Stellar – Public infrastructure for money | Hacker News Reader

Stellar – Public infrastructure for money

stellar.org

40 pointsdankohn17 comments

We have been heads down for the past several months working on the new network that is much more scale-able, has a provably correct consensus mechanism and a much more flexible modular design. It has cool features like multi-sig and attaching arbitrary info to transactions. We released it in beta a couple months ago: https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...

We are turning the new network live very soon.

Here are some interesting previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342348

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8708844

and why not: http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin/

Among group of friends living together, let us say that we assume each having 1000 friendcoin by the virtue of being in the friend circle. Now we send each other friendcoins and each transaction is a mail cc'ed to all the friends in the circle. Thus no one can overspend their account and we now we have our own money infrastructure.

The protocol I just described, is it decentralized? Stellar would say yes, but I would say it doesn't look like it. A person outside the system cannot just come and join. Needs prior verification.

From their white paper summary, "it requires unanimous agreement on system membership by all participants. Each node in the network must be known and verified ahead of time."

Is it centralized? No. But is it decentralized? I don't know.

Oh I think it was misunderstood. The full quote is: "Byzantine agreement guarantees distributed consensus despite the Byzantine failure of participants. However, it requires unanimous agreement on system membership by all participants. Each node in the network must be known and verified ahead of time." It is comparing SCP to Byzantine agreement protocols like paxos.

As in Stellar doesn't have this requirement. Here is the white paper: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...

The difference between a byzantine agreement and a federated byzantine agreement used in SCP is that it reaches consensus based on quorum slices rather than the whole network consensus. This is just removing the graph edges from the bitcoin node network. The real problem then is optimum quorum slicing to guarantee many possible problems that might arise, such as partition-tolerance, non-survival of a bad node etc .

Maybe you have addressed these concerns, I'll read the paper to check. Can you please answer one question though, how are the coins originated in this system?

Yes a node in the Stellar network doesn't need to know all the other nodes in the whole network and adding and removing nodes is a fluid and open process but yes there must be some transitive overlap in the quorum slices people choose. The details would be better explained in the paper.

All the coins(lumens) exist when the network starts up. The Stellar Foundation is distributing them in the following way: https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution

I've been following Stellar from a distance over the past year. After the initial hype, there wasn't much news about it outside of the relatively small Stellar community. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

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