9 ms·

How I Accumulated 2M Stellar in Less Than 24 Hours

104 points by everettForth 12y ago

malanj 12y ago
That seems like the market mechanism working as it should. It's a little tacky, but effectively the turkers are valuing their Stellars really low. I'm not sure it's a problem. Arguably Bitcoin was the same initially, except in Bitcoin's case you paid CPU manufacturers and electrical utility companies who preferred to be paid cash than mine Bitcoin themselves. Division of labour in action.
dan_bk 12y ago
Is USD 1.00-2.00 really enough of an incentive for people to do this (instead of keeping the Stellars), considering they (normally) can do this only once (b/c 1 FB account)? (Edit: it seems more likely to me that, if this was done over MT, the people working on MT were in turn using botnets for scale.)
- opendais 12y ago
  Yes or just human spammers in low labor cost countries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
- listic 12y ago
  I actually thought it is way too much. People are filling surveys for cents there, after all.
gus_massa 12y ago
Stripe paid $3000000 for 2000000000 stellars @$0.0015. He's paying up to $2 for 5000 stellars @$0.0004. So the MT are selling it at a 25% of the Stripe price. IF stellar is a success, hoarding can be a good idea. But if this has a fate similar to to Auroracoin (also heavily premined, handed out for free to everybody) the price may drop 20 fold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin
- imaginenore 12y ago
  And it will. There's nothing revolutionary about Stellar. It's a fork of Ripple (the founders of which already cashed out). Instead of inventing yet another premined coin Stripe should have integrated Ripple.
  - EarthLaunch 12y ago
    They should have integrated Bitcoin.
    - imaginenore 12y ago
      Yeah, they should have.
opendais 12y ago
Everett, The cat was out of the bag before you even tried. The only difference is others showed restraint and didn't break Stellar's mechanism intentionally. When I pointed out you could buy access to FB accounts, you weren't actually supposed to go out and do it, y'know? Just because we can break dumb mechanisms like these just means we have to show restraint. :/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497 > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430
- gdb 12y ago
  Note that Everett was paying Mechanical Turks to auth their legitimate/existing Facebook accounts — not to go and fill out a bunch of captchas to farm new ones.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Yes. That is farming Facebook accounts. :/ If I had meant "creating Facebook accounts", I'd have stated that. This is a technique that has been used before on various blackhat forums. Generally farming is getting people in countries with cheap labor to go out and perform the action for you. Mechanical Turk is one way to do that. e.g. Term in a different way: http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/ http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/ Captcha Farms do the same thing but with a private pool of cheap labor. Gdb, I was trying to be circumspect and not spelling it out so some script kiddie didn't go and immediately use the technique.
- kibibu 12y ago
  I know there are clever people working on this, but I can't see how any system based on handing out free money can really work. "Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course all become immensely rich."
  - opendais 12y ago
    Honestly, I'm mainly just angry someone went out and basically ignored the fact multiple people told Stellar this would happen. Then went and did it.
SandroG 12y ago
Everett's response is much appreciated. Per my original HN post last night which broke the story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119], I still think that he gamed the system. If I remember correctly, he asked mTurkers to create a Stellar account _without_ an identifiable account name so the transaction couldn't be easily backtracked. Also, he did not use his real name in mTurk and impersonated someone else. Not sure if his actions violated the ToS. It was right for Everett to have come forward and disclose his means. His suggestions to improve the system are excellent. It will improve the Stellar system for everyone involved. Nevertheless, I believe that he should donate his balance to a charity. It will be an honorable thing to do. Sandro
- lessnonymous 12y ago
  It makes no sense to suggest he donate it to charity. He found a pile of people willing to sell him the goods at a price both they and he were happy with. If something like Stellar is to succeed you can't put limits on the free market and the transactions that are allowed to take place using them. Just because he didn't use his real name doesn't make the transaction less valid. And just because the task didn't use an identifiable account name doesn't make the transaction less valid. What you're insisting is that you can't buy something from someone on Craigslist using a fake name and meeting in a place that nobody else can tell where you made the transaction. In other words, 99% of Craiglist transactions.
  - SandroG 12y ago
    He found a pile of people looking for a job, and willing to perform a set of tasks for a certain price. Nowhere was it disclosed that this was a one-time deal, and by proceeding they would be forever limiting the upside of their personal economic prosperity. If you disclosed to these people that this is a one-time transaction, and that they will forever be parting ways with their only allotment of currency which might appreciate in the future, and which is currently valued 50X higher, I bet you wouldn't get as many takers.
    - 12y ago
prezjordan 12y ago
Why would you tell people this?
- opendais 12y ago
  For some reason the link to the other HN thread got downvoted so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 He got outed.
everettForth 12y ago
https://twitter.com/EverettForth/status/495725720464023552 https://twitter.com/EverettForth/status/495725720464023552
jnbiche 12y ago
I just read at the top of Stellar's forum a note from Joyce Kim, CEO of Stellar: >We expect that as a price for stellar becomes more established, we'll have to continually adjust the total amount of the giveaway to make sure it keeps making sense. So they're already dialing back their distribution promise. This is exactly what happened with Ripple. When Ripple first started, there were assurances that all but 20% of Ripples would be distributed "as quickly as possible". That didn't happen. Several years later now, Ripple has decided to basically keep as many ripples as they can, which is supposedly part of what led to the split between Jed and the Ripple leadership/owners. All this is a funny commentary on human nature. As an outsider, it's as clear as day to me that in order to succeed, Ripple needed to rapidly distribute as many XRP as possible. After all, 5% of a lot of money is worth much more than 50% of nothing. The only other missing ingredient for Ripple was community engagement. And with Stellar I fear we'll see the same thing (at least with respect to a rapidly decreasing distribution rate). These issues are exactly why Bitcoiners are so scornful of "pre-mined" coins. All things considered, proof-of-work and proof-of-burn are still by far the fairest and most successful currency bootstrapping methods. Stellar uses neither. Bootstrapping a currency is the ultimate Zen undertaking: in order to make money as a crypto-bootstrapper, you must find ways to distribute it, either by giving it away or (preferably) by fostering entrepreneurship and spending it on those merchants who take a chance on accepting it. A lesson much of the Bitcoin community still hasn't taken to heart, which is likely the only reason why interest in the coin is failing to pass on from the early adopter to the early majority.
- swamp12 12y ago
  Sorry that wasn't clear. What she means is the amount given to each person. We are still and always will be committed to giving away the total 95B stellars. I just edited her post to clarify what we were trying to say.
  - jnbiche 12y ago
    Thanks for the response. At the same time, I remained concerned by this idea that an increase in value of Stellars would slow down the rate of distribution. After all, new users are a limited commodity (particularly after the honeymoon period). So almost by definition, if you chose to decrease the amount of Stellars distributed because the price is increasing, then you're slowing down the rate of distribution. Which is exactly what Ripple has done. I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this one, but I'm definitely taking a wait and see approach.
cconcepts 12y ago
Am surprised no one with the coding skills has put up a graph showing the value of a Stellar over time. A rudimentary beginning could be a derivative of these values: http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl Which is currently around $0.000353USD/STR ($2.05/5800)
- cconcepts 12y ago
  I must be missing something, was that not an OK thing to say?
- striking 12y ago
  What was supposed to be at that link? Could you take a screenshot?
  - cconcepts 12y ago
    It was the Mechanical Turk page showing people buying/selling Stellar
SandroG 12y ago
I bet that the unsuspecting Mechanical Turk workers, who traded their 6000 Stellars, did not realize that this was a one-time deal, rather than a repeatable revenue opportunity. Mechanical Turk workers are used to low-paying and high-volume jobs. The $1.00 fee is very attractive for the steps involved, if this was a repeatable job. It's only natural to assume that every worker would attempt to create another Stellar account and retry the steps anew, only to be confronted with a an error after the first attempt. And, unbeknownst to them, if Stellar does become a success, those workers will forever be left on the sidelines. Considering that Stellar has the potential to include the world's underprivileged into the global economy, often without bank accounts or identities, it's a shame that we are the first to take advantage of them.
- Aqueous 12y ago
  Or Stellar flops and the guy just spent 24 hours of his life and $50 or so dollars to accumulate a bunch of useless not-even-paper. It could go either way. The mechanical turk workers implicitly made the bet that stellars will not be worth much more than they are worth today in the future - and were thus, reasonably, willing to trade nothing for real actual money that's there right now.
  - SandroG 12y ago
    Those same workers could have traded in their 5000 Stellars for $50 on Stellar Forums. Everett was actively selling 5K Stellars at $50 [http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-for-your-5-000/520/32 http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-fo...], while buying them at $1 on Mechanical Turk.
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      Otherwise known as "Arbitrage" and something that any commodity, let alone currency faces in the first 30 seconds on the market. If it wasn't Everett, there is a 100% guarantee that if there was money to be made, that any one of another 10,000 people would be immediately utilizing this mechanism.
    - 12y ago
hankhill 12y ago
Not only is he arguably violating Mechanical Turk's terms of service by simple asking people to sign up for this in the first place, he's even gaming MTurk itself by creating multiple Amazon accounts with pseudonyms and spamming the marketplace with requests. Cute, Mr. Forth, really, really cute. Update: If you don't believe it, here's a screenshot straight from HIT Scraper, a Greasemonkey script MTurk workers often use to display job listings on Mechanical Turk in a more easily parsable fashion: http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3 http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3 Not sure how he pulled this one off, considering Amazon is now requiring a verified SSN or tax ID for requesters to purchase money to post HITs, but there you have it.
- yincrash 12y ago
  When was the screenshot taken? Once the cat was out of the bag about what he was doing, I'm sure many people decided to also try the same thing.
- striking 12y ago
  Maybe those HITs were posted by other people, recently?
joyce 12y ago
I am the executive director of Stellar. Wanted to share my reply to the MTurk stuff: http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026 http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026
- cheshire137 12y ago
  On my laptop, I scroll the screen but cannot read all the text in the blue popup titled "Updates from Stellar HQ." It just scrolls the white page underneath, which is not what I'm trying to read.
  - alanfalcon 12y ago
    Yeah I had a lot of problems with this on my iphone
iamjdg 12y ago
hey everett, just because you are so ahead of the curve i used my "send 1000, receive 1000" new stellar account promo on you..well deserved, spend wisely...

104 points by everettForth 12y ago

That seems like the market mechanism working as it should. It's a little tacky, but effectively the turkers are valuing their Stellars really low. I'm not sure it's a problem. Arguably Bitcoin was the same initially, except in Bitcoin's case you paid CPU manufacturers and electrical utility companies who preferred to be paid cash than mine Bitcoin themselves. Division of labour in action.

dan_bk 12y ago

Is USD 1.00-2.00 really enough of an incentive for people to do this (instead of keeping the Stellars), considering they (normally) can do this only once (b/c 1 FB account)? (Edit: it seems more likely to me that, if this was done over MT, the people working on MT were in turn using botnets for scale.)

opendais 12y ago
Yes or just human spammers in low labor cost countries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
listic 12y ago
I actually thought it is way too much. People are filling surveys for cents there, after all.

gus_massa 12y ago

Stripe paid $3000000 for 2000000000 stellars @$0.0015. He's paying up to $2 for 5000 stellars @$0.0004. So the MT are selling it at a 25% of the Stripe price. IF stellar is a success, hoarding can be a good idea. But if this has a fate similar to to Auroracoin (also heavily premined, handed out for free to everybody) the price may drop 20 fold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin

imaginenore 12y ago
And it will. There's nothing revolutionary about Stellar. It's a fork of Ripple (the founders of which already cashed out). Instead of inventing yet another premined coin Stripe should have integrated Ripple.
- EarthLaunch 12y ago
  They should have integrated Bitcoin.
  - imaginenore 12y ago
    Yeah, they should have.

opendais 12y ago

Everett, The cat was out of the bag before you even tried. The only difference is others showed restraint and didn't break Stellar's mechanism intentionally. When I pointed out you could buy access to FB accounts, you weren't actually supposed to go out and do it, y'know? Just because we can break dumb mechanisms like these just means we have to show restraint. :/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497 > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430

gdb 12y ago
Note that Everett was paying Mechanical Turks to auth their legitimate/existing Facebook accounts — not to go and fill out a bunch of captchas to farm new ones.
- opendais 12y ago
  Yes. That is farming Facebook accounts. :/ If I had meant "creating Facebook accounts", I'd have stated that. This is a technique that has been used before on various blackhat forums. Generally farming is getting people in countries with cheap labor to go out and perform the action for you. Mechanical Turk is one way to do that. e.g. Term in a different way: http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/ http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/ Captcha Farms do the same thing but with a private pool of cheap labor. Gdb, I was trying to be circumspect and not spelling it out so some script kiddie didn't go and immediately use the technique.
kibibu 12y ago
I know there are clever people working on this, but I can't see how any system based on handing out free money can really work. "Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course all become immensely rich."
- opendais 12y ago
  Honestly, I'm mainly just angry someone went out and basically ignored the fact multiple people told Stellar this would happen. Then went and did it.

SandroG 12y ago

Everett's response is much appreciated. Per my original HN post last night which broke the story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119], I still think that he gamed the system. If I remember correctly, he asked mTurkers to create a Stellar account _without_ an identifiable account name so the transaction couldn't be easily backtracked. Also, he did not use his real name in mTurk and impersonated someone else. Not sure if his actions violated the ToS. It was right for Everett to have come forward and disclose his means. His suggestions to improve the system are excellent. It will improve the Stellar system for everyone involved. Nevertheless, I believe that he should donate his balance to a charity. It will be an honorable thing to do. Sandro

lessnonymous 12y ago
It makes no sense to suggest he donate it to charity. He found a pile of people willing to sell him the goods at a price both they and he were happy with. If something like Stellar is to succeed you can't put limits on the free market and the transactions that are allowed to take place using them. Just because he didn't use his real name doesn't make the transaction less valid. And just because the task didn't use an identifiable account name doesn't make the transaction less valid. What you're insisting is that you can't buy something from someone on Craigslist using a fake name and meeting in a place that nobody else can tell where you made the transaction. In other words, 99% of Craiglist transactions.
- SandroG 12y ago
  He found a pile of people looking for a job, and willing to perform a set of tasks for a certain price. Nowhere was it disclosed that this was a one-time deal, and by proceeding they would be forever limiting the upside of their personal economic prosperity. If you disclosed to these people that this is a one-time transaction, and that they will forever be parting ways with their only allotment of currency which might appreciate in the future, and which is currently valued 50X higher, I bet you wouldn't get as many takers.
  - 12y ago

prezjordan 12y ago

Why would you tell people this?

opendais 12y ago
For some reason the link to the other HN thread got downvoted so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119 He got outed.

everettForth 12y ago

https://twitter.com/EverettForth/status/495725720464023552 https://twitter.com/EverettForth/status/495725720464023552

jnbiche 12y ago

I just read at the top of Stellar's forum a note from Joyce Kim, CEO of Stellar: >We expect that as a price for stellar becomes more established, we'll have to continually adjust the total amount of the giveaway to make sure it keeps making sense. So they're already dialing back their distribution promise. This is exactly what happened with Ripple. When Ripple first started, there were assurances that all but 20% of Ripples would be distributed "as quickly as possible". That didn't happen. Several years later now, Ripple has decided to basically keep as many ripples as they can, which is supposedly part of what led to the split between Jed and the Ripple leadership/owners. All this is a funny commentary on human nature. As an outsider, it's as clear as day to me that in order to succeed, Ripple needed to rapidly distribute as many XRP as possible. After all, 5% of a lot of money is worth much more than 50% of nothing. The only other missing ingredient for Ripple was community engagement. And with Stellar I fear we'll see the same thing (at least with respect to a rapidly decreasing distribution rate). These issues are exactly why Bitcoiners are so scornful of "pre-mined" coins. All things considered, proof-of-work and proof-of-burn are still by far the fairest and most successful currency bootstrapping methods. Stellar uses neither. Bootstrapping a currency is the ultimate Zen undertaking: in order to make money as a crypto-bootstrapper, you must find ways to distribute it, either by giving it away or (preferably) by fostering entrepreneurship and spending it on those merchants who take a chance on accepting it. A lesson much of the Bitcoin community still hasn't taken to heart, which is likely the only reason why interest in the coin is failing to pass on from the early adopter to the early majority.

swamp12 12y ago
Sorry that wasn't clear. What she means is the amount given to each person. We are still and always will be committed to giving away the total 95B stellars. I just edited her post to clarify what we were trying to say.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  Thanks for the response. At the same time, I remained concerned by this idea that an increase in value of Stellars would slow down the rate of distribution. After all, new users are a limited commodity (particularly after the honeymoon period). So almost by definition, if you chose to decrease the amount of Stellars distributed because the price is increasing, then you're slowing down the rate of distribution. Which is exactly what Ripple has done. I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this one, but I'm definitely taking a wait and see approach.

cconcepts 12y ago

Am surprised no one with the coding skills has put up a graph showing the value of a Stellar over time. A rudimentary beginning could be a derivative of these values: http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl Which is currently around $0.000353USD/STR ($2.05/5800)

cconcepts 12y ago
I must be missing something, was that not an OK thing to say?
striking 12y ago
What was supposed to be at that link? Could you take a screenshot?
- cconcepts 12y ago
  It was the Mechanical Turk page showing people buying/selling Stellar

SandroG 12y ago

I bet that the unsuspecting Mechanical Turk workers, who traded their 6000 Stellars, did not realize that this was a one-time deal, rather than a repeatable revenue opportunity. Mechanical Turk workers are used to low-paying and high-volume jobs. The $1.00 fee is very attractive for the steps involved, if this was a repeatable job. It's only natural to assume that every worker would attempt to create another Stellar account and retry the steps anew, only to be confronted with a an error after the first attempt. And, unbeknownst to them, if Stellar does become a success, those workers will forever be left on the sidelines. Considering that Stellar has the potential to include the world's underprivileged into the global economy, often without bank accounts or identities, it's a shame that we are the first to take advantage of them.

Aqueous 12y ago
Or Stellar flops and the guy just spent 24 hours of his life and $50 or so dollars to accumulate a bunch of useless not-even-paper. It could go either way. The mechanical turk workers implicitly made the bet that stellars will not be worth much more than they are worth today in the future - and were thus, reasonably, willing to trade nothing for real actual money that's there right now.
- SandroG 12y ago
  Those same workers could have traded in their 5000 Stellars for $50 on Stellar Forums. Everett was actively selling 5K Stellars at $50 [http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-for-your-5-000/520/32 http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-fo...], while buying them at $1 on Mechanical Turk.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Otherwise known as "Arbitrage" and something that any commodity, let alone currency faces in the first 30 seconds on the market. If it wasn't Everett, there is a 100% guarantee that if there was money to be made, that any one of another 10,000 people would be immediately utilizing this mechanism.
  - 12y ago

hankhill 12y ago

Not only is he arguably violating Mechanical Turk's terms of service by simple asking people to sign up for this in the first place, he's even gaming MTurk itself by creating multiple Amazon accounts with pseudonyms and spamming the marketplace with requests. Cute, Mr. Forth, really, really cute. Update: If you don't believe it, here's a screenshot straight from HIT Scraper, a Greasemonkey script MTurk workers often use to display job listings on Mechanical Turk in a more easily parsable fashion: http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3 http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3 Not sure how he pulled this one off, considering Amazon is now requiring a verified SSN or tax ID for requesters to purchase money to post HITs, but there you have it.

yincrash 12y ago
When was the screenshot taken? Once the cat was out of the bag about what he was doing, I'm sure many people decided to also try the same thing.
striking 12y ago
Maybe those HITs were posted by other people, recently?

joyce 12y ago

I am the executive director of Stellar. Wanted to share my reply to the MTurk stuff: http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026 http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026

cheshire137 12y ago
On my laptop, I scroll the screen but cannot read all the text in the blue popup titled "Updates from Stellar HQ." It just scrolls the white page underneath, which is not what I'm trying to read.
- alanfalcon 12y ago
  Yeah I had a lot of problems with this on my iphone

iamjdg 12y ago

hey everett, just because you are so ahead of the curve i used my "send 1000, receive 1000" new stellar account promo on you..well deserved, spend wisely...