Keybase and Stellar Partner on XLM Airdrop Worth $118M | Hacker News Reader

Keybase and Stellar Partner on XLM Airdrop Worth $118M

keybase.io

102 pointsjqueryin92 comments

This is an interesting/generous giveaway...

I'm not sure what to think about XLM. On the one hand, I am very pessimistic about all altcoins, but on the other, I am impressed with Stripe, Keybase, and the teams behind those products.

XLM is a very cool altcoin system, thanks to it there is no third party so no commissions and really low TRX cost. IBM also makes a lot of server as nodes for the Stellar network.

At this point, I am at a complete loss to understand what it is that Keybase is, or is doing.

A pity, because it started so well, as a way to manage my online identity.

It is a swiss army at this point. I don't mind some of the options. I was hoping they'd make email one of their endeavours in a way that's compatible with protonmail as an alternative. I was also hoping they would sell me additional storage or something.

It seems like they want to do a lot of things, but they embark on new projects before previous ones have gained significant adoption. This makes it appear like they lack a general direction, with some of the suggestions on this page already spanning from key management to cryptocurrency to group chat.

Everyone likes free money, but I'm not sure if this will be a net plus for them or not, it comes with a lot of overhead in multiple areas, and I hope they realize that with this post.

It's like Pied Piper, but with cryptography instead of compression!

Personally, the online identity part is the thing I'm the _least_ excited about with Keybase and would actually prefer it without (or, even better, selective disclosure where I can choose to give proofs of identity to users without Keybase sniffing it up).

I find it

I don't care about that crypto currency stuff. I still think Keybase overall is a great tool.

Their private encrypted git repos and file storage is pretty solid.

Slack is probably their closest competitor at this stage. But they do crypto (stellar) wallets + git + identity too. The encrypted git functionality is really handy for sharing API keys.

Client-Side encrypted chat, git, storage, 'team groups', wallet and identity.

All of it kind of slow and something you can't pay for to expand limits, so you can't rely on it as a company or for your own personal use.

Currently I use it to store my personal dot files and share it with my work laptop.

Throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks can be a legitimate strategy. We'll see if it pays.

How to join the drop:

1) install Keybase: https://keybase.io/download

2) add your device

3) in the app, go to devices (second to last item in the nav) and add two paper keys

4) click on your avatar (top of nav) and select "View profile"

5) click "Prove your [GitHub, Hackernews]" and follow the steps (HN might take a while to update, took about 2 mins for me)

6) now you should be able to join the drop

(edit: I just had to restart Keybase app.)

If I see four checkmarks and "Register inside the Keybase app" what am I missing? Do I just need to make sure I have a stellar wallet, or is there something else?

I'm using the Keybase app for MacOS and don't see any indication that I have joined the drop, or prompts which mention it.

The "register" call-to-action button just sends you to https://keybase.io/download which has a link at the top, " News: the Keybase Stellar Space Drop " that sends you right back to the same page as referenced in the post.

Check this out: https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/19408

Hi. Does anyone know how I can join the xlm airdrop? I dont have a keybase account or a github or hacker news account. I created an account for keybase today but they say I am too late and need to connect an account which was registered before the 9th September? Any help please. Thanks.

To avoid bots they don't seem to be allowing new github or hacker news accounts. So it looks like you are out of luck if you didn't already have those accounts.

for HN, they also require at least 2 karma. a little annoying because i only use my account for lurking and only have 1 karma.

Enjoy.

thank you kind hacker! however, it looks like HN is either slow to update or there is some other limiter/throttle involved to prevent karma abuse since im still at 1 karma. will check back later.

EDIT I: looks like it took awhile to update. maybe 25+ min. thank you again!

EDIT II: to the person who just downvoted me. thank you. now im back at 1 karma and unable to qualify for the airdrop. not sure why that was necessary.

EDIT III: thank you to all the hackers who took pity on me. finally got over the 2 karma requirement for the airdrop. thank you so much guys.

Karma will take care of itself.

Mee too :-)

you should be good to go now. will probably take 25+ min to update.

Sorry to be the pedant here, but this isn't the correct use of "airdrop", or at least, not how it's commonly used in the cryptocurrency community.

And airdrop typically refers to a fork that someone starts of an existing cryptocurrency, but keeps the same global ledger (blockchain or equivalent) up to a certain date. At that date/time, anyone who held the cryptocurrency at the time is treated as having that same amount in the new fork.

Hence why it's called an "airdrop": from the perspective of existing users, it feels like someone just dumped some freebies on you.

This is not an airdrop, in that meaning. It's just a regular giveaway.

(With that said, this finally gave me the kick in the pants to sign up for Keybase. I initially ignored it because, well, I don't hold any XLM or have the software for it set up, why would I benefit from an airdrop? Glad I read the fine print.)

The 'airdrop' analogy doesn't really capture anything about the involvement of branching ledgers, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair to use the same giveaway jargon the community's previously used. But definitely, a different mechanism is involved here.

It captures the metaphier of “you do nothing further on your end, and stuff of value falls in your lap”. This offer doesn’t do that and requires active steps on your part. If it’s air-anything, it’s “air rendezvous” :-p

ah, well, for preexisting Keybase users with linked GitHub accounts it fits that description - I found out about it because I got given some without doing anything.

I thought you specifically had to approve the participation even if you already met the criteria?

apparently not!

Previous topic that got flagged for some reason:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919736

I flagged that one (and this one) because a cryptocoin giveaway isn’t newsworthy at HN, any more than “free iPad contest” or “get a $20 gift card” deals would be.

Original topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919736

Seems like increased popularity is impacting keybase.

My client is now getting:

Error: ERROR CODE 218 - internal chat storage error: readBlock: failed to decrypt block: 1 in method chat.1.local.getThreadNonblock at new s (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:561326) at file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:561922 at u (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:561961) at file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:1242674 at file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:3018547 at e._call (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:2580383) at file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:2580523 at s (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:2580163) at e._fulfill (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:2580493) at s (file:///opt/keybase/resources/app/desktop/dist/main.bundle.js:1:2579694)

The funny thing is that it seems that the amount of XLM you get (according to https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019) is related to the number of people who sign up.

It appears that the amount of airdrop money is being divided equally amongst all the people who sign up. So in a round-about way, after you have signed up, you are actually incentivized to not spread the news.

As it stands right now, if nobody else signs up, I will receive over $19,000 XLM (roughly $1136 USD).

So yeah. Nobody else sign up for this, please!

From the top of the bottom part:

> The Finest of Fine Print

> No individual recipient will get more than $500 USD worth of Lumens.

The question is: How long is your wallet worth $500 USD. The value dropped in the last months significantly.

Otherwise - it´s free money.

if the cryptocurrency fails its dollar value will plummet. So do you really want no one to sign up?

The airdrop site says "You'll get 1,835 Lumens (XLM) if no one else registers. " but on the first drop I got 356 XLM (20.92USD).

I'm confused by the stellar sign-up terms. "6. WE ARE UNABLE TO HELP DISTRIBUTE SDF LUMENS TO USERS IN CERTAIN COUNTRIES. By activating this wallet you agree you're not in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Crimea, or any other country or region subject to sanctions by OFAC; further you agree you're not a non-resident alien of the United States."

So this is only open to people living in the USA or people with some sort of non-alien legal status in the USA who are not currently residing in the list of banned countries? Seems odd to ban a specific list of countries, and then on top of that ban almost everyone who is not in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Foreign_Assets_Contr... << This is the wikipedia article you're looking for if you want context.

Am I correctly interpreting the clause as saying that pretty much only Americans are eligible? I'm confused because if that is the intent then the clause is really burying the lede when it starts out by excluding "users in certain countries".

No. That doesn’t exclude other countries - it means you are not illegally living in the US (“non-resident alien”). They are just complying with US sanctions/international law.

Thanks!

So what if you're temporarily in the US on a tourist (B1/B2) visa? Or on NAFTA status? Or as a non-resident using H1-B (which is dual intent)?

Non-resident alien doesn't mean illegal immigrant at all. As the name implies, it means you're a non-citizen who is also not residing in the US.

It's actually pretty scary giving out money (in any form) to international peoples potentially sanctioned by OFAC. Making it their problem through an EULA is an interesting strategy.

But what about people from countries other than the US that are are not sanctioned by OFAC? "further you agree you're not a non-resident alien of the United States"

Going by this [1] definition of nonresident alien, I am not a citizen of the USA so I'm an alien, and I don't live in the USA so I'm a non-resident alien.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/dete...

The IRS is only writing its definitions for the sake of people in the US. That's presumed from context. Otherwise, why care what the IRS has to say?

Because Stellar is using that term in a document they're asking me to agree to and it seems likely that their intended meaning is similar to the IRS definition. But I'm not 100% sure that it's meant to exclude (almost) all non-Americans which is why I'm asking.

This is incorrect. If you're not in the USA, you're not a "non-resident alien", you just don't live here at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(law)#Categories

But common. I recall ordering samples of components and having to agree that these capacitors Or ICs won’t be used for ______ or sent in any way to _____ countries.

I join keybase and github and hacker news to be able to join and get stellar but didnt allow me.. i dont know what happened but i was qualified cos i joined sept 9.. can someone help me about it.. it was lagging that time i guess theres a lot of people registering that time..

I think Keybase is great but I'm not really much interested in the Crypto Currency stuff. I would much rather they focus on good authentication services, there is so much great things you can do with what they have now.

When I first saw this I just assumed it was some sort of spam/scam. What's the rationale for giving away money here? Is it purely Keybase/Stellar marketing?

How is Keybase planning on making money?

Just think of it as Universal Basic Income... get your coinage into circulation, and when people use your coins to exchange value, now your coins have value! So as the coin minter, hopefully you've kept some coins for yourself too, and now you have money!

Yes, I get that. So is Keybase banking on XLM itself to drive their revenue?

I had an account for years, but I rarely used it and didn't even know they had an app now. To qualify I had to install the client on 2 devices and setup account recovery. I am now much more likely to explore the app.

Agreed. I'm checking it out now too.

The Stellar team uses Keybase as their main base of operations. They are the third most popular (2.4k members) Team on Keybase.

https://keybase.io/popular-teams

I'm assuming its a co-marketing campaign in between Stellar and Keybase.

They aren't giving away money. They are creating these coins out of thin air. The only way anyone is losing money is possibly by deflating the value of existing coins by creating more supply. That these coins are worth anything at all was sort of luck by being early in the race. The top 10 - 20 coins don't seem to change much.

These airdrops were an expectation from the start. The first coins from this organization were also airdropped and they have done other airdrops since.

I'm not a guru in this space, but I believe the idea for Stellar was to be more of a utility coin as opposed to a store of value.

Why would anyone back a cryptocurrency whose operator can simply whisk new coins into existence?

This is different from US dollars how?

Approximately 300m people vote for, pay taxes to and support the creators of US dollars, the US government. Approximately 8 billion people recognise the US dollar as a global unit of value exchange which has a known local currency value.

A new cryptocurrency is just a database with some private keys shared remotely.

The US government is ultimately beholden to US citizens, who don't want to get hosed by inflation. People who can't vote in America do actually have a legitimate reason to be concerned: if the US ever can't maintain its debt, it will likely become in the voter's interests to devalue the currency to nothing. That's basically the "default risk" on Treasury bonds.

Unless there's some other factor in place, you probably shouldn't.

This is not the case here, though. Stellar has been sitting of huge piles of coins (par for the course these days at least) that they are now distributing.

In general, this is definitely something to watch out for.

As far as I understand it, that's not the case here, however. These coins were already in existence held by Stellar, who is now giving them away. I.e. no coins being printed.

I see airdrops regularly, and this is the first one I have not dismissed as a waste of time and attention right away. Unless they mess it up somehow, I think this is a great move by Stellar - I think the people using Keybase (especially combined with GH/HN) are exactly the early-adopters-power-users they want to extend adoption to.

Creating more of a currency is typically known as inflation. Deflation is the opposite.

I am excited about this XLM Airdrop. On the one hand the reputation of cryptocurrencies and in particular XLM will increase. And on the other hand, Keybase also creates real life use cases for the cryptopcurrencies, away from Crypto exchanges.

Great news and great partnership, being here in 2019 is exciting. Everything is evolving and the blockchain is a wise choice to take. Good work to everybody on Keybase and Stellar, of course to HN too, keep going guys!

This happened? So even though I have a Keybase account that I use regularly, because I didn't click "join the airdrop", I missed this month's giveaway?

Nope, that's not the case, in fact you'll get the Lumens automatically within a day or so. If you want to _continue_ after the first month, you'll need to click the button in the app saying you want to. But you have a month to do that.

I don't see any details on this in my keybase, it's a big confusing to say something has already happened and I'm wondering if I was included or not... I've verified my HN and GitHub.

Perhaps it's still being rolled out, can't complain :)

I had to fully quit the app and launch it again before the "airdrop" button appeared. Still unsure myself about the first airdrop. I used my account regularly, was able to join the airdrop so meet all the criteria, but havne't had any Lumens added to my wallet.

According to Chris(1), the rollout "might take a couple days" because of a lazy sending script they're using

1: https://keybase.io/chris

Thanks for the info. Will wait and see.

I see, thank you. Yeah, it's a bit confusing because the post says they already sent the lumens...

What's the going rate for alpaca socks?

Hello, i just want to ask. i just created and keybase account. that was before sept 9. does this mean i don't get any airdrop? not even for the next month or so?

your question is confusing. when did you create the keybase account? BEFORE or AFTER 9/9/19? if after, do you have any older GH or HN accounts before 9/9?

Could this potentially dilute the worth of XLM?

Could this dilute the value of HN?

very great sir

I appreciate the free money, but is their goal to get me to use this cryptocurrency?

Yes, yes it is. Or at least become familiar with it.

New to Keybase & Hacker News.Seems legit and a good tool to start learning the ins and outs.

Quisiera hacer una pregunta yo soy nueva en keybase pero si ya tenia cuenta en GitHub antes del 9 que quiere decir que estoy en la primera ronda?

Didn't Stellar recently do a similar airdrop with Blockchain wallet? Seems a contrived way to increase adoption/use of xlm...

Correct, but they're now winding down the airdrop. You can read more about it here: https://blog.blockchain.com/2019/07/15/airdrops-adoption-wha...

Thanks

Grab your free XLM worth $25 while it still lasts. Also means to register your identity

I can't believe this is actually in the terms of service:

7. YOU AGREE TO HELP SPREAD THE WORD. You vow to lean about Stellar by visiting https://stellar.org and by testing Stellar-in-Keybase, simply by sending Lumens to people you care about, or at least your enemies' enemies. You will aim to encourage 5 people to join Keybase for its Stellar features.

I legitimately might not sign up now.

Whimsy? In my grim, algorithmic reality? It's more likely than you think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com