Make Stellar wallet an optional (opt-in) module

[FrancisPouliot]

Stellar is an insecure (useless?) (pyramid scheme?) (pump and dump scheme by venture capitalists?) fork of the Ripple Protocol (scam!) - see more here: https://twitter.com/francispouliot_/status/1042180860580122625

NOT A RISK, SEE COMMENTS BELOW: Having a stellar lumens wallet exposes users to legal liabilities, including, in Canada, an obligation to divulge that they are cryptocurrency owners. The requirement in Canada states that users must divulge all cryptocurrency addresses under their control.

The economics of Lumens are built so that the value of the coin will tend towards zero, with no incentive for holders. Because it is NOT a trustless decentralized consensus algorithm, rather a consortium of legally-liable trusted nodes, it is not a reliable payment method and as such has not seen widespread merchant adoption. The fact that startups are literally giving away millions of dollars worth of lumens should be extremely alarming.

NOT A RISK, SEE COMMENTS: As such, it is very detrimental to Keybase users to be forced to expose themselves to legal liability of having a lumens wallet, with little to no upside.

STILL VALID: In addition, it can only be described as a pyramid scheme, and is fundamentally insecure.

To protect the Keybase user experience and to protect the privacy of users, I strongly urge Keybase to make the Lumens wallet an optional, opt-in feature. A simple "I want a Stellar Wallet" option when downloading the client would be great.

Thanks for understanding,

One of your biggest users and fans.

[edits in bold]

[junderw]

When you open the wallet tab it asks if you want to create a wallet.

Click no every time you accidentally click on the wallet. Or just never click on the wallet.

An address will not be made, and you will have no lumens.

[FrancisPouliot]

When you open the wallet tab it asks if you want to create a wallet.

Click no every time you accidentally click on the wallet. Or just never click on the wallet.

An address will not be made, and you will have no lumens.

Thank you for pointing this out, I wasn't clear if addresses are generated or not.

This definitely solves the legal/privacy problem indeed.

However, it can still be seen as promotion of Lumens.

Thanks for the reply

[original post edited to reflect the confusion around wallet creation]

[FrancisPouliot]

1. It's ultra fast and cheap: that is the result of using a centralized network where users don't run full nodes, which defeats the entire point. It requires a counterparty, and the counterparty settlement is not fast and cheap.
2. It natively understands currencies and tokens: Much like visa and mastercard, an XLM transaction is only good if the underlying "banks" (gateways) honor the IOU. Currencies and tokens are merely debts, and messages. It's more akin to SWIFT (the wire transfer protocol) to a cryptocurrency.
3. It doesn't burn more electricity than a small nation: I'm assuming this is a comment aimed at SHA256 bitcoin miners. The Bitcoin network has a power consumption of around 5000MW, which is less that the power that Quebec alone wastes every year from the surplus of its hydro-electricity. In addition, the power usage required for Keybase's underlying technologies and coporate structure (banking, the internet, computer hardware, servers, mining for minerals used in components, etc.) is far greater than Bitcoin's. The reason electricity is dedicated to the Bitcoin network is to make it secure and decentralized. There is a reason why Stellar doesn't require electricity: it relies on trust.

[junderw]

Keybase and Stellar share a common investor and share developer resources since last year.

Keybase removing Stellar won't happen based on ideological reasons.

However, on the plus side Keybase founders are big Bitcoin supporters, and looking at the code the wallet functionality was built with adding more currencies in mind.

If you don't like ANY crypto that won't be much of a consolation I understand, but it makes me hopeful.

[FrancisPouliot]

Keybase and Stellar share a common investor and share developer resources since last year.

Keybase removing Stellar won't happen based on ideological reasons.

However, on the plus side Keybase founders are big Bitcoin supporters, and looking at the code the wallet functionality was built with adding more currencies in mind.

If you don't like ANY crypto that won't be much of a consolation I understand, but it makes me hopeful.

I'm a pretty big fan of Bitcoin. I am not a fan of Stellar and also not a fan of "pay-to-play" marketing schemes. I understand that Keybase needed funding, but I think there is an ethical issue in promoting unregistered securities to end-users, particularly ones that are so economically flawed that they are almost guaranteed to result in a huge financial loss for unsophisticated investors with a potentially unlimited upside (with no downside: they just created money out of thin air for a product that was itself forked and easily forkable in the future).

thanks for the insights

[junderw]

I am not at liberty to comment on the status of a crypto-asset as a security or not.

However, I agree that there are many projects that try to trick unsuspecting and/or uneducated investors into giving them tons of money.

Those projects can burn in hell. Anything the SEC does to hurt or destroy those projects is welcome as long as good projects don't get caught in the crossfire.

Note: I am not explicitly stating stellar is one of those projects.

[FrancisPouliot]

https://sites.google.com/view/stellar-analysis

[nebolsin]

@FrancisPouliot For the sake of completeness, here’s an article discussing the mentioned research by David Mazières, Stellar’s Chief Scientist: http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/blog/safety-vs-liveness.html

[rikur]

It seems like there are already plans to fork Keybase to get rid of Stellar and to support other filesystems beside KBFS 🤷‍♂

[rikur]

Keybase and Stellar share a common investor and share developer resources since last year.

Just curious, is this public information? Couldn't find any common investors on Crunchbase.

[nebolsin]

@rikur I think this “common investor” is SDF itself, because they’re funding Keybase since March 2018 : https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar

Also it sounds strange to fork something in order to get rid of the optional feature, but that’s the beauty of open-source — anyone can change and adapt software as they see fit.

[max-l]

I really hope the stellar wallet feature remains,

@FrancisPouliot contrary to many crypto tokens, Lumens are backed by something very tangible: they are credits for platform usage. Anyone wishing to use the platform must obtain Lumens, so dilution of "value" (market price in dollars) is not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that transactions become cheaper, until the transaction fee is reajusted. Granted that this somewhat comes at the expense of the "store of value" function of Lumens, and definitely makes it less attractive as a speculative asset, but that's what allows Stellar to be a low cost and energy efficient platform.

The beauty of stellar is that "store of value" tokens can be run on top of the platform, so you get the best of both worlds: a low cost transaction platform (low cost in dollars AND energy), and the possibility of hosting stablecoins on top of it.

[rikur]

@max-l lol what a load of crap

[junderw]

I really hope the stellar wallet feature remains.

Off topic. This is about allowing users to disable the Stellar wallet feature completely.