I've been convinced by Mazières and the Stellar team
This is no different than what current financial institutions do other than a new UI.
I think Stellar's model if Internet-style (as in the backbone network infrastructure) organic, federated trust relationships is the most practical and viable approach to decentralization that I have seen.
Organizations decide who to trust based on their relationships with them and individuals decide which organizations to trust for the same reason. That is how trust works in the real world, and for good reason. The problem is that the costs of operating at a global level in the current financial system are very high, which leads to centralized control.
Stellar will potentially allow many different types of new, small and innovative organizations to participate in the same network as larger more traditional institutions, with no restrictions for joining the network. Of course those small organization still have to compete for customers in the real world and the playing field is never fully level, but certainly opens up the game.
I personally just don't see the Utopian, fully-decentralized, f*ck-the-system future that a lot of crytpo-enthusiasts envision. It just doesn't mesh with the reality of how non-technical users operate in the real world. For example, right now the vast majority of US users purchase Bitcoin through Coinbase, because that is who they deem trustworthy. What I do see with Stellar is the possibility for greater innovation and greater individual access to the global payments network.
[1] https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...
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?
the foundation is some group of fly-by-night scammers
This was my implication. I have known 'Stellar' since its beginnings as Ripple. I have no expectations of changing your mind or obligation to convince you otherwise. Just thought I'd share my viewpoint.
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), fails to guarantee safety without >90% agreement on the UNL.
When SWIFT was devised, the idea of having a singular system for resolving these transactions not only made sense but was (probably?) technically necessary. I think given where we are today, multiple competing protocols, each with their own advantages, may be viable.
Lastly, for finance, consumer choice is valuable: I like being able to Venmo my friends, autodeposit my landlord, slow mail my bills, and Apple Pay my retail purchases. I don’t send money overseas but I could imagine a similar bifurcation of solutions in this space, all with their own advantages.
An analogy I can be able to give, is banking is double entry book keeping. DLT's are triple entry book keeping, there is simply many things that their current ledger entries can't do. DLT allows their money to become commodity money, there is also a bunch of contracts that can be added on top of that. So main thing is banks could be able to potentially offer many more services than just verifying payments, at a much lower cost reducing the amount of employees they need. Make more offices or w/e else bankers do lol.