acquire enough stake.
- drexlspivey 7y ago
  This is true for Ripple but not for stellar. In stellar you become part of consensus when any node adds you to their quorum slice. For example IBM runs a node, if they do business with your company they want to add you to their quorum and you are part of consensus.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  This is one of those things that comes up frequently in discussions about Stellar. It's simply not true. It's neither centralized nor limited to a few partners. You can start your own validator easily. The way the Stellar consensus protocol works is that when you do that, you specify which other validators to trust. The consensus in the network of validators is based on the network of who is trusting whom. Right now there are a few dozen companies running validators: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/nodes.html that trust each other directly or indirectly. Most of the companies running these validators are doing so because they have business dependencies on the network. Running a validator is not actually free and comes with a bit of devops overhead. So you need a good business reason to do so as mining is just not a thing in Stellar. If you are doing business on Stellar, trusting your direct business partners is probably a smart thing. E.g. IBM and the banks they are partnering likely have ironclad contracts between them and good reasons to trust each other's validators. Most nodes also trust the SDF and trusting additional nodes for resilience is basically something you can do based on your judgment of who is running those nodes and how well they are running them (up time). Lots of new nodes start with a default configuration that includes the Stellar foundation's own nodes. This is a bit of a problem. Stellar foundation is actually considering shutting down their own validators at this point as there are now plenty of reliable other validators around that they don't need to be there by default anymore. Over time, the number of validators and companies using them is likely to grow substantially. The network gets more robust as the network grows organically. Of course for a malicious node the trick is getting others to trust you back. This only happens when people actually trust you. This makes e.g. 51% attacks really hard because you can spin up all the nodes you want but if people think you are a scammer, your nodes won't have any decision power. Mostly that's a good thing. Stellar is very resilient against this kind of thing; unlike other networks.

intpbro 7y ago

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

icelancer 7y ago

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 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.. 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."

thanatos_dem 7y ago
Yup... I was part of one of the first XLM grants. I saved my credentials and stopped paying attention until recently when I tried to go to my account. There was some sort of wallet migration needed due to a security issue, and it needed to be done years ago, so it’s all just gone now. Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  So you're angry that the virtual money you got as a handout, from a system in early development, was lost four years later after you failed to act on an upgrade announced months in advance. Sounds fair.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I don’t know about you, but the bank cannot arbitrarily decide that my money is gone because I didn’t deign to respond to them within a certain time period. The moment the bank starts doing that it’s not a bank any more, it’s a scam.

sealthedeal 7y ago

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.

zeroxfe 7y ago

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

giancarlostoro 7y ago

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?