Keybase cancels Stellar token airdrop

https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019?update=2019-12-10

by ceejayoz • 7 years ago

255 121 7 years ago

jrockway4• 7 years ago

$16,000,000 spent to acquire users that you had to then build a "block all other users" feature for.

Does anyone know how successful this was at getting people on to the platform? I had the same number of friends on Keybase before the airdrop was announced as I do now.

duelingjello2• 7 years ago

Yeah, giving away money scales only in the short-term like a negative price product, increasing demand that usually doesn't translate into recurring users or revenue. I think they need more freemium and related paid services, and integrations. Like why aren't they also the "gravatar" of GPG fingerprints and keys? They also need a widget generator to spread the word on websites.

Boulth• 7 years ago

How would a "gravatar of GPG fingerprints and keys" look like?

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

You are thinking about this wrong. This is not money they had and are now losing but value that they created and are now distributing to improve the robustness of their economy (everybody wins). The SDF actually burned a lot of tokens recently (way more than this airdrop) as well because they concluded they were stockpiling too much and thus were putting their economy at risk. the point of this airdrop was to increase circulation of XLM among real users. The reason they are stopping it is that keybase had to scramble to keep bots, spammers, etc. out, which kind of defeats the purpose because you get a few bad actors accumulating disproportionately large amounts of tokens.

I was on Stellar already and received both airdrops so far. About 55$ in total at the current rate. It peaked out at ~65$ a few weeks ago. It's a nice gesture; much appreciated. I already earned (as in I worked for it) some XLM through other means so I have a nice stash that I'm HODLing.

Keybase is actually a nice product. It lacks a few of the niceties of Slack but it has made nice progress over the last year. Setting up a team is quite easy and right now they are not really charging for it. I would consider it for a small team.

jrockway4• 7 years ago

Yeah, I like the product and I think sending money in a chat app is nice.

I guess it doesn't really affect me that the userbase is 50% crypto speculators. I don't have to interact with them.

sneak3• 7 years ago

The money was spent by Stellar, who raised a huge amount during the ICO hype era, and have been quietly spending it in huge chunks in an attempt to build a market for their shitcoin from scratch. Their CAC must be 10x that of almost any other internet business, but, hey, they can afford it.

They supply the tokens, and presumably are paying Keybase for access to their userbase (and non-removable ads for their coin on almost every single keybase profile page).

https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/15555

jrockway4• 7 years ago

I just don't understand how it's a good investment. For the people that desperately needed the free $20, they probably immediately withdrew it and will not be building any blockchain apps in the near future. So what did Stellar even get? A few crazy people that use a very off-the-beaten-path chat app now know about it? I feel like the money could be better spent.

I also don't see how this works as a pump-and-dump to turn their ICO into actual United States Dollars. With the vast majority of people wanting hard currency instead of a cryptocoin... I feel like that can only drive the price down. Looking at some charts (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/XLM-USD/), XLM has been trending downward for a year. There is a small spike right around the time of the first airdrop. Maybe that was all they needed to make some money?

I don't really know but it all seems shady to me. I have decided not to hold this against Keybase; it's an experimental app for "stuff" that I don't have to pay for. I am still suspicious of cryptocurrency in general, and especially ones I haven't heard of like Stellar.

skywhopper• 7 years ago

This was a terrible idea from the start. And I've been hearing from lots of folks that the influx of "users" attracted to scammy stuff like this have been harassing other Keybase users via DMs. Congrats on ruining your service, Keybase.

duelingjello2• 7 years ago

I don't know if it's "scammy," but it comes off as desperate. The "scammy" part seemed to be phony users registering to grab cash.

kstrauser• 7 years ago

Yeah, I got this one: https://twitter.com/kstrauser/status/1199040190980845575

I went from about 25 followers to over 50 in approximately a month, after being there more or less from the launch. Those first 25 were largely people I've personally met in real life. The rest are entirely fakey.

twothamendment2• 7 years ago

Until Stellar, I've never been followed or contacted by some rando. Now if I see either from a person who only has stellar and bitcoin attached to their profile I just block them. Hopefully this Dec 10th announcement returns some peace and quiet to keybase.

JonathonW• 7 years ago

On the other hand, if Keybase continues to grow, network abuse (spam and harassment) is something they'd have to solve eventually anyways.

This has just forced them into coming up with a solution now rather than waiting a few more years when the network's larger.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Keybase/Steller incentivised spam has also apparently been the inducement for much of the vacuous-but-annoying "great post" and "hello" comments infesting HN in recent months (per exchange with admins).

So yes, it's had an effect here as well.

yabadabadoes• 7 years ago

Yeah, I think their fundamental error was making a definitive way to join a future airdrop.

They should have just given coins to existing active keybase users. They would have had healthy increase in users based on regret and fear of missing out again.

dexterdog• 7 years ago

I received one unwanted DM which was removed when the user was deleted by keybase an hour later and I have been on keybase since the early days. I've replaced most of my slacks with it and use it as my shared drive, static web server and personal git. I don't use the wallet.

photoGrant• 7 years ago

Yeah this whole farce turned my 'trust' beacon away from keybase. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but I feel like trust is a compass and this move was quite polarising. It felt like the iTunes U2 fiasco. Don't give me something, and have me live with it if I never asked for it to begin with.

kelnos3• 7 years ago

... especially considering that there might be confusing tax consequences for people who receive these.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

About as confusing as receiving a cash allowance from your mom.

eitland• 7 years ago

It felt like the iTunes U2 fiasco.

Looked it up now and this explains why I had a lonely U2 album in my iMusic when I finally got another Apple product after 7 years.

ocdtrekkie4• 7 years ago

I appreciated the free only-crypto-I'll-ever-own-probably? But Keybase learned that people ruin everything. I still think what they built here is really neat, and hopefully once everything settles from the giveaway, what's left will be worthwhile.

The original design of the airdrop seemed designed to reward mostly/only existing users, but with the in for existing HN/GitHub users who might join. Basically it was narrowly intended to be for developers. The redesign to "avoid" abuse involved phone numbers, and allowing anyone with one in, which was the real floodgates.

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

FWIW, the initial "in for existing HN/GitHub users" caused a huge spam account problem for HN.

ocdtrekkie4• 7 years ago

Yeah, but the floodgates opened far worse when it wasn't limited to developer focused websites. I feel they should've shutdown the way for new Keybase users to join the airdrop. Stellar would've benefit from a large number of developers having their crypto and potentially developing software to use it, and Keybase would've been seen as rewarding their loyal users.

mirimir7• 7 years ago

I got one drop, but then there was the demand for a mobile number. So that was that.

And what are Lumens good for, anyway? Are there any ~anonymous exchanges with Bitcoin, etc?

linsomniac• 7 years ago

I went looking around when I got the first airdrop, and it looks like the answer to "what are lumens good for" is "Nothing." Turning into Bitcoin I guess...

Stellar looked promising a few years ago, but doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

mirimir7• 7 years ago

I guess ...

I never had much interest in trading or investing in Bitcoin.

But I do earn a little Bitcoin, now and then. And I like to play with VPS, and the occasional server. So I probably spend maybe $100-$200 in Bitcoin each month.

And given that I do all that ~anonymously, it'd be far more hassle without cryptocurrencies.

phyzome• 7 years ago

I was amused when their FAQ had "Q: So, what can I do with these?" and the A was basically... "send them to people I guess I dunno". -.-

awinder• 7 years ago

They're great for randomly holding / forgetting you're holding onto and waiting for a bubble, like that time in 2014 that Stellar gave away bundles of free coins (I think it was like 6K coins per user?) and then it bubbled in 2018.

twothamendment2• 7 years ago

My wife received the first airdrop and then they wanted her mobile number while I've never been prompted for it. I doubt too many people were willing to sell their mobile number for some funny money. More for me! (Not that I know what I'll do with it.)

utopian3• 7 years ago

I've had keybase for a while, but never really used it. After spending an hour going through all their requirements to sign up for this, it said I was qualified, but then when I clicked the button to claim it... it said I wasn't. I've tried 4x since and it didn't work

kjhughes2• 7 years ago

Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come in, far beyond the capacity of Keybase or SDF to filter.

Assumptions regarding the original purpose of the air drops:

1. Stellar's goal was to spur use and circulation of XLM.

2. Keybase's goal was to increase their user base.

I think they both took the easy way out: Give-away and pray.

If Stellar wanted to increase circulation, they should have rewarded transfers and payments. Keybase could have supported that effort via their infrastructure and possibly convinced their existing user base to become more active on their platform. I suspect that they'd have gotten much farther by demonstrating value to existing customers than trying to attract (buy, in the basest sense of the term) new ones.

Opportunity lost, it would seem.

wheelerwj• 7 years ago

they should have rewarded transfers and payments.

It doesn't matter what they would have rewarded, it was going to be gamed. This is a fact of life on the internet.

kjhughes2• 7 years ago

Sure, but when you're fighting a public perception that cryptocurrency is a value store to be bought and held for huge windfalls, just giving it away won't change perception or behavior. Incentivize people to learn to transfer, spend, trade, or somehow use the currency rather than hoard it (or immediately cash it out as many of the fake users were likely doing).

kelnos3• 7 years ago

One interesting thing I found was that they must have done some cleanup very early on, or perhaps many people decided to opt out. According to the wallet tab in the app, the Sept 9 airdrop went out to 280,598 users, while the Nov 17 airdrop (after the fake accounts started piling up) was only to 145,263 users. Curious to see what this final airdrop will be like.

It seemed kinda novel and fun, but I've never really been interested in cryptocurrency, and I have no idea what Stellar is good for, or even if I care more than my ability to cash it out as USD.

Overall Stellar feels like a distraction from Keybase building out their core platform and improving the user experience to the point where I'd even think of trying to get my non-technical friends to use it. And if they want to attract the masses (maybe they don't), they need to integrate traditional payments, in local currencies. (Yes, I know Stellar can act as an exchange medium, but people will want single-click ability to transfer fiat currency in/out of their bank account.)

atdt• 7 years ago

You had to register your wallet to receive gifts after September. I'm assuming many people just didn't know. I hadn't used Keybase in a while and I just found out about the XLM giveaway.

sschueller• 7 years ago

I have been unable to login for months because the password reset is disabled.

jhanschoo• 7 years ago

The Sept airdrop went to all their users, whereas you had to opt-in to the rest. The balance, minus new signups, were likely inactive users.

patcon• 7 years ago

And if they want to attract the masses (maybe they don't)

It's not super widely known, but Extinction Rebellion NYC relies highly on the whole keybase suite of tools, and I've heard they mostly like it (and they're def not predominantly technical). NYC is also likely inspiring other XR global chapters, but hard for me to speak to that.

weinzierl2• 7 years ago

I too received one drop in Sept and one in Nov. The communication from Keybase sounds like the drops were happening monthly though. Was there an Oct drop and did we miss it?

ocdtrekkie4• 7 years ago

They pushed it back at the last minute because of the rework in registration opt-in. Their disclaimer om the whole process was basically that it was a gift and came with no guarantees.

al_chemist• 7 years ago

perhaps many people decided to opt out

November airdrop required providing phone number.

nyuszika7h• 7 years ago

That was only for new users. Existing ones didn't need to verify their number.

seibelj• 7 years ago

Stellar is a nonprofit and an organization that is trying to do positive things in the space. Much respect to them. I agree with other commenters that airdropping millions of dollars to Keybase users was not the best - I myself traded them immediately. I think they could have spent ~$15million on devs around the world to build integrations and features and that would have been a far better investment.

noxer2• 7 years ago

They devs probably don't exist. Stellar is a copy of XRP. Its rather unlikely any developer would build on stellar instead of XRPL.

Demeisen• 7 years ago

I feel like keybase is great as a key-management platform and _that's it_. I found it to be a fairly pain-free way to manage a pgp key, and the ability to associate it with a public social media identity is super cool. I don't really get why all the other features are needed, and if there's a better platform to do key management easily across devices I'll jump ship in a heartbeat.

sunaurus• 7 years ago

It's pretty good for end-to-end encrypted chat and file sharing. I've used Telegram, Signal and Wire in the past, but I've found Keybase to be the best for my needs.

The cryptocurrency wallet feature is not useful for me, but it hasn't really impact me in any negative way, so I don't mind it.

RL_Quine• 7 years ago

It's not particularly strong end to end encryption, to note. It doesn't have perfect forward secrecy, for better or for worse.

oefrha3• 7 years ago

I signed up for Keybase during the alpha because I liked the idea of PGP-verified identities on different web properties (and I still do). However I uninstalled their client when it was “upgraded” to a Mac app complete with a kext for a goddamn FUSE mounted at all times (that and the fact that the client was somehow spamming my DNS server). But at least the chat service makes sense for part of their user base. Then came the crypto nonsense....

I guess being a free keyserver and identity verification service (they frequently check all your signed messages across all linked web properties) just isn’t a viable business model.

JNRowe2• 7 years ago

I feel like keybase is great as a key-management platform and _that's it_.

I agree, although I'll freely admit I haven't tried to use the other features all that much.

However, I do find myself a little uneasy with the key management aspects too. The official keybase CLI package being ~500mb when installed, the background server, etc concerns me. The alternative of using curl with a heap of largely inscrutable commands seems unworkable¹.

I wonder if anyone has worked on an alternative, and easy to inspect, client to interact with keybase for just the key management aspects?

1. I largely used the curl method, but suspect very few others would.

oefrha3• 7 years ago

I don’t enjoy the key management part of Keybase and don’t find it particularly strong, but why do you think the curl method is inscrutable? The entire payload (basically a JSON blob plus a signature) is there for you to see instead of a binary client that could do god knows what (even if you have the source code it’s probably harder and at least slower to understand than the final payload sent over the wire). I would say the curl method is actually the most inspectable one.

skybrian• 7 years ago

I found it convenient for syncing private git repos between machines. But now that gihub allows private repos for free, maybe that's not so useful anymore?

chrismatheson• 7 years ago

Lots of services are great key management. What I'm waiting for is encrypted (or at least signed) email between myself and literally any company on the internet communicating by email.

"can you just email me a copy of your passport photo and these 5 other things i need to completely verify your identity to banks and so on"

errrr .... no ?

Individuals are arguably not fussed. But surely business can get behind some better levels of encryption / verification ?

jeffalyanak• 7 years ago

Facebook of all places has PGP email. Even encrypts your password recovery emails.

tialaramex2• 7 years ago

I wouldn't bother waiting. Just use a web site to transfer anything important and give up email for this purpose.

A hard problem with email is that there is a boundary inside the address itself. How can anyone know this is steve@example.com? Maybe an outside authority can verify it's really @example.com but if I thought this was Steve and it's actually Tammy then I'm unhappy anyway.

For your purpose you probably don't think you care. You don't know whether custserv@example.com or customer@example.com or jenny.smith@example.com is the right email address to be telling you that your complaint is being confidentially processed anyway. But what about steve-the-plumber@gmail.com ? Does it matter if this is really from Steve or the mail actually came from tialaramex@gmail.com ?

Because the web doesn't have this authority boundary the Web PKI can actually assure you of a meaningful fact to a worthwhile degree. This is really https://example.com/. Is example.com really your local plumber Steve? Are they legally authorised to repair your gas appliance? Are they crooks? We can't answer those things. But we can tell you this is definitely example.com

flurdy• 7 years ago

"I don't really get why all the other features are needed"

Because growth. Either by VCs insistence, or founders ambitions.

Or that they hired X people to build the identity bit and needed to build more to keep all funding and staff.

If they had separated it more under a suite of products then it would have been ok, instead of bundling it all in one client and service.

All I need is the web page for identity and the CLI for encryption and verification.

I don't need a heavy electron UI always running on my devices.

joallard• 7 years ago

Seems like a lot of people are saying the airdrop and integrating Stellar to Keybase was a bad idea, but I don't think so. There's a lot I like in the Stellar-Keybase integration.

Keeping cryptocurrency keys secure has always been a challenge. Keep them too well, lose your money; keep them not well enough, someone can steal your money. It's a thin line to walk.

Keybase wants to make encryption user-friendly, and keeping cryptocurrency keys secure fits very well to that purpose. This is probably the least painful way I've kept crypto private keys.

Besides, the wallet is pretty functional, and is integrated to an app that's already sync'd to my phone and computer. It's without fuss and just works. Compare that to yet another app which I don't know, need to evaluate, don't trust to keep my secrets, or won't share them across my devices. Here, it's painless.

I personally knew Stellar already, but as a technical user (which I feel is a natural demographic for any crypto to start to get early adopters), this brought back Stellar in my mind and renewed my interest (or would've interested me if I hadn't known it).

Besides, I quite like Stellar as a cryptocurrency for payments: fees are low, and confirmations are near instant. And I'm not even naming the fact that it natively allows you to keep fiat money as a Stellar asset instead of exposing yourself to the risk of losing value to fluctuation. (Though there are caveats, but the infrastructure is there natively to build very useful things.)

I don't think this was quite bad a move as some make it out to be.

_Codemonkeyism3• 7 years ago

I agree, I think airdrops with Stellar and a wallet on many developer computers could create the critical mass to more crypto applications.

KirinDave2• 7 years ago

As a keybase user, why should I want to be a part of that?

alwillis• 7 years ago

Thanks for articulating my thoughts and feelings regarding Keybase and Stellar.

corobo• 7 years ago

On the flip side of the anecdata I signed up for a thing that could prove I am me in case it ever became useful then they added chat to it and something to do with git and then started spamming me with some cryptocoin bollocks

stevekemp• 7 years ago

When I started getting the spam I deleted my account.

I love the idea of keybase but in practice I never had contact from strangers suddenly using GPG, so it felt more aspirational than useful. But with zero interest in cryptocurrencies any tiein/integration was just wasted on me.

cormacrelf• 7 years ago

I discovered the first (surprisingly good) use case for keybase the other day -- Terraform encrypted outputs which you can configure by simply providing your keybase id. Extremely convenient. Perfectly joined the dots between a complicated but secure thing (you had to store sensitive state in S3 with server-side-encryption, which made it way too complicated to have sensitive data in a small side project) and the throwaway easy but very insecure thing (store the state locally/in a private git repo).

Of course, absolutely ZERO crossover between that kind of utility and this Stellar thing. I'd like them to find more life-improving nuggets of utility like that instead. Find more places in your life where you want something encrypted ad-hoc but don't want to memorise your GPG key ID. Any time someone would normally whisper to tell you something could be a candidate.

1234_0000_99• 7 years ago

Keep them too well, lose your money; keep them not well enough, someone can steal your money. It's a thin line to walk.

Nah, not really.

Unsophisticated users tend to keep their crypto on the bigger exchanges, which means someone else manages their keys.

Sophisticated users tend to use (cheap) hardware wallets or at least understand paper backups of keys and passphrases.

How-tos and warnings are exchanged ad nauseam on crypto Twitter and crypto blogs.

I imagine Keybase would have moved this forward about as far as they've moved forward GPG / PKI for the general user. (Not much)

This is mostly Stellar trying to gain some marketshare since they haven't made much progress elsewhere.

geofft3• 7 years ago

That's a fair defense of Keybase and Stellar. But it's not a defense of the airdrop, which seems to have had the effect of introducing a new population to Keybase, one that is more interested in cryptocurrency speculation than any of the things Keybase did previously. That, I think, was a big mistake. It increased engagement metrics while annoying all the existing users; effectively it pivoted Keybase into a chat app for altcoin enthusiasts. Which would be fine, if that was actually their goal, but it doesn't seem like that's what they wanted.

OJFord• 7 years ago

Agreed - the first distribution required registration prior to the announcement. I don't see why that didn't apply completely, why use it to drive Keybase sign-ups? They were essentially all 'fake users'.

angrygoat• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me how I'd exchange my lumens for goods or services.

I could imagine transferring some lumens to a friend for my share of dinner, but only if my friend is actually going to want lumens. Even if they're a keybase user, they're hardly going to be excited if I transfer them tokens that they are then, themselves, going to find difficult to exchange for goods or services.

If Keybase had to cancel this because all of the people signing up were after the lumens to speculate, maybe they should work on making the currency actually usable and liquid. I'm not interested in speculating; if I could use this to buy something down the supermarket, I'd be very interested.

ocdtrekkie4• 7 years ago

Indeed. If there were businesses on Keybase at verifiable addresses that accepted lumens as payment, we'd be in a much more interesting space. ...And I do think that might be a place Keybase can excel, because they could provide the method to be sure @walmart was actually Wal-Mart. But it requires that companies be willing and able to accept cryptocurrency.

carleverett• 7 years ago

You could get a Wirex credit card and spend them anywhere that accepts Visa: https://wirexapp.com/global

elamje• 7 years ago

A lot of comments here don’t understand why Keybase added a crypto wallet, or chat, or git, or file storage, etc.

It’s about user growth and attracting more people to the platform. Yeah git repos seem a little random, but you can’t have huge user growth from just offering identity verification.

DuskStar• 7 years ago

Git repos aren't bad for secret management within teams, IME. So there is some use.

zorked• 7 years ago

Git repos are the only thing I use. I imagine there is a colossal overlap between "people who can use Keybase" and "people who use git".

That said sharing files from the command line is super-convenient. I just never remember it's a possibility!

beaner• 7 years ago

It's also the only thing that provides all these things end-to-end encrypted, a lot of people don't realize that and so don't realize why others are interested in it.

sneak3• 7 years ago

I am willing to bet it is about Stellar giving Keybase a lot of money to force a non-removable ad for their coin onto nearly every active keybase profile page.

Still no way to get it off of there, save for a total account reset that wipes all data and connections. No warning or notice when you are offered to generate stellar keys for a wallet that it’s going to separately use your keybase key to also make a signature and post this permanent, non-removable ad to your profile page.

https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/20022

Almost two months ago the Keybase guy said they were going to allow people to remove it; no progress as yet. I wonder how much they got paid by Stellar to make their client app abuse a user’s trust like this. I hope it was a lot, I used to really like the idea behind keybase.

marc3842h• 7 years ago

I think this whole thing was a good idea, at least for me. I've had a Keybase account since back when they were invite-only. Once this whole thing launched, I finally convinced myself to take a closer look into this crypto currency thing. Certainly an interesting topic.

neiman• 7 years ago

"Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come in.."

Who would have imagined giving free money would cause that?

scarejunba• 7 years ago

I like Keybase. Pity about the outcome. Quite happy with my Lumens, though.

Also, interesting that the same user acquisition strategy works so often. Paypal gave away money to acquire (it's also in Zero to One but you'll remember it when it came out), Coinbase did, Jet did, etc. I'm quite happy with this strategy to be honest.

aliswe• 7 years ago

Keybase is such a strangely positioned product. Really misses the mark for us. No password reset, chatting, public profiles, likes, follow "crypto influencers" ... And this campaign felt like a nigerian letter. It's like that strange guest who noone invited.

The whole office will be relieved when we switch.

dbalan• 7 years ago

For people like me who is confused about what this means: https://airdrops.io/stellar/

StathamStack• 7 years ago

Courtesy of Internet Archive: screenshot from December 4th, 2019:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191204211334/https://keybase.i...

2 Billion Lumens (XLM) were going to be shared over 20 months.

100 Million Lumens will be distributed on December 15th.

So, Keybase profits by keeping the remaining 1.9 Billion Lumens (19000000000*0.053261 current USD rate)

floren• 7 years ago

You were beating this same drum on /r/keybase and nobody was buying the story then either. The fake money will most likely remain with Stellar, although I'd rather it did go to Keybase, a company which provides actual value... even if it's fake money that I'll be leaving to languish in my Keybase wallet until it drops to $0 value.

pornel• 7 years ago

I kinda feel sorry for them. They must have realized they can't make $100M for their investors by managing GPG Web Of Trust for a bunch of nerds.

Keybase was a nice protocol/command-line tool to prove identity, but it was over as soon as they flipped it to being some wannabe Dropbox with Adobe-quality autoupdate, then wannabe Slack, then some shitcoin-powered Twitter DM spam.

geofft3• 7 years ago

While this giveaway mostly worked, it's clear that there will be decreasing returns and massively increased effort required. Why? Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come in, far beyond the capacity of Keybase or SDF to filter.

Keybase still doesn't see the hordes of real people and their Eternal September effect on the platform as a problem. I'm not saying they have to see it as a problem - if they want to tell investors "We increased our userbase N-fold by attracting a bunch of people who are just here for the free money," that's their right. But for those of us who were previously on the platform for all the things Keybase used to advertise, it seems we're no longer the target market.

aprvchndrs2• 7 years ago

I love Keybase for the ability to link together multiple identities together.

I use keybase with two profiles. One which is linked to my IRL identity. And one which is linked to my internet identity.

The Stellar offering seemed really odd to me - because it seemed so outside of its core functionality. Almost scammy.

Then I read an article on Ars Technica about a flood of scammers and that sort of connected the two dots. The Stellar offering seems to have flooded them with more “people” than they can handle.

mopsi• 7 years ago

Stellar doesn't seem odd to me at all. One of the large hurdles of working together with freelancers (especially from outside the US/EU) are payments.

If I find someone on Twitter or elsewhere posting artwork I like and I want to hire them, then Keybase makes the rest quite simple: easy to confirm identity, discuss details over chat, share files, and finally make payments.

Seems like a platform with great potential that's horribly misunderstood.

aprvchndrs2• 7 years ago

That’s actually a fair point.

I hadn’t considered Keybase as a platform for freelance work. If Stellar is supposed to tie in with their Teams, Files and Git offerings - that makes much more sense.

But the airdrops just felt off to me. Last time I checked the github issues page - I saw half dozen issues raised just asking for airdrop info.

crawshaw• 7 years ago

I think this is a good move.

Keybase had a certain quiet dignity to it. Everyone listed there was easily identifiable to me so there was never any confusion over who I was talking to, and it was easy to turn the notifications right down. We even used it for team chat. Keybase had some appeal as "crypto means cryptography." Introducing a cryptocurrency shattered that quiet careful image.

I wouldn't say cryptocurrency integration and the surrounding song and dance is the reason we switched to Slack for team chat, but it is the reason I stopped advocating for staying on Keybase.

I hope this move is part of shoring up the "quiet reliable tool" image I had of Keybase. Among the 1e6 chat programs I have to use to talk to everyone, Keybase was the closest to feeling quiet and reliable, and I hope it does again soon.

thebouv• 7 years ago

That's a bummer. I liquidated the stellar they sent me. Free money. I bought some plastic Orks to paint, ha.

bloopernova• 7 years ago

I bought some Lego. Well, I mean, I withdrew the funds to coinbase then my bank, and used those funds to pay for 2 Lego sets.

If I'm getting all my Stellar at once next week, I can complete my collection of Avengers Lego sets.

OK, so it's not WAAAAAAGGHHHH! But it's the same small pieces of crack cocaine. Although the WH40K lore is so much more wonderful than even the Avengers movies :)

(are you cunning and brutal, or brutal and cunning?)

exabrial• 7 years ago

Stellar is a seriously cool cryptocurrency. The more I learn about it, the more I want to actually use it for everyday stuff. And unlike bitcoin, it isn't causing a massive energy waste.

Really the only thing missing is a way make semi-anonymous payments (sort of like cash).

noxer2• 7 years ago

It's still mostly a bad copy of XRP so although overall "better" than bitcoin is does nothing better than the predecessor (XRP). In fact stellar was created because Jed McCaleb wanted to do a FB airdrops to push XRP but the rest of the team dint like this idea. Their though a giveaway for actually crypto interested people is enough and giving coins to people who don't understand it would not add any value. Quite obviously they where right. But Jeb started stellar and since day one airdrops the token wherever he can.

Disclaimer: I sold the XLM I got years ago for XRP. I didn't participate in the recent giveaways.

bluehatbrit• 7 years ago

I used to huge advocate for Keybase. I was drawn in initially by the elegance of their social identity proof, and the chat that came from that. The idea of being able to send a message to someone and know it was them struck me as very powerful.

When they then announced KBFS I was excited. It was just as useful as chat, and makes a ton of sense as a next step for the product. My second thought was hoping that I'd be able to pay for a "pro" tier and they'd then become profitable and sustainable.

Teams I also think was a very natural progression and definetely felt like the next thing for them. Especially with sub-teams, it opened a lot of doors when combined with KBFS and chat. To me it seemed to be gearing towards an eventual free personal tier with paid-for teams funding the platform. This would be similar to the model we've seen work with GitHub and such.

What came next was months of hoping that Keybase would become more stable and easier to use. The apps were buggy, but I could deal with it. The UI/UX wasn't very intuitive but with some effort I, as a technical person, could figure it out. I could even explain the concepts to non-technical friends and get them excited for it. But the quality just never picked up. The pain my friends experienced came from a crappy user experience, an incredibly flakey app (mobile and desktop). They all stopped using it, and so my usage became limited as well.

Then after months of waiting and hoping for improvements, they announced Stellar integrat. I was confused, it didn't really seem to have a straight forward commercial aspect. In my mind, you can sell keybase with file storage and teams, it seems like an attractive offering! Especially with hard line gaurentees of identity, that's a huge problem which is suddenly solved. But cryptocurrency, while fitting with the cryptography theme, didn't feel like it fit with the product they'd built. What's more, the apps still hadn't become more usable or stable.

I think my frustration with Keybase is that I thought they were using cryptography to solve problems with communication and collaboration. Instead it seems to be an excuse to for some crytopgrahy enthusiasts to build more things with cryptography. There doesn't seem to be a commercial approach, nor a true desire to make the power of cryptography accessible to the masses.

I really wish they'd invest in making teams, kbfs, chat, and identity easier to use and more stable. If they did, I'd find it really easy to convince my employer to give them money for the product suite. But instead they seem to want to throw in any feature related to cryptography, rather than building a product suite and applying cryptography to solve common issues.

I hope someone will one day take what Keybase has started, and will focus on the product rather than the tech. I'm not a cryto expert, most of what I learned was from being inspired by the Keybase articles. But at the end of the day I want to leverage this tech to it's maximum, not just use it because it's "fun".

Keybase cancels Stellar token airdrop

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