
Stripe-Backed Stellar Places a New Bet on Blockchain in the Developing World - serg_chernata
http://fortune.com/2017/05/11/lightyear-blockchain/
======
mintplant
I was kinda excited to see this and the price jump, because I thought I still
had the 1,000 Lumens from when they were giving them away at launch. Turns out
they accidentally corrupted all accounts created before some date in 2014, so
my password and recovery code don't work and there's no way to recover. That
doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

~~~
nullstyle
IIRC There were a very small number of accounts that were corrupted during our
soft launch period. I think it was something like only the first 1000 wallets
were affected, but I could be off... it was a long time ago. Did you happen to
work for stripe at the time? I feel like it was only the prelaunch wallets we
gave out during our client testing period that got hosed beyond recovery.

But other than that, most people who lost their accounts tend to have bad
password management skills, frankly. They certainly could also be victims of
bugs in our client... it turns out one of our too ambitious goals during our
early days was building a banking-grade wallet experience that offered broad
browser support with as few developers as we were. Our support queues however
were a sobering lesson in how bad passwords are for security and usability and
it was just too much for our community manager and us on the dev team to
handle. Our bad... we were trying our hardest believe me.

I apologize if you got hosed because of a bug. I do know that all of my
friends and family accounts (6 of the earliest accounts in the system post
launch) were able to successfully upgrade to the new wallet and network as
late as sunday of last week. They. like you I imagine, got their free lumens
and then promptly forgot about the project. They all scrambled to update their
wallets when the craziness was going on at the end of last week with lumens
and they all upgraded fine.

I'd be happy to help you troubleshoot you wallet to see if we can recover you
lumens... email me at scott@stellar.org and we can work through it privately
if you like. I can't guarantee much, however... I'm presently starting on a
leave of absence for the next month or so and so the time I can dedicate to
support is pretty truncated at the moment.

~~~
nunyabuizness
Which service do I use to log in to the account I created when Stellar first
launched?

~~~
nullstyle
launch.stellar.org

------
runeks
In my opinion, all crypto-currency ventures which rely on their token suddenly
becoming money -- meaning it's liquid enough to absorb large sums in and out
of traditional currencies -- will fail. Currently, only the Bitcoin market has
sufficient depth to support a reasonable level of trade, since merchants -- as
things stand now -- need to pay their bills in traditional currency.

It's a bit like creating a Snapchat/Instagram Stories competitor, claiming
that you have a solution that lets everyone in the world chat with each other.
All that needs to happen is that everyone switch to your protocol. And with
money it's even worse, since people are not just risking incompatibility, but
the loss of real wealth, in case things don't work out as intended for the
users. The market, not the inventors, decides to what extent a given token can
be used to transfer value, by doing market making at the exchanges which trade
these tokens for whichever currency people's paychecks are denominated in.

Bitcoin becoming reasonably liquid is a damn-near miracle, in my opinion. I
thoroughly doubt any crypto-currency that doesn't substantially improve upon
Bitcoin will ever attract enough liquidity to become useful for tranferring
value (and even in this case, I think it's much more likely that Bitcoin will
just adopt whichever features that make this competitor superior).

~~~
qwtel
> it's much more likely that Bitcoin will just adopt whichever features that
> make this competitor superior

since the bitcoin community continues to fail to adopt the most basic measures
to do something about its scalability issue (transaction fees >> $1,
confirmations times >> 1h), i highly doubt that this is likely. Just like with
megacorps and startups, all the money in the world can't buy you out of
internal divisions and politicking.

~~~
runeks
Bitcoin shares the same limitations in scalability as all other blockchain-
based crypto-currencies. The only difference is that Bitcoin is so popular
that its limitations, scalability-wise, are becoming obvious.

There is no easy fix to adopt, so nothing has happened. Raising the block size
isn't a fix, it just pushes the decentralization/throughput-equilibrium
further towards "throughput" and further away from "decentralization".

~~~
pjc50
> pushes the decentralization/throughput-equilibrium further towards
> "throughput" and further away from "decentralization".

It's rare to see a crypto advocate admit that such a tradeoff exists!

~~~
runeks
It should be noted that our current financial system has the exact same
limitation: an international bank transfer (SWIFT) costs roughly $35, which
makes it entirely unsuitable for consumer-to-merchant transactions. This is
fixed by using credit instruments to clear payments going from consumers to
merchants, such as is done by VISA, MasterCard etc.

A similar (VISA-like) clearing system can be deployed on top of Bitcoin, thus
making it behave exactly as our current financial system does today. The
lowest layer (Bitcoins on the blockchain/USD in a bank account) acts as the
store of value, while protocols on top of this layer are used to make consumer
payments sufficiently cheap.

~~~
pjc50
$35 is the retail charge for the transaction though, not what it actually
costs - so e.g. within SEPA payments are free.

The difficult bit of retail payments is not clearing but fraud and disputes,
which bitcoin tends to wash its hands of.

~~~
runeks
My bank charges 20DKK (~$3) for a SEPA transaction. I'd be really interested
if you could show me a Danish bank that offers free SEPA transfers.

As for dispute resolution, I think it would be appropriate for this to be a
third protocol layer -- on top of VISA-style clearing. I see no reason the
clearing layer should handle this as well (and incorporating it into the
Bitcoin layer would be true insanity, in my opinion). Nor do I see a reason it
should be difficult. Costly, perhaps, but it's a simple matter of finding a
mutually trusted third party, who won't release funds to the merchant until
the consumer has received the goods.

------
c3534l
Uh, Mt. Gox on your resume isn't a good thing. It was a horrible failure that
cost a lot of people a lot of money and was revealed to have security
practices not suitable for a small business, let alone a financial
institution. So no, we shouldn't pay attention to this dime-a-dozen startup
because it's Jeb McCaleb.

~~~
qwtel
as I understand, he sold mt.gox to its current owners long before the attack,
which is also before they conducted a rewrite, that subsequently allowed for
the attack.

~~~
davidgerard
yeah, about that.

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/19/behind-
the-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/19/behind-the-biggest-
bitcoin-heist-in-history-inside-the-implosion-of-mt-gox)

The deal used a contract McCaleb and Karpeles worked out between them, without
either of them using a lawyer. It included terms such as:

> the Seller is uncertain if mtgox.com is compliant or not with any applicable
> U.S. code or statute, or law of any country.

> The buyer agrees to indemnify Seller against any legal action that is taken
> against Buyer or Seller with regards to mtgox.com or anything acquired under
> this agreement.

It was only in April, after the handover, that Karpeles realised that 80,000
bitcoins (then worth $62,400) had already been missing when he bought Mt. Gox.
McCaleb told him "maybe you don't really need to worry about it" and suggested
he buy up more BTC to cover the shortfall, shuffle his internal accounts
around, get an investor or just mine more himself - but didn’t offer any
explanation of where the coins might have got to or how.

It's entirely unclear that McCaleb has the attention to detail robust
financial systems require.

------
Jhsto
Nice to hear there are some actual news behind the price development of
altcoins. The market has been maybe even too lucrative during the past few
weeks. For example, my random purchase of Lumens with 20€ just two weeks ago
is currently sitting at 180€.

~~~
hendzen
What if the upward price pressure is actually people buying massive amounts of
bitcoin to pay off new ShadowBrokers-based ransomware? And the corresponding
rise in alts is the perpetrators using the alts to launder the ransom?

~~~
nullstyle
That seems unlikely given the volumes of trading we've been seeing. We
probably should have heard about a spike in ransomware last week if there is a
causal relationship.

Disclosure: I work for stellar and I have no clue what caused the spike in
trading and price.

~~~
sbisker
Still doesn't prove causality of course, but there's an article on the front
page at this very moment about a spike in ransomware. And most ransomware (and
ransom in general) is paid quietly, not discussed publicly.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14324129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14324129)

~~~
nullstyle
Yes, I'm well aware. And if you look at the dashboard for the botnet
([https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/wcrypt/?t=24h&bid=all](https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/wcrypt/?t=24h&bid=all))
it looks like we're dealing with ~80000 infected hosts.

Unless I'm reading things wrongs (and that certainly could be) it seems like
the ransom from those hosts would still be several orders of magnitude lower
than the new money that appears to be coming into the exchanges.

