I just read at the top of Stellar's forum a note from Joyce Kim, CEO of Stellar:<p>>We expect that as a price for stellar becomes more established, we'll have to continually adjust the total amount of the giveaway to make sure it keeps making sense.<p>So they're already dialing back their distribution promise. This is <i>exactly</i> what happened with Ripple. When Ripple first started, there were assurances that all but 20% of Ripples would be distributed "as quickly as possible".<p>That didn't happen.<p>Several years later now, Ripple has decided to basically keep as many ripples as they can, which is supposedly part of what led to the split between Jed and the Ripple leadership/owners.<p>All this is a funny commentary on human nature. As an outsider, it's as clear as day to me that in order to succeed, Ripple needed to rapidly distribute as many XRP as possible. After all, 5% of a lot of money is worth much more than 50% of nothing. The only other missing ingredient for Ripple was community engagement.<p>And with Stellar I fear we'll see the same thing (at least with respect to a rapidly decreasing distribution rate).<p>These issues are exactly why Bitcoiners are so scornful of "pre-mined" coins. All things considered, proof-of-work and proof-of-burn are still by far the fairest and most successful currency bootstrapping methods. Stellar uses neither.<p>Bootstrapping a currency is the ultimate Zen undertaking: in order to make money as a crypto-bootstrapper, you must find ways to distribute it, either by giving it away or (preferably) by fostering entrepreneurship and spending it on those merchants who take a chance on accepting it.<p>A lesson much of the Bitcoin community still hasn't taken to heart, which is likely the only reason why interest in the coin is failing to pass on from the early adopter to the early majority.
Stripe paid $3000000 for 2000000000 stellars @$0.0015. He's paying up to $2 for 5000 stellars @$0.0004. So the MT are selling it at a 25% of the Stripe price.<p>IF stellar is a success, hoarding can be a good idea. But if this has a fate similar to to Auroracoin (also heavily premined, handed out for free to everybody) the price may drop 20 fold: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin</a>
That seems like the market mechanism working as it should. It's a little tacky, but effectively the turkers are valuing their Stellars really low. I'm not sure it's a problem.<p>Arguably Bitcoin was the same initially, except in Bitcoin's case you paid CPU manufacturers and electrical utility companies who preferred to be paid cash than mine Bitcoin themselves. Division of labour in action.
I am the executive director of Stellar. Wanted to share my reply to the MTurk stuff: <a href="http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026" rel="nofollow">http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026</a>
I bet that the unsuspecting Mechanical Turk workers, who traded their 6000 Stellars, did not realize that this was a one-time deal, rather than a repeatable revenue opportunity.<p>Mechanical Turk workers are used to low-paying and high-volume jobs. The $1.00 fee is very attractive for the steps involved, if this was a repeatable job. It's only natural to assume that every worker would attempt to create another Stellar account and retry the steps anew, only to be confronted with a an error after the first attempt.<p>And, unbeknownst to them, if Stellar does become a success, those workers will forever be left on the sidelines. Considering that Stellar has the potential to include the world's underprivileged into the global economy, often without bank accounts or identities, it's a shame that we are the first to take advantage of them.
Everett,<p>The cat was out of the bag before you even tried. The only difference is others showed restraint and didn't break Stellar's mechanism intentionally.<p>When I pointed out you could buy access to FB accounts, you weren't actually supposed to go out and do it, y'know?<p>Just because we can break dumb mechanisms like these just means we have to show restraint. :/<p>> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115497</a><p>> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115430</a>
Am surprised no one with the coding skills has put up a graph showing the value of a Stellar over time. A rudimentary beginning could be a derivative of these values: <a href="http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/1o2eBJl</a><p>Which is currently around $0.000353USD/STR ($2.05/5800)
Is USD 1.00-2.00 really enough of an incentive for people to do this (instead of keeping the Stellars), considering they (normally) can do this only once (b/c 1 FB account)?<p>(Edit: it seems more likely to me that, if this was done over MT, the people working on MT were in turn using botnets for scale.)
hey everett, just because you are so ahead of the curve i used my "send 1000, receive 1000" new stellar account promo on you..well deserved, spend wisely...
Not only is he arguably violating Mechanical Turk's terms of service by simple asking people to sign up for this in the first place, he's even gaming MTurk itself by creating multiple Amazon accounts with pseudonyms and spamming the marketplace with requests. Cute, Mr. Forth, really, really cute.<p>Update: If you don't believe it, here's a screenshot straight from HIT Scraper, a Greasemonkey script MTurk workers often use to display job listings on Mechanical Turk in a more easily parsable fashion:
<a href="http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3</a><p>Not sure how he pulled this one off, considering Amazon is now requiring a verified SSN or tax ID for requesters to purchase money to post HITs, but there you have it.
Everett's response is much appreciated.<p>Per my original HN post last night which broke the story [<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119</a>], I still think that he gamed the system. If I remember correctly, he asked mTurkers to create a Stellar account _without_ an identifiable account name so the transaction couldn't be easily backtracked. Also, he did not use his real name in mTurk and impersonated someone else. Not sure if his actions violated the ToS.<p>It was right for Everett to have come forward and disclose his means. His suggestions to improve the system are excellent. It will improve the Stellar system for everyone involved. Nevertheless, I believe that he should donate his balance to a charity. It will be an honorable thing to do.<p>Sandro