
Keybase cancels Stellar token airdrop - ceejayoz
https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019?update=2019-12-10
======
joallard
Seems like a lot of people are saying the airdrop and integrating Stellar to
Keybase was a bad idea, but I don't think so. There's a lot I like in the
Stellar-Keybase integration.

Keeping cryptocurrency keys secure has always been a challenge. Keep them too
well, lose your money; keep them not well enough, someone can steal your
money. It's a thin line to walk.

Keybase wants to make encryption user-friendly, and keeping cryptocurrency
keys secure fits very well to that purpose. This is probably the least painful
way I've kept crypto private keys.

Besides, the wallet is pretty functional, and is integrated to an app that's
already sync'd to my phone and computer. It's without fuss and just works.
Compare that to yet another app which I don't know, need to evaluate, don't
trust to keep my secrets, or won't share them across my devices. Here, it's
painless.

I personally knew Stellar already, but as a technical user (which I feel is a
natural demographic for any crypto to start to get early adopters), this
brought back Stellar in my mind and renewed my interest (or would've
interested me if I hadn't known it).

Besides, I quite like Stellar as a cryptocurrency for payments: fees are low,
and confirmations are near instant. And I'm not even naming the fact that it
natively allows you to keep fiat money as a Stellar asset instead of exposing
yourself to the risk of losing value to fluctuation. (Though there are
caveats, but the infrastructure is there natively to build very useful
things.)

I don't think this was quite bad a move as some make it out to be.

~~~
corobo
On the flip side of the anecdata I signed up for a thing that could prove I am
me in case it ever became useful then they added chat to it and something to
do with git and then started spamming me with some cryptocoin bollocks

~~~
cormacrelf
I discovered the first (surprisingly good) use case for keybase the other day
-- Terraform encrypted outputs which you can configure by simply providing
your keybase id. Extremely convenient. Perfectly joined the dots between a
complicated but secure thing (you had to store sensitive state in S3 with
server-side-encryption, which made it way too complicated to have sensitive
data in a small side project) and the throwaway easy but very insecure thing
(store the state locally/in a private git repo).

Of course, absolutely ZERO crossover between that kind of utility and this
Stellar thing. I'd like them to find more life-improving nuggets of utility
like that instead. Find more places in your life where you want something
encrypted ad-hoc but don't want to memorise your GPG key ID. Any time someone
would normally whisper to tell you something could be a candidate.

~~~
ithkuil
Could you please describe in more details the workflow with terraform?

~~~
deadbunny
(Using the IAM module because I'm lazy)

module "iam-user_foobar" { source = "terraform-aws-
modules/iam/aws//modules/iam-user" version = "2.3.0" name = "foobar" pgp_key =
"keybase:foobar" force_destroy = true create_iam_user_login_profile = true
create_iam_access_key = false password_length = "${var.password_length}" }

This sets the users password then PGP encrypts the password with their keys
from keybase. You can then use the module output to get the pgp encrypted
password and pass it to the user (manually, email etc...).

Otherwise it will put the password in plaintext in the state, not a massive
issue as you can set it to require changing next login. But eliminates the
even slight chance of leakage.

~~~
vageli
You can also encrypt the state with KMS (for example) and manage access to the
key to prevent casual access to your secrets in statefiles. Uploading
encrypted values in state is interesting though and using keybase for that is
awesome!

------
skywhopper
This was a terrible idea from the start. And I've been hearing from lots of
folks that the influx of "users" attracted to scammy stuff like this have been
harassing other Keybase users via DMs. Congrats on ruining your service,
Keybase.

~~~
kstrauser
Yeah, I got this one:
[https://twitter.com/kstrauser/status/1199040190980845575](https://twitter.com/kstrauser/status/1199040190980845575)

I went from about 25 followers to over 50 in approximately a month, after
being there more or less from the launch. Those first 25 were largely people
I've personally met in real life. The rest are entirely fakey.

~~~
twothamendment
Until Stellar, I've never been followed or contacted by some rando. Now if I
see either from a person who only has stellar and bitcoin attached to their
profile I just block them. Hopefully this Dec 10th announcement returns some
peace and quiet to keybase.

------
Demeisen
I feel like keybase is great as a key-management platform and _that's it_. I
found it to be a fairly pain-free way to manage a pgp key, and the ability to
associate it with a public social media identity is super cool. I don't really
get why all the other features are needed, and if there's a better platform to
do key management easily across devices I'll jump ship in a heartbeat.

~~~
chrismatheson
Lots of services are great key management. What I'm waiting for is encrypted
(or at least signed) email between myself and literally any company on the
internet communicating by email.

"can you just email me a copy of your passport photo and these 5 other things
i need to completely verify your identity to banks and so on"

errrr .... no ?

Individuals are arguably not fussed. But surely business can get behind some
better levels of encryption / verification ?

~~~
tialaramex
I wouldn't bother waiting. Just use a web site to transfer anything important
and give up email for this purpose.

A hard problem with email is that there is a boundary inside the address
itself. How can anyone know this is steve@example.com? Maybe an outside
authority can verify it's really @example.com but if I thought this was Steve
and it's actually Tammy then I'm unhappy anyway.

For your purpose you probably don't think you care. You don't know whether
custserv@example.com or customer@example.com or jenny.smith@example.com is the
right email address to be telling you that your complaint is being
confidentially processed anyway. But what about steve-the-plumber@gmail.com ?
Does it matter if this is really from Steve or the mail actually came from
tialaramex@gmail.com ?

Because the web doesn't have this authority boundary the Web PKI can actually
assure you of a meaningful fact to a worthwhile degree. This is really
[https://example.com/](https://example.com/). Is example.com really your local
plumber Steve? Are they legally authorised to repair your gas appliance? Are
they crooks? We can't answer those things. But we can tell you this is
definitely example.com

------
crawshaw
I think this is a good move.

Keybase had a certain quiet dignity to it. Everyone listed there was easily
identifiable to me so there was never any confusion over who I was talking to,
and it was easy to turn the notifications right down. We even used it for team
chat. Keybase had some appeal as "crypto means cryptography." Introducing a
cryptocurrency shattered that quiet careful image.

I wouldn't say cryptocurrency integration and the surrounding song and dance
is the reason we switched to Slack for team chat, but it is the reason I
stopped advocating for staying on Keybase.

I hope this move is part of shoring up the "quiet reliable tool" image I had
of Keybase. Among the 1e6 chat programs I have to use to talk to everyone,
Keybase was the closest to feeling quiet and reliable, and I hope it does
again soon.

------
kelnos
One interesting thing I found was that they must have done some cleanup _very_
early on, or perhaps many people decided to opt out. According to the wallet
tab in the app, the Sept 9 airdrop went out to 280,598 users, while the Nov 17
airdrop (after the fake accounts started piling up) was only to 145,263 users.
Curious to see what this final airdrop will be like.

It seemed kinda novel and fun, but I've never really been interested in
cryptocurrency, and I have no idea what Stellar is good for, or even if I care
more than my ability to cash it out as USD.

Overall Stellar feels like a distraction from Keybase building out their core
platform and improving the user experience to the point where I'd even think
of trying to get my non-technical friends to use it. And if they want to
attract the masses (maybe they don't), they need to integrate traditional
payments, in local currencies. (Yes, I know Stellar can act as an exchange
medium, but people will want single-click ability to transfer fiat currency
in/out of their bank account.)

~~~
weinzierl
I too received one drop in Sept and one in Nov. The communication from Keybase
sounds like the drops were happening monthly though. Was there an Oct drop and
did we miss it?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They pushed it back at the last minute because of the rework in registration
opt-in. Their disclaimer om the whole process was basically that it was a gift
and came with no guarantees.

~~~
weinzierl
Thanks, so I'm not the only one who wondered what is going on. Their last
message said literally: "You are still registered; _there is nothing for you
to do_ ". Emphasis theirs, not mine. I didn't receive the December drop
either. Their communication is confusing.

------
jrockway
$16,000,000 spent to acquire users that you had to then build a "block all
other users" feature for.

Does anyone know how successful this was at getting people on to the platform?
I had the same number of friends on Keybase before the airdrop was announced
as I do now.

~~~
jillesvangurp
You are thinking about this wrong. This is not money they had and are now
losing but value that they created and are now distributing to improve the
robustness of their economy (everybody wins). The SDF actually burned a lot of
tokens recently (way more than this airdrop) as well because they concluded
they were stockpiling too much and thus were putting their economy at risk.
the point of this airdrop was to increase circulation of XLM among real users.
The reason they are stopping it is that keybase had to scramble to keep bots,
spammers, etc. out, which kind of defeats the purpose because you get a few
bad actors accumulating disproportionately large amounts of tokens.

I was on Stellar already and received both airdrops so far. About 55$ in total
at the current rate. It peaked out at ~65$ a few weeks ago. It's a nice
gesture; much appreciated. I already earned (as in I worked for it) some XLM
through other means so I have a nice stash that I'm HODLing.

Keybase is actually a nice product. It lacks a few of the niceties of Slack
but it has made nice progress over the last year. Setting up a team is quite
easy and right now they are not really charging for it. I would consider it
for a small team.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, I like the product and I think sending money in a chat app is nice.

I guess it doesn't really affect me that the userbase is 50% crypto
speculators. I don't have to interact with them.

------
photoGrant
Yeah this whole farce turned my 'trust' beacon away from keybase. I know that
sounds like a strange thing to say, but I feel like trust is a compass and
this move was quite polarising. It felt like the iTunes U2 fiasco. Don't give
me something, and have me live with it if I never asked for it to begin with.

~~~
kelnos
... especially considering that there might be confusing tax consequences for
people who receive these.

~~~
hombre_fatal
About as confusing as receiving a cash allowance from your mom.

~~~
kelnos
Guidance from the IRS suggests that you need to maintain cost basis
information for cryptocurrency, and pay tax on any gains if/when you do
something that causes it to be converted to US dollars.

Hell, even with a cash allowance, if it exceeds a certain value during the
year, you owe gift tax (though it's obviously difficult for the IRS to figure
out about your allowance, especially if you never put it in a bank account).

------
ocdtrekkie
I appreciated the free only-crypto-I'll-ever-own-probably? But Keybase learned
that people ruin everything. I still think what they built here is really
neat, and hopefully once everything settles from the giveaway, what's left
will be worthwhile.

The original design of the airdrop seemed designed to reward mostly/only
existing users, but with the in for existing HN/GitHub users who might join.
Basically it was narrowly intended to be for developers. The redesign to
"avoid" abuse involved phone numbers, and allowing anyone with one in, which
was the real floodgates.

~~~
TeMPOraL
FWIW, the initial "in for existing HN/GitHub users" caused a huge spam account
problem for HN.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yeah, but the floodgates opened far worse when it wasn't limited to developer
focused websites. I feel they should've shutdown the way for new Keybase users
to join the airdrop. Stellar would've benefit from a large number of
developers having their crypto and potentially developing software to use it,
and Keybase would've been seen as rewarding their loyal users.

------
elamje
A lot of comments here don’t understand why Keybase added a crypto wallet, or
chat, or git, or file storage, etc.

It’s about user growth and attracting more people to the platform. Yeah git
repos seem a little random, but you can’t have huge user growth from just
offering identity verification.

~~~
zorked
Git repos are the only thing I use. I imagine there is a colossal overlap
between "people who can use Keybase" and "people who use git".

That said sharing files from the command line is super-convenient. I just
never remember it's a possibility!

------
exabrial
Stellar is a seriously cool cryptocurrency. The more I learn about it, the
more I want to actually use it for everyday stuff. And unlike bitcoin, it
isn't causing a massive energy waste.

Really the only thing missing is a way make semi-anonymous payments (sort of
like cash).

~~~
noxer
It's still mostly a bad copy of XRP so although overall "better" than bitcoin
is does nothing better than the predecessor (XRP). In fact stellar was created
because Jed McCaleb wanted to do a FB airdrops to push XRP but the rest of the
team dint like this idea. Their though a giveaway for actually crypto
interested people is enough and giving coins to people who don't understand it
would not add any value. Quite obviously they where right. But Jeb started
stellar and since day one airdrops the token wherever he can.

Disclaimer: I sold the XLM I got years ago for XRP. I didn't participate in
the recent giveaways.

------
kjhughes
_Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come
in, far beyond the capacity of Keybase or SDF to filter._

Assumptions regarding the original purpose of the air drops:

1\. Stellar's goal was to spur use and circulation of XLM.

2\. Keybase's goal was to increase their user base.

I think they both took the easy way out: Give-away and pray.

If Stellar wanted to increase circulation, they should have rewarded transfers
and payments. Keybase could have supported that effort via their
infrastructure and possibly convinced their existing user base to become more
active on their platform. I suspect that they'd have gotten much farther by
demonstrating value to existing customers than trying to attract (buy, in the
basest sense of the term) new ones.

Opportunity lost, it would seem.

~~~
wheelerwj
> they should have rewarded transfers and payments.

It doesn't matter what they would have rewarded, it was going to be gamed.
This is a fact of life on the internet.

~~~
kjhughes
Sure, but when you're fighting a public perception that cryptocurrency is a
value store to be bought and held for huge windfalls, just giving it away
won't change perception or behavior. Incentivize people to learn to transfer,
spend, trade, or somehow _use_ the currency rather than hoard it (or
immediately cash it out as many of the fake users were likely doing).

------
seibelj
Stellar is a nonprofit and an organization that is trying to do positive
things in the space. Much respect to them. I agree with other commenters that
airdropping millions of dollars to Keybase users was not the best - I myself
traded them immediately. I think they could have spent ~$15million on devs
around the world to build integrations and features and that would have been a
far better investment.

~~~
noxer
They devs probably don't exist. Stellar is a copy of XRP. Its rather unlikely
any developer would build on stellar instead of XRPL.

------
marc3842h
I think this whole thing was a good idea, at least for me. I've had a Keybase
account since back when they were invite-only. Once this whole thing launched,
I finally convinced myself to take a closer look into this crypto currency
thing. Certainly an interesting topic.

------
aprvchndrs
I love Keybase for the ability to link together multiple identities together.

I use keybase with two profiles. One which is linked to my IRL identity. And
one which is linked to my internet identity.

The Stellar offering seemed really odd to me - because it seemed so outside of
its core functionality. Almost scammy.

Then I read an article on Ars Technica about a flood of scammers and that sort
of connected the two dots. The Stellar offering seems to have flooded them
with more “people” than they can handle.

~~~
mopsi
Stellar doesn't seem odd to me at all. One of the large hurdles of working
together with freelancers (especially from outside the US/EU) are payments.

If I find someone on Twitter or elsewhere posting artwork I like and I want to
hire them, then Keybase makes the rest quite simple: easy to confirm identity,
discuss details over chat, share files, and finally make payments.

Seems like a platform with great potential that's horribly misunderstood.

~~~
aprvchndrs
That’s actually a fair point.

I hadn’t considered Keybase as a platform for freelance work. If Stellar is
supposed to tie in with their Teams, Files and Git offerings - that makes much
more sense.

But the airdrops just felt off to me. Last time I checked the github issues
page - I saw half dozen issues raised just asking for airdrop info.

------
mirimir
I got one drop, but then there was the demand for a mobile number. So that was
that.

And what are Lumens good for, anyway? Are there any ~anonymous exchanges with
Bitcoin, etc?

~~~
linsomniac
I went looking around when I got the first airdrop, and it looks like the
answer to "what are lumens good for" is "Nothing." Turning into Bitcoin I
guess...

Stellar looked promising a few years ago, but doesn't seem to have gone
anywhere.

~~~
mirimir
I guess ...

I never had much interest in trading or investing in Bitcoin.

But I do earn a little Bitcoin, now and then. And I like to play with VPS, and
the occasional server. So I probably spend maybe $100-$200 in Bitcoin each
month.

And given that I do all that ~anonymously, it'd be far more hassle without
cryptocurrencies.

~~~
y4mi
Bitcoin isn't anonymous. The ledger is public and your wallet has to be linked
to you only once for every purchase you've done to be entirely attributed to
you.

This can even happen years after you've deleted the wallet key and moved on to
a new wallet.

~~~
mirimir
Sorry, forgot to mention mixing multiple times, using multiple Electrum
wallets, in multiple Whonix VMs via Tor, using different mixing services, etc,
etc, etc.

So sure, all that Mirimir spends is linked. But nothing is linked to my other
personas, or to me in meatspace.

Edit: Bitcoin Fog was used to mix thousands of Bitcoin from at least two
thefts. In 2013 from Sheep Marketplace, and in 2015 from Bter. And as far as I
know, none of that was ever traced.

That's just one of the mixers that I used. So I'm not at all worried.

~~~
mirimir
Edit2: I should mention that the current status of Bitcoin Fog is unclear. See
their Bitcoin Fog thread. So best don't use them.

~~~
mirimir
Make that "... Bitcoin Forum thread".

------
pornel
I kinda feel sorry for them. They must have realized they can't make $100M for
their investors by managing GPG Web Of Trust for a bunch of nerds.

Keybase was a nice protocol/command-line tool to prove identity, but it was
over as soon as they flipped it to being some wannabe Dropbox with Adobe-
quality autoupdate, then wannabe Slack, then some shitcoin-powered Twitter DM
spam.

------
scarejunba
I like Keybase. Pity about the outcome. Quite happy with my Lumens, though.

Also, interesting that the same user acquisition strategy works so often.
Paypal gave away money to acquire (it's also in _Zero to One_ but you'll
remember it when it came out), Coinbase did, Jet did, etc. I'm quite happy
with this strategy to be honest.

------
thebouv
That's a bummer. I liquidated the stellar they sent me. Free money. I bought
some plastic Orks to paint, ha.

~~~
bloopernova
I bought some Lego. Well, I mean, I withdrew the funds to coinbase then my
bank, and used those funds to pay for 2 Lego sets.

If I'm getting all my Stellar at once next week, I can complete my collection
of Avengers Lego sets.

OK, so it's not WAAAAAAGGHHHH! But it's the same small pieces of crack
cocaine. Although the WH40K lore is so much more wonderful than even the
Avengers movies :)

(are you cunning and brutal, or brutal and cunning?)

------
geofft
> _While this giveaway mostly worked, it 's clear that there will be
> decreasing returns and massively increased effort required. Why? Starting in
> the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come in, far
> beyond the capacity of Keybase or SDF to filter._

Keybase still doesn't see the hordes of _real_ people and their Eternal
September effect on the platform as a problem. I'm not saying they have to see
it as a problem - if they want to tell investors "We increased our userbase
N-fold by attracting a bunch of people who are just here for the free money,"
that's their right. But for those of us who were previously on the platform
for all the things Keybase used to advertise, it seems we're no longer the
target market.

------
neiman
"Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come
in.."

Who would have imagined giving free money would cause that?

------
utopian3
I've had keybase for a while, but never really used it. After spending an hour
going through all their requirements to sign up for this, it said I was
qualified, but then when I clicked the button to claim it... it said I wasn't.
I've tried 4x since and it didn't work

------
dbalan
For people like me who is confused about what this means:
[https://airdrops.io/stellar/](https://airdrops.io/stellar/)

------
bluehatbrit
I used to huge advocate for Keybase. I was drawn in initially by the elegance
of their social identity proof, and the chat that came from that. The idea of
being able to send a message to someone and know it was them struck me as very
powerful.

When they then announced KBFS I was excited. It was just as useful as chat,
and makes a ton of sense as a next step for the product. My second thought was
hoping that I'd be able to pay for a "pro" tier and they'd then become
profitable and sustainable.

Teams I also think was a very natural progression and definetely felt like the
next thing for them. Especially with sub-teams, it opened a lot of doors when
combined with KBFS and chat. To me it seemed to be gearing towards an eventual
free personal tier with paid-for teams funding the platform. This would be
similar to the model we've seen work with GitHub and such.

What came next was months of hoping that Keybase would become more stable and
easier to use. The apps were buggy, but I could deal with it. The UI/UX wasn't
very intuitive but with some effort I, as a technical person, could figure it
out. I could even explain the concepts to non-technical friends and get them
excited for it. But the quality just never picked up. The pain my friends
experienced came from a crappy user experience, an incredibly flakey app
(mobile and desktop). They all stopped using it, and so my usage became
limited as well.

Then after months of waiting and hoping for improvements, they announced
Stellar integrat. I was confused, it didn't really seem to have a straight
forward commercial aspect. In my mind, you can sell keybase with file storage
and teams, it seems like an attractive offering! Especially with hard line
gaurentees of identity, that's a huge problem which is suddenly solved. But
cryptocurrency, while fitting with the cryptography theme, didn't feel like it
fit with the product they'd built. What's more, the apps still hadn't become
more usable or stable.

I think my frustration with Keybase is that I thought they were using
cryptography to solve problems with communication and collaboration. Instead
it seems to be an excuse to for some crytopgrahy enthusiasts to build more
things with cryptography. There doesn't seem to be a commercial approach, nor
a true desire to make the power of cryptography accessible to the masses.

I really wish they'd invest in making teams, kbfs, chat, and identity easier
to use and more stable. If they did, I'd find it really easy to convince my
employer to give them money for the product suite. But instead they seem to
want to throw in any feature related to cryptography, rather than building a
product suite and applying cryptography to solve common issues.

I hope someone will one day take what Keybase has started, and will focus on
the product rather than the tech. I'm not a cryto expert, most of what I
learned was from being inspired by the Keybase articles. But at the end of the
day I want to leverage this tech to it's maximum, not just use it because it's
"fun".

------
StathamStack
Courtesy of Internet Archive: screenshot from December 4th, 2019:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191204211334/https://keybase.i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191204211334/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019)

2 Billion Lumens (XLM) were going to be shared over 20 months.

100 Million Lumens will be distributed on December 15th.

So, Keybase profits by keeping the remaining 1.9 Billion Lumens
(19000000000*0.053261 current USD rate)

~~~
floren
You were beating this same drum on /r/keybase and nobody was buying the story
then either. The fake money will most likely remain with Stellar, although I'd
rather it _did_ go to Keybase, a company which provides actual value... even
if it's fake money that I'll be leaving to languish in my Keybase wallet until
it drops to $0 value.

------
aliswe
Keybase is such a strangely positioned product. Really misses the mark for us.
No password reset, chatting, public profiles, likes, follow "crypto
influencers" ... And this campaign felt like a nigerian letter. It's like that
strange guest who noone invited.

The whole office will be relieved when we switch.

