
Stellar – Public infrastructure for money - dankohn1
https://www.stellar.org/
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swamp12
We have been heads down for the past several months working on the new network
that is much more scale-able, has a provably correct consensus mechanism and a
much more flexible modular design. It has cool features like multi-sig and
attaching arbitrary info to transactions. We released it in beta a couple
months ago: [https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-
proo...](https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/)

We are turning the new network live very soon.

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kanzure
Here are some interesting previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342348)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708844)

and why not: [http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-
bitcoin/](http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin/)

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kang
Among group of friends living together, let us say that we assume each having
1000 friendcoin by the virtue of being in the friend circle. Now we send each
other friendcoins and each transaction is a mail cc'ed to all the friends in
the circle. Thus no one can overspend their account and we now we have our own
money infrastructure.

The protocol I just described, is it decentralized? Stellar would say yes, but
I would say it doesn't look like it. A person outside the system cannot just
come and join. Needs prior verification.

From their white paper summary, "it requires unanimous agreement on system
membership by all participants. Each node in the network must be known and
verified ahead of time."

Is it centralized? No. But is it decentralized? I don't know.

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swamp12
Oh I think it was misunderstood. The full quote is: "Byzantine agreement
guarantees distributed consensus despite the Byzantine failure of
participants. However, it requires unanimous agreement on system membership by
all participants. Each node in the network must be known and verified ahead of
time." It is comparing SCP to Byzantine agreement protocols like paxos.

As in Stellar doesn't have this requirement. Here is the white paper:
[https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-
protocol.pd...](https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf)

~~~
kang
The difference between a byzantine agreement and a federated byzantine
agreement used in SCP is that it reaches consensus based on quorum slices
rather than the whole network consensus. This is just removing the graph edges
from the bitcoin node network. The real problem then is optimum quorum slicing
to guarantee many possible problems that might arise, such as partition-
tolerance, non-survival of a bad node etc .

Maybe you have addressed these concerns, I'll read the paper to check. Can you
please answer one question though, how are the coins originated in this
system?

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swamp12
Yes a node in the Stellar network doesn't need to know all the other nodes in
the whole network and adding and removing nodes is a fluid and open process
but yes there must be some transitive overlap in the quorum slices people
choose. The details would be better explained in the paper.

All the coins(lumens) exist when the network starts up. The Stellar Foundation
is distributing them in the following way:
[https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution](https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution)

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chasemiller
I've been following Stellar from a distance over the past year. After the
initial hype, there wasn't much news about it outside of the relatively small
Stellar community. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

