joyce

Here is a link to the blog post when the Stellar Consensus Protocol was released. It includes a summary in Stellar's own words and a link to the white paper: https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...

Joyce from Stellar here. We are really proud of this project as it is directly situated in villages all across Nigeria. These MFIs been doing the hard work of offering financial services in really rural areas and now will be able to connect these communities to a larger economy.

Joyce from Stellar.org here! We are also putting together another presentation on off-validator storage in XDR within Stellar-Core that was briefly mentioned in the post. Graydon is working on it now.

As the executive director of a tech nonprofit (https://www.stellar.org/), this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. Certain problems need scalable, open, global public infrastructure, like global open system for identity, money, healthcare, energy research, climate data, etc. Unfortunately, the current model of foundation philanthropy doesn't fund these kinds of solutions well because the current charity funding model focuses on funding "programmatic services" (programs that service recipients directly). To put in more familiar HN terminology, foundations prefer to fund front-end services rather than back-end infrastructure. But Wikipedia cannot exist without http. And who funds the development of http-like projects?

With the growth of the Internet and the open-source movement, we, the tech industry, understand why open protocols and technology are crucial to providing access and opportunity to more people. I am a big believer in for-profit companies too, but there are certain things in tech that should be executed with a more philanthropic bent. When asked why Stellar.org is nonprofit, decentralized and open-source, we reply, "Can you imagine if the Internet had been owned by a for-profit company?

The thesis of Parker's post in the WSJ really struck a chord with me. There is a unique role that technologists can to play in philanthropy. We understand infrastructure and we should be funding the big tech bets that the world needs. Our industry is full of the unreasonable optimists - let's take that optimism and invest in an unbelievable future:)

Funny you pick that example! We just had an internal hack day on Friday and Bartek (who also worked on Interstellar) was working on a SMS client as his project. I'll ask him to swing by and post some thoughts on it here but he is in Europe so asleep now. (I work for Stellar.org).

And thanks for the kind words - in our view, to handle the last mile problem, we need to build things to be accessible and as modular as possible which will hopefully make things much easier for developers everywhere. By bringing down the barriers of use of the code base, we will hopefully see more developers building things for their local communities and starting to fill in the gaps in the last mile. Goal: let a thousand flowers bloom!

Joyce from Stellar here. Thanks! As we were working on the white paper, we realized how difficult it was to explain complex concepts like federated Byzantine agreement.

We know it’s part of our jobs to make these ideas understandable. That way more people can join the dialogue and think of ways this infrastructure can be used to build services for their communities, which may be really far from the nearest computer science program. So we decided to add a lighter approach in hopes of making it fun for people to learn.

Not sure what your exact question is. If you elaborate, we can try to answer. Thanks.

This is Joyce from Stellar. One of the most interesting parts of this project for me is the fact that airtime (prepaid mobile minutes) will be a method of savings. And in many places in the world, there are many locations and agents where people can pay for mobile minutes (essentially cash in/ cash out). It is ubiquitous. This means Praekelt and their users can piggy back off of existing networks and reach more people at lower cost.

Howdy - so at the time of the ledger fork, the Foundation was running all 5 of the validating nodes and there were other parties not associated with us that were running non-validating nodes.

We do not have the ability nor do we want the ability to control other people's nodes.

Since Stellar only launched 4 months ago, the number nodes in the network was still small. In the future, when the network is on the new consensus system and able to run safely in a truly decentralized, then it would be up to individual nodes to decide what to do.

Hope that clarifies things.

Joyce from Stellar here. Yes, that is correct. When given the choice between temporary centralization and guaranteeing the security of the protocol and therefore user funds, the choice is obvious. Once the new consensus algorithm is complete, it will be safe to run with more than one node again.

I may never need postmates again.

Joyce from Stellar here. Prof. David Mazieres is creating a new provably-correct version of the consensus system and will be publishing a white paper that will be in line with his normal, rigorous academic standards.

In addition, Graydon Hoare (creator of Rust) has also joined the Stellar team from Mozilla. Now that Stellar supports over 2.3 million wallets, making it the largest implementation of this system, we have found certain scaling limitations of the core tech. Graydon is one of the developers spearheading efforts to make Stellar capable of scaling well beyond its current limitations.

Once these two efforts are complete in a few months, I think you will feel much more comfortable with the robustness of the Stellar protocol.

He will be on the Core team which focuses on stellard. We will be publishing a roadmap shortly. Thanks!

Joyce from Stellar here. We have not changed any content from our launch post since it was published for launch. Please feel free to read over our post here. Also adding Stripe's if anyone missed both announcements a month ago. (Side note: Stellar is 1 month old today!)

- https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/

- https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

Thanks!

Use one of the exchanges like justcoin.com or https://bx.in.th/BTC/STR/

I am the executive director of Stellar. Wanted to share my reply to the MTurk stuff: http://forum.stellar.org/t/stellar-updates/1026

Hi Owen - I'll go help you out. Let me know if you have any questions. joyce@stellar

Great - shoot me an email (joyce@stellar) and happy to help!

Hi from Stellar. I know FB isn't the ideal login method. But our goals were to provide easy access to people and to have a method to detect spam accounts. Today is our first day out. We will be releasing other ways to claim soon so I hope you check back. Thanks.

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.

Ha! Thanks for sticking with it and we will keep working on smoothing things out.

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.

Sorry, our web client is currently down under the load. We're on it.

We want to give them away as fairly and to as many people as possible. Stellar doesn't require mining and so there's no need to give them away to the people with the most CPU cycles. Anyone can participate regardless of technical ability or income.

I work at Stellar. We wanted a method by which we could fund people once (to prevent someone from spinning up a lot of fake accounts to claim) hence the decision to move forward with Facebook. I know it isn't perfect, but we are doing our best to make the giveaway broadly accessible and not game-able. And we are working on other claim methods so yes, totally hear your concerns.

Hi, I work at Stellar. The FB auth is the first of several methods to receive stellars so we will add more methods soon.

Also, mining obviously has many benefits, but it's still limited to people who are highly technical and/or who have money to spend. We wanted to provide much broader access to digital currency, and so stellars will be given away for free at the click of a button.

To encourage transparency, anyone can see how many stellars have been given away here: https://www.stellar.org/stats/

I am one of the folks working at Stellar. Yes, FB isn't a login method that will work for everyone. Today is just day 1; we plan on adding more methods soon.

Also, anyone can create an account/wallet without even registering your email. FB auth is only for the giveaway.

I am one of the folks working at Stellar. Yes, FB isn't a login method that will work for everyone. But today is our first day saying hello to the world; we do plan on adding more methods soon. Thanks.

I worked at The Innocence Project for 2 years. When I was working there, our exoneration rate for cases that made it to DNA testing was 50%. Imagine that - 50%. This kind of failure rate is unacceptable. This is a compounded by the fact that the majority of cases we saw never made it to DNA testing because evidence was so old that it was typically lost.

The Innocence Project still has a huge backlog of cases. Legal cases are incredibly long and expensive. A single DNA test costs thousands of dollars. Donations mean everything here. Thank you.

Honolulu is a big city which has a constant flow of Silicon Valley folks so not as isolating as where you were.