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Comment by kylebrown | Hacker News Reader

Yup, obviously a fork of Ripple. While at Ripple, Jed acqui-hired his gf Joyce (SimpleHoney). Then MtGox blew up (Jed still had his profit-sharing agreement with MtGox from his sale to Mark Karpeles). Then Jed announced he was going to dump his 9 billion XRPs ("fyi, XRP dump incoming") because he didn't like the direction his co-founder Chris was taking Ripple.

Then he launches Stellar, the XRP clone. Didn't even bother to change the total token amount (both XRP and Stellar have a cap of 100 billion tokens).

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I have my own documentation of what I would consider to be Jed's dubious history as a trustworthy part of the digital currency world. Having been one of the early miners of BTC when it was under 25 cents and then an eager proponent of Ripple at its inception I feel disgusted and betrayed by the behavior of two particular people: Jed and Mark Karpeles. And yes, they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. I was one of the lucky ones who did not lose any money, so this isn’t about sour grapes. I trust them about as far as I could throw a heavy safe, and I'm not very strong. Protocols may be game-changing and robust, but I learned the hard way that if the people behind them suck, supporting their schemes will likely make you a sucker. Protocols don’t create trust, people do. I’ll acquire stellars for free, but no more putting USD behind another one of Jed’s self-enriching money-making schemes. He’s very good at profit-taking for himself and is fearless in the art of self-promotion.

Given that you have documentation, instead of simply accusing him, why don't you offer substantiated evidence? Otherwise, why should we believe you?

This sounds like a stable currency that is well worth my time and interest

Well, the one thing Stellar has going for it is that Stripe is on board. Though afaict Stripe is not yet integrated as a Stellar gateway.

The only thing keeping Ripple alive is the fact that Bitstamp is a Ripple gateway.

Except it's premined and centralized. It's "stable" until its creator decides to dump, like they did with Ripple.

Dumping Stellar coins should be prevented for at least five years provided the creators adhere to the agreement described in their Mandate page:

"In order to provide additional stability to the system, the nonprofit founders and Stripe have voluntarily agreed not sell any of the stellars initially received (either via employee grants in the case of the founders or via repayment of the loan) for at least five years; however, Stripe may auction any of their stellars, provided the recipients also agree not to sell their stellars for five years, and net profits are returned to the Foundation."[1]

[1] https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Stellar_distribution

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