Introducing Stellar: a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money

We definitely want to expand beyond Facebook for distribution as quickly we can. We'd love to hear — do you have any suggestions for the best way of doing distribution within China?

The reason is strictly for fundraising. They have Naval Ravikant as an advisor and he is a proponent of using that model to fund a project. It's a viable model, but I don't think you can call yourself a nonprofit and use it.

I work at Stellar. re: the distribution method: mining obviously has many benefits, but it's still limited to people who are highly technical and/or who have money to spend. That eliminates most people in the world. We wanted to provide much broader access to digital currency to normal folks, and so stellars will be given away for free at the click of a button. Hope that helps clarify.

We chose to help fund Stellar because we were very impressed with their mission and their thoughtful approach to how to get cryptocurrency into the hands of as many people as possible.

I think we all would have preferred a route that didn't require creating a new currency, but this was the best approach they could find to moving forward on their vision. Certainly the long-term hope is that the stellar will mostly help provide liquidity between other currencies, rather than become something used primarily as a first-class currency itself.

The distribution strategy here is actually something that, as far as I know, has never been tried before. It's correspondingly very difficult to know exactly how it'll turn out. The underlying motivation is to distribute the stellar as fairly and as rapidly as possible, and this model (given lots of transparency and upfrontness) was the best they could think of. (If you come up with a better one, I'd certainly love to hear it — I'm gdb@stripe.com if you'd like to talk more.)

Ah, so certainly malicious JS code could misbehave and gain access to your account. But this is true also for someone publishing a desktop client — in practice, people aren't going to check the code going into each release, any more than they're going to inspect the JS running on their page before entering the password.

I think the question of where your password by design will go is very important. If it's transiting the server, suddenly there's a lot more surface area to worry about. Logfiles, databases, and the like suddenly can be called into scope, and an attacker might be able to steal credentials even without being able to substitute out code.

In any case, the great thing about an open ecosystem is that, if you don't like the choices someone else has made, you are more than welcome to make your own implementation with choices you prefer!