
Keybase is now supported by the Stellar Development Foundation - jamessun
https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar
======
malgorithms
Blog author from Keybase here. Always game for a Hacker News discussion!

There's a subtle point I cut from my post for simplicity reasons, but which
feels perfect for HN. I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team
that the classic "blockchain" works great for native tokens but is extremely
dangerous for anything with counterparty redemption. For example, imagine the
shitshow after a truly contentious fork, if there are tokens which are
supposed to be redeemable with a counterparty.

Let's say Deutsche Bank had put €1 billion into colored coins on Bitcoin.
Suddenly, after a fork (e.g. bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash), there would be €2
billion IOU's in the wild. The people on each side of that fork would not roll
over and die, and it's not simple to say "Oh, whoever Deutsche picks wins." Or
even "Whoever has the strongest chain wins." I have a hard time imagining a
company would ever take that risk. I worry big companies would never dare to
put anything real-world redeemable directly onto, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum,
for this reason. They'd just get sued over and over again.

The Stellar federated consensus story (HN debates about SCP below [1][2]) has
Deutsche Bank as an actual player on the network. If you want DB redemptions
then you would include them in your trust lines / quorum slices, and if
Stellar fell apart and became partitioned, you would stay on DB's side. All
said, it seems significantly faster and more stable for cryptocurrency-to-
real-world mappings, both for the consumer and counterparty.

Fun discussions:

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687)
\-- of particular note, because it has David Mazières, Vitalik Buterin, and
Greg Maxwell all weighing in.

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16125920)

~~~
staplers

      I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team
    

As someone who's been in the cryptocurrency space for a long time I can
guarantee you got swindled. Countless investors I have seen move to
centralized "blockchains" due to buzzword powerpoint presentations and
floating_nodes.jpg bootstrap landing pages.

This is no different than what current financial institutions do other than a
new UI.

~~~
ordinaryradical
I don’t understand this comment. It doesn’t seem to address any of the key
technical points behind the Stellar project as it is actively used today, but
instead tries to imply that the foundation is some group of fly-by-night
scammers that have won over keybase by nothing more than a twinkle in their
eye.

My impression was that Lumens seemed to be solving one of the legitimate
problems of the world—the inefficiency of the SWIFT system for cross-border
transactions—and appears to have a viable model for doing so.

I don’t see how whether or not it’s centralized makes it a swindle?

~~~
diakritikal
It's possible more than one system could replace SWIFT, but why would it be
Stellar/Lumens who are still in the gate with their fork when Ripple/XRP seem
to be already round the first bend with seemingly very large momentum in terms
of interest, trials and actual production use by financial institutions?

~~~
mazieres
How is Stellar still "in the gate," more than two years after deploying their
decentralized Byzantine agreement algorithm?

Ripple has only just now, in 2018, published their decentralized consensus
algorithm (Cobalt), which as far as I know is not even in production use yet,
and doesn't provide optimal safety. (In settings where Cobalt is guaranteed
Safe, SCP would be too, but not vice versa.) Their production network still
uses a protocol that, by Ripple's own analysis
([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07242](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07242)), fails
to guarantee safety without >90% agreement on the UNL.

------
eropple
Last time Keybase came up I made sure to post about how great using it is and
that I am super-duper enthused about Keybase. I entreated 'malgorithms to let
me _give him money_ for Keybase. And I have recommended Keybase to a ton of
people and a bunch of my clients, using it in a bunch of workflows. Now those
people and those clients are going to have cryptocoin bullshit stuffed into a
_work_ tool?

Thanks, Chris. You're doing a great job of making _me_ look like an asshole
for believing in you guys.

I don't want your "monetization plays" and my clients don't either. _Giving
you guys money_ for Keybase is infinitely preferable to having cryptocoin
crap, Stellar or otherwise, being jammed into a tool I use for _work_. (Or
anything else, really, that I ever have to touch.) And I feel like a sap for
being an enthusiastic user of Keybase and recommending it to people when
_this_ sort of garbage is coming down the pike.

I am really, really disappointed.

~~~
StavrosK
Why are you disappointed if Keybase includes a wallet or a way to send people
Lumens? Can you not just not use it?

~~~
eropple
I recommended Keybase to people as a security tool. This isn't security. There
is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist in tools I rely upon. There
is no reason for cryptocurrency bullshit to exist things that I use in
production capacities.

It is the pure addition of risk to my operations and my clients' operations
and offers nothing to me except a ding to my reputation, because I now look
like an asshole because a security tool I recommended and spoke highly of is
now going to be flogging funbux.

~~~
talawahdotnet
I could maybe see your concern if Keybase were announcing an ICO for their own
token, but that is not what this is.

This really is about Keybase bringing expertise with identity to the table and
it makes a lot of sense for the two teams to work together. The currency side
of things is still going to be handled by Stellar as far as I can tell.

~~~
eropple
I understand what they are doing.

Here's how normal people look at something like this. It's not "oh, but
they're just _facilitating_ ," it's "why is there cryptocoin crap in this
thing we use for work?". Then it's "Ed, why is this thing you recommended and
spoke so highly about doing this? Are they cryptomining on our computers
now?". Then, even after an explanation, they're probably still suspicious and
probably right to still be suspicious because the cryptocurrency universe is,
by normal and sane people, still viewed as a scammer's paradise. (To be clear:
is this entirely justified? No, and I think there are decent people trying to
make a go of it. But there's _plenty_ of dirt going on and people should be
suspicious until it's proven otherwise.)

I don't want this on my computers. But, more than that, I don't want my
clients thinking that I am a party to shady business because of the tools I
recommend that they use.

~~~
mazieres
If you are so allergic to cryptocurrency, why didn't it bother you when
Keybase started writing their root into the Bitcoin blockchain
([https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...](https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitcoin_blockchain))?

There are obviously annoying ways in which keybase could support
cryptocurrency, but you are making a lot of assumptions about what Keybase is
going to do that are not based on the blog post. For example, wallets do not
mine coins and Stellar does not support mining.

Why don't you wait to see what comes out and submit a feature request if you
don't like it, instead of flipping out about some hypothetical feature you
won't like.

~~~
saintbellarmine
Thou art too wise sir. I guess we all have to do is to first wait and see how
the implementation is done.

------
fullsage
This post is very oblique in a way that makes me suspicious.

1\. Is Keybase still a for-profit corporation?

2\. No actual technology is announced here. Is the purpose of this post to
announce funding? If so, how much funding is it and what are the conditions
under which it is provided?

3\. How is Stellar compatible with privacy? Keybase mentions MobileCoin in
this blog post, but they are only using Stellar's consensus protocol, not the
full Stellar protocol. I think that is because Stellar isn't private. What is
Keybase doing to solve that if they are using the Stellar network?

~~~
nipponese
I think the translation is:

1\. We are now taking money from Stellar, so...

2\. We will support UserA/FiatX to UserB/FiatY in app, whenever we're allowed
to talk about it.

------
tgb
> And traditional banking, with its branches and offices and free dog treats,
> uses even more electricity than Bitcoin.

Isn't this disingenuous, to say the least? First, traditional banking uses
more (for now) but also performs orders of magnitude more transactions. I'd be
surprised if banking used more per transaction. Secondly, a bank does a lot of
things that Bitcoin doesn't even _try_ to do. I can walk into my local bank
and get quarters for me laundry, Euros for my trip, a loan for my house, set
up a retirement savings account and get advice on what to do with it, request
help if I've been defrauded, and probably a lot more I haven't ever
considered.

------
bkolobara
I first heard about Stellar from Patrick's (patio11) Harry Potter post around
3 years ago: Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars[1]. I have been
following Stellar closely since then and am also running one of the biggest
Stellar communities.

It's one of the rear cryptocurrency and "blockchain" technologies that
actually make sense to me. They have a simple structure: you are able to issue
assets/tokens on the network and you are able to send and trade them for other
tokens. I think that this simplicity allowed it to gain a lot of credibility
with bigger companies (Stripe, IBM, now Keybase, ...), while other
technologies like Bitcoin/Ethereum are getting just more and more complicated
with 2nd layer networks and locking up tokens in them. They stayed true to the
original ideas without introducing a bunch of buzzwords around them and trying
to avoid hype in their announcements[2]:

> Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric
> deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another
> crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re
> completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect
> they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming
> years.

[1] [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-
cr...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-
cryptocurrency-of-stars/) [2] [https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-
stellar-partnership...](https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-
partnership/)

~~~
jerguismi
You know what is even better? A SQL database. Very simple and you can do
almost anything with it. Also very proven technology.

~~~
leonsmith
Stellar is a postgres database under the hood and its just the stellar
concensus protocol (SCP) that determins which queries/transaction to apply to
your database in tandem with all the other nodes

~~~
talawahdotnet
They support SQLite as well :)

------
ris
I've stopped recommending keybase since they removed all references to being
able to do operations directly with gpg (which is a real shame - it worked
incredibly well and was the best example I've ever seen of web/CLI
integration). The whole thing is becoming very opaque and startup-y and hey-
we're-an-app have-you-downloaded-our-app why-not-app-our-app app-app-app-
app... I'm really not a fan of these "minimal" growth-hack-y websites which
seem so popular these days.

~~~
andrewjw
Just curious, around how long ago was this change made? Can you find
web.archive.org links for a page which was changed? I'd find them useful for
discussions with my peers.

~~~
ris
The gpg approach was available in September 2017, when I used it to setup my
account. I can't tell you any better than that though, and that's part of the
nature of opaque aggressive growth startups today. Things just disappear or
change with no acknowledgement of the past unless it's part of the story the
company wants to tell about itself _today_. It's reasons like this that I tend
to lose all interest in a project as soon as I hear they've taken VC.

~~~
mirimir
I recently used the terminal/gpg method to update my keys.

------
donquichotte
Read the announcement of the Stellar Foundation [1] for more detail. TLDR:

"We see a future where, say, I can send my friend 100XLM, and, via Keybase, I
can send it to her by knowing only her Twitter or Reddit handle."

[1] [https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-
partnership...](https://www.stellar.org/blog/keybase-and-stellar-partnership/)

------
blocked_again
You get a sense of positivity by just going through the stellar website and
documentation (eerily similar to Stripe). It is beautifully designed and easy
to understand. Kind of gives the feeling that they are in it for the long run
unlike many other get rich quick Ponzi cryptocurrencies out there.

~~~
oh_sigh
I recently had extensive contact with someone on their support staff(Robert)
regarding issues with my stellar coins(issued back in 2014 which I had
completely forgotten about until a month ago). We exchanged probably 10-20
emails trying to resolve my issue, which was eventually satisfiable resolved.
I came away with a very positive opinion about the seriousness of the team.

------
oelmekki
The thing I love the most about Stellar is how its founders want it to become
"the SMTP of payment". It's kind of amazing we still haven't such kind of
protocol widely available, and have to rely on private companies like Paypal,
Stripe or any bank's IPN to send money on the internet, decades after its
creation.

------
cmonfeat
Very cool news. It's always exciting to see Keybase introduce new features,
and the thought process behind them is usually pretty interesting to read.

There's definitely a very real need for an anchored cryptocurrency that isn't
a huge scam like Tether. It's cool that Stellar seems to solve this in a way
that doesn't require me to hand over all of my trust to the currency creator.

Also, that FAQ was awesome.

------
SteveJS
How does this change the threat model for using keybase? It would seem to
increase the target value of compromising the client. Is that immediate
impression wrong?

~~~
fiatjaf
Yes. I don't believe Keybase will not store Stellar private keys in any way,
this would be horrible.

~~~
xchaotic
what does prevent you from storing your private keys today? Nothing. The
association with Stellar might imply a higher likelyhood of something valuable
crypto related being there. However, I don't care, if the security of keybase
is somehow broken, I'd rather find out early on and with the increased
exposure, they may be getting free pen testing.

------
koko775
Welp, time to uninstall. I like Keybase a lot, but there are zero ways in
which I want my crypto to mix with my cryptocurrency.

~~~
ghostwreck
Probably should have done some more research before you installed the first
time. Keybase has been mixed with cryptocurrency since 2014 [1]

[1]
[https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...](https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitcoin_blockchain)

~~~
floatboth
eh, publishing audit log hashes into the buttchain doesn't really "mix" it on
the users' side

------
tristanho
The FAQs are the bottom are amazing. Seems to cover just about every HN
objection ever:

> Does Keybase itself have Lumens?

Thus far, SDF has supported us with cash — "dirty fiat" — which is what it
takes to build software. But yes, we will hold Lumens later.

> But Stellar is not Turing complete

Ok

> Hodl on a second - aren't these anchored currencies the same thing as
> "tethers" (USDT)? I hear bad things about them.

Sort of. How Stellar's view of real-world currencies is different:

you choose which issuing parties to trust. No one seems to know if Tethers are
redeemable. the exchange itself is decentralized; you can change your trust
lines whenever you like, and you can trade away the rubbish. This is very
different from being stuck in a centralized exchange with one questionable
currency-pegged token.

> What about Keybase profiles' support of Bitcoin and Zcash addresses?

This won't change. We continue to be big fans of Zcash (for all the reasons
mentioned here), Ethereum (for its flexibility), and Bitcoin (for its relative
stability). We're also excited for Filecoin.

We really are pro cryptocurrency across the board.

> Where can I learn about Stellar?

Here's a Talk at Google about it. After the video, you could read the Stellar
Consensus Protocol paper. And here's their blog post announcing their support
of us.

> Won't this distract the Keybase team from its other work?

All of our existing product (chat, teams, files, identity, etc.) should only
get better, with more total resources put into them.

> So are you launching a coin, like MobileCoin or Kik's?

No. We will be helping Stellar in general, not launching our own coin.

> Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze?

It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example?

> Any advice on storing cryptocurrency today?

Advice we've gotten is the Ledger Nano S.

> WHAT ABOUT MONERO??

...

------
exabrial
I <3 Keybase, though I wish I could generate my device keys with pgp rather
than _only_ having keybase do it for me. And of course, I'd love to store an
ssh key with keybase...

------
flashmob
I wasn't convinced about Stellar in that article. Some arguments given were
strawman like, especially when attacking proof of work (PoW) or other things
that are irrelevant because Stellar is something completely different.
Besides, I found the overall tone to be somewhat condescending, especially due
to the Monero snide at the end.

There are plenty of other low-fee, non-PoW coins out there, that the article
should have spent more time comparing to instead; So we know that stellar
doesn't use PoW - what I want to know is why the Stellar consensus algorithm
is better when compared to the other similar alternatives out there, and what
makes it faster and more secure. They also leave an elephant in the room - how
is Stellar more resistant to censorship? What I'd really be interested in
reading is why they chose it based on technical merits, rather than talking
down other projects.

------
zapita
Isn't Keybase a for-profit corporation? What does it mean for a non-profit to
support a for-profit? An emtry in the FAQ explaining this would be
appreciated.

------
CryptoPunk
>>We think Stellar can fulfill Bitcoin's original goal of fast, cheap,
worldwide payments.

Stellar will not remain fast, cheap and global. It has counterparty risk in
the form of the trusted third parties that form its consensus nodes. These
TTPs will censor transactions and introduce costly registration requirements
for the same reason traditional fintech companies do: to comply with the
demands of regulatory agencies.

The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are
decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like
Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum.

~~~
sethgecko
Only the third party issued tokens have counterparty risk i.e you trust the
issuer to redeem them somehow. Is that different than an ethereum ERC20 token?
The native asset itself (XLM) has no counterparty risk.

> The only networks capable of providing fast, cheap, worldwide payments are
> decentralized protocols without trusted third party intermediaries, like
> Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) and Ethereum.

IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability. Bitcoin
requires no trust but has a costly PoW consensus algorithm which does not
allow instant transactions and has a very low tps limit. You can't have both
(unless someone comes up with a better consensus mechanism)

~~~
CryptoPunk
XLM and everything else on a ledger like Stellar's has counterparty risk,
because consensus on these types of ledgers is established by a set of trusted
third parties. The TTPs are counterparties, and if they fail, the ledger
fails.

>>IMO it is a trade off between degree of trust and scalability.

In my opinion, the right approach to managing this trade-off is to build more
centralized platforms on top of the decentralized base layer. That way they
have a highly immutable/trustworthy base layer they can all interact on.

An example of this approach is the POA Network, which uses a set of US public
notaries to run high throughput validator nodes for a permissioned instance of
Ethereum. This permissioned ledger is a side chain of the Ethereum main chain,
which can interoperate with it, and has the advantage of being able to scale
to 1000s of transactions per second. One could envision multiple trusted or
semi-trusted ledgers operating on top of a decentralized ledger that acts as
the settlement layer.

------
ndreckshage
I'd be really interested in adding Twitter (etc) support to Lumenette with
help of Keybase, if possible. Hoping there will be an API for other wallets to
interact with the features Keybase is working on.

I've been using Keybase git and file storage for some time now. Really excited
about this partnership!

Lumenette wallet, for reference: [https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-
android-ios-stella...](https://galactictalk.org/d/1159-lumenette-android-ios-
stellar-lumens-wallet)

------
diakritikal
Given that stellar/lumen is a fork of ripple/xrp, and ripple/xrp seem to have
a massive head start with what 100+? bank and payment providers already on
board - are stellar/lumen not just competing head to head with Ripple with
essentially the same technology but with a handicap of being behind in terms
of development and not having an in-use production network and settlement
solution?

~~~
arianvanp
Is the current code still a fork? I thought stellar switched to their own
thing quite early alreaxy

~~~
nullstyle
Yeah, it hasn't been a fork for a long time. Disclosure: I work for stellar
and took part in the big rewrite.

------
chasemiller
As a long time Keybase user and Stellar holder, I couldn't be more excited for
this news! Congratulations to all!

------
redka
I feel like there's a very real synergy possible here. Keybase has a solution
covering security, identity, chat and multi-device usage that could be very
interesting when combined with a crypto-currency like Stellar Lumen. I wonder
what they have in mind in terms of features. Any guesses?

~~~
askmike
Given keybase is a social product around cryptographic security my bet is on
some kind of a social platform where stellar tokens play a big role.

------
xerxe-sans-s
Attaching a transaction history and wallet to an identity perfectly positions
keybase as a player in the credit scoring industry.

I’m excited to see this, and hopeful that it takes off. However, I’ve enjoyed
utilizing keybase as an identity tool. I’ve had a decent experience with the
system as a workplace productivity tool (chat, git). I’m worried that the team
will lose focus by branching into a third, and potentially fourth area of
focus.

------
SZJX
Sorry if this question is a bit stupid but could somebody enlighten me on why
Keybase seem to regard Monero quite poorly? From what I've heard it seems that
its anonimity is more trusted than that of Zcash at least, and both it and
Zcash are proof-of-work coins anyways. Is it simply because they already had
Zcash, so they'd rather not put something similar in there?

------
bigcoin
That's a very good partnership! Since Keybase maps social media identities to
encryption keys in a publicly auditable manner, as well as Stellar implements
Lumens as a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses
cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional
units, and to verify the transfer of assets

------
curo
In response to the environmental backlash argument, isn't the lightning
network supposed to substantially mitigate those concerns?

~~~
wmf
Lightning doesn't reduce mining in any way. Note that energy consumption of
mining is not related to transaction throughput.

------
vongesell
Beware of anything Jed McCaleb touches. The author of eDonkey, the horrid PHP
code that was MTGox, ripple and now stellar.

~~~
superobserver
Perhaps truer words were never spoken...

------
jasonmp85
> But Stellar is not Turing complete… Ok

This made me smile.

------
ldiracdelta
Is Stellar private by default, or do you have to add tumblers to gain some
semblance of privacy?

------
Cambridgeport90
this is going to be awesome. I need to look at that now. So many coins to be
aware of and to study to navigate a seemingly confusing new world, though.

------
desireco42
I was just thinking this morning how keybase would be useful as a tie-in for
crypto identity on blockchain, when this is desirable. This is fantastic news.

Just confirms that Stellar is great platform.

------
weinzierl
>Have you ever heard of the Dutch tulip craze?

>It sounds familiar. Have you ever heard of proof by example?

Well played!

------
drgenus
awesome!

------
kang
Stellar doesn't work.

Disturbed by energy consumption, their solution is to divide(shard) the
blockchain graph. Does that result in a consensus though? Not in their own
prior version.

Will the topology they are claiming emerge? There is no proof.

------
johnny_1010
Why someone use this kind of chat? Same Slack, Hipchat it's look to me like
expansive irc. And this "blog post" is more Stellar commercial.

~~~
0xCMP
Because it's end-to-end encrypted for just the people in the chat. Slack and
Hipchat store the logs in the clear for themselves and the contents could be
revealed if they were ever hacked. Since they're _also_ centralized this poses
an issue because they're an easier target than say a member of the chat's
device.

Since keybase is all encrypted, signed, and authenticated the fact it's
centralized only matters as far as the service going down, but the content is
all secure.

