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Comment by joyce | Hacker News Reader

Great question - here are the two key items:

- Stellar is a nonprofit. No one owns it. The board and advisors represent a diverse group of people in tech, finance, nonprofit and academia to encourage cross-pollination of ideas. The board is also required to expand to 5 members by year-end.

- Almost all the stellars will be given away for free (95%) because the goal is to educate and provide access to digital currency/financial services. This is really good for cryptocurrency as a whole because it provides access to a huge segment of the world that would not have access to digital currency otherwise.

This should all help the effort be open and transparent.

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I keep hearing the argument about being a non-profit. It really means little in terms of accountability or credibility. Even in a for-profit public company shareholders have some amount of say on who gets elected to the board. But this board is entirely self-selected; which seems contrary to the inherently democratic if not flat idea behind crypto currencies.

And we are talking about a full fledged monetary system here with legal repercussions in terms of international law. With Bitcoin, no one was technically "responsible" for what folks did with Bitcoin. Will the Stellar organization be responsible for oversight and arbitration for any legal or financial fraud? And will the board BE held accountable or responsible for any systemic issues rising from speculation or any other activity?

And Stripe got their USD 3M loan repaid in 2% of the pre-mined stellars, valuating the whole pre-mined lot at USD 150M. How did they arrive at this number?

Not necessarily. They may have figured that if stellar go stellar, then the service provided would be worth a lot to them.

So this is pseudo-decentralized in the same way CA certificates or domain names are? I thought we were trying to move away from that model after Bitcoin made it possible to.

> I thought we were trying to move away from that model after Bitcoin made it possible to.

"We" doesn't include people trying to make money off shitty pump-and-dump altcoins, unfortunately.

The only thing preventing Stellar from being an immediate pump-and-dump scheme is a 5 year mandate clause:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8116051

Ripple's XRP value plummeted after one of the founders of Ripple, and now founder of Steller, sold off his holdings within 2 weeks. I hope someone can explain to me how this is better than a decentralized variant?

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