andrewstellar

Great article on the global correspondent banking system.

For anyone interested in how US domestic payment systems work (checks, ACH, Visa/Mastercard) check out Payment Systems in the US by Carol Benson. It is the bible.

Maginot Line attack, I like that. And yep, that's basically the point I've been trying to make in my posts. IMO Bitcoin isn't "trustless" - you need to implicitly trust those with hashing power aren't colluding to screw you.

Why wouldn't this be plausible? Let's say one day China had enough of Bitcoin, and used their essentially limitless resources to gain enough hashing power at will, to block transactions or rewrite them or what have you. Entirely plausible with Bitcoin (in this case, China doesn't care about the coin reward and therefore is not a "rational attacker" as the popular game theoretic model of Bitcoin security presupposes).

Now let's look at the Stellar model in this same situation. We've got a bunch of large company nodes that are probably Gateways (for the sake of argument say JCB, Wells Fargo, Barclays, and Bank of Brazil). We've got a ton of other nodes that belong to research universities, and then we have a bunch of "non-profit" or hobbyist or whistle blower nodes. There's a nice graph topology between all of these. Then one day China comes along and decides its had enough. How does it attack the network in this case? By hacking enough organizations to take control of their nodes? Seems a bit more unlikely than it gaining 51% of hashing power on the Bitcoin network...

Here's an overview that attempts to explain it in a less CS/math way and a more general and approachable way: https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...

Let's say there's 3 big "tier 1" operators, which everyone trusts. This means that if 2/3 colluded to defraud the system, they could. Then, a smaller non-profit or more "trustworthy" node comes online and says, hey everybody, add me to your quorum slice. I'll listen to these big operators and make sure they're honest, and you can listen to me to verify that.

Now, regular nodes add the non profit node to each of their 2 member set slices. If one of the bigger guys colludes, the system is only blocked, because now the regular stellar users have depended on the non-profit node in each stellar slice, who has seen the collusion and isn't externalizing bogus transactions. Once the collusion is published by the whistle blower node, regular stellar nodes can remove those slices that contained the bad node, and the system moves forward.

Now this is a completely contrived example but you can generalize it as a chain of trust webs, where i listen to the someone, someone listens to me and the person i listen to, and so on.

Great, thank you!

I loved this article. It was very clear: the reasoning the high level step by steps were very helpful. +1 suggestions to follow up in 3/6/12 months. Also, I'd love to see a more detailed explanation, chef scripts, etc.

Thanks! Please contact hello@stellar or one of the admins directly on freenode channel #stellar-dev.

Hi Peter, we are aware of this issue affecting a minority of users and are actively working to provide a fix. If you signed up with your email, we will also contact you soon with instructions on how to retrieve your account. Thank you for your patience!

We recommend you only trust one gateway per currency for that exact reason. You can only paid in currency issued from accounts you trust. Lets say your friend holds Euro credits from a gateway in London, and you live in San Francisco and therefore only hold USD credits from a gateway there. All she has to do to send you USD is specify "Send him X USD". She doesn't have to care about your issuer. It's taken care of by the protocol.

Check out https://www.stellar.org/api/#api-payment. By setting Amount.issuer to be the recipient's address, the protocol will find a path from the sender's gateway to the recipient's gateway.

Speaking more broadly, I anticipate many gateways will also become exchanges, to make their credits more valuable, aka more "liquid". For instance, in the last example, what was required to make this work was a "market maker", someone in the middle buying London EUR and selling San Francisco USD. If no direct exchange existed (highly unlikely in this example), there may be a EUR -> XYZ Currency -> USD. To avoid this external dependency (and also offer a cheaper exchange rate), it would be in the London and SF gateway's best interest to trust (https://www.stellar.org/api/#api-trustset) each other. Then, the exchange from her EUR credits to your USD credits would happen directly.

> Another solution would be to allow gateways to declare that their coins are only redeemable by a limited set of accounts.

Yep, that's baked into the protocol :) https://www.stellar.org/api/#api-accountset - require Auth flag

Hi karl, Andrew from Stellar here. We're aware of the problem that's causing some users not to receive their 5000 Stellar reward. We're working on a fix - you'll have your Stellars in your wallet soon :)

Hello, we check various properties of your Facebook account to determine that this was not a spam account created simply to exploit the giveaway. This is our first day out, and we apologize that legitimate users like yourself aren't able to receive the giveaway. Please check back in the coming days as we continue to improve our spam detection algorithms.

Hello, Andrew from Stellar here. We're using Facebook as our identity verification mechanism for our giveaway, and we've added additional spam prevention checks to ensure lots of Facebook accounts aren't created just to claim the giveaway reward. We will be tweaking these checks in the coming days to ensure legitimate users like yourself will be let in. Please check back soon!