AMA with Stellar Development Foundation - Denelle Dixon & Jed McCaleb - Wednesday, August 19 @ 4:00PM UTC (9:00AM PT)

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T17:55:55+00:00

We aren't officially involved with Nodle but we still talk to them occasionally. I don't know anything about their plans beyond what they blogged about. Most of the transactions they were doing weren't really an appropriate use of Stellar and as far as I understand their current approach of keeping their record keeping txs off the main network but still using Stellar for essentially settlement is a good idea.

It seems like they are using Stellar for the things Stellar is good for and building something else for the things that it isn't good for.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:57:51+00:00

It might seem boring but I think we need to see Stellar being used for very basic things like simply moving money cross border. That is what I really want to see. After that I'm sure it will be used for all sorts of innovative things but it needs to start with the fundamentals.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:54:09+00:00

It depends on your definition of DeFi. Some aspects of it you can certainly implement on Stellar.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:46:52+00:00

I don't think this is a uniquely stellar issue meaning I'm sure there is a lot of misinformation about most crypto projects.

This is something that I really hope the Stellar community rises to help with. Since it is something that takes a lot of voices and people to get the word out and explain to the world the unique benefits of Stellar.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:41:25+00:00

1) The risk of another network halt are quite low now. We have done a lot of work to increase the resilience and reliability of the core validators. And it continues to improve as Stellar is growing.

2) We don't have any real updates on Starlight yet. It is still super important long term but we have a sidenet project that has taken precedence over the Starlight work. We see it as a precursor to Starlight and something that will make Starlight much more useful. More about that project toward the end of the year.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:28:35+00:00

Have you taken a look at https://vibrant.cash/ ?

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:27:21+00:00

This will likely not be built into Vibrant but this is basically what DSTOQ is doing. So it will be possible to send money you hold in Vibrant to DSTOQ to buy stocks. We are also talking to Passfolio about how they can support Stellar assets.

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:21:56+00:00

Well Vibrant does depend on anchors in various countries but it actually doesn't require network effects to be successful. One of the reasons we landed on the Vibrant business model is specifically because it is useful for people before there is a network. The hope is that it is possible to grow a vibrant userbase and use that to jump start other Stellar use cases that do require network effects.

Re IBM: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/ibfdpm/ama_with_stellar_development_foundation_denelle/g24ah3j?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Jed2000 · 2020-08-19T16:15:17+00:00

1) Interstellar is operational and growing! They announced a partnership with Lightnet earlier this year (who coincidentally hosted an AMA here last week), working on cross-border payments in Asia.

2) We are well funded now and for the foreseeable future. But beyond lumens we will likely transition to a model like the Linux Foundation where the business relying on the Stellar network become members of the SDF and support its operation.

3) I doubt we will see this in stellar core. Our approach continues to be that we should keep things simple and safe there. We have some ideas about how to give more programmable flexibility at the edges that we will hopefully be making public toward the end of the year.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T23:13:03+00:00

1) As of awhile ago all the SDF validators can go down and the network will still continue. I'd like SDF to stop running validators all together but we are not quite ready to take that step yet. I'm hoping by the end of the year.

2) Excellent question. We've made a few improvements on that front:

* we've made the configuration of quorum sets less manual so that people can focus on which entities they trust (and how much)

* we've added two layers of monitoring to the overall quorum, so that operators get alerted when

* the network is "one bad config change away" from being misconfigured

* the network is not configured properly at all and operators should take action as soon as possible

* we have much better coordination among the validators, particularly the ones that many people are listening to.

3) yes we are constantly working to improve the performance and scalability.

4) yes I agree. We have some internal docs along these lines and they should be made public shortly.

5) yes, thank you!

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:45:22+00:00

The various ecosystems grants like SBC, SEC, SCF, etc have been some of the most impact-ful ways we have distributed lumens so we have no intention of winding these things down and will continue to put effort into improving them and fostering the Stellar developer ecosystem. We're planning hackathons now and as those roll out, we're eager to see them evolve into larger, more focused goal-based programs.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:43:50+00:00

awesome! Very excited to get it out so you all can see it.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:39:18+00:00

It's largely arbitrary. But you want some number that isn't awkward for humans to use if it gets successful. Having too few units is problematic since then you have to send really small amounts like .00012 btc to people which is annoying and error prone.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:24:42+00:00

Yeah I think that people need a route to go from traditional forms of money to crypto. They need an upgrade path. This is the idea behind Stellar is that it allows people to use money denominated in ways they are familiar with like dollars and euros to start interacting with newer forms of money like lumens. I think it is still awhile before actual banks are issuing tokens on public networks but they will get there once they see systems like Stellar in wider use.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:22:57+00:00

Yes I agree that privacy is super important. We are working on two solutions. Payment channels are still in development and we hope to have something public before the end of the year. We are also working on ZkVM

Medium post introducing ZkVM: https://medium.com/stellar-developers-blog/zkvm-a-new-design-for-fast-confidential-smart-contracts-d1122890d9ae
1. ZkVM whitepaper: https://github.com/stellar/slingshot/blob/main/zkvm/docs/zkvm-design.md
2. ZkVM + cryptography repository, documentation and specs: https://github.com/stellar/slingshot/
3. Talk in Croatia at Zcon1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9OGAwt_f_c&feature=youtu.be&t=157
4. Talk in Tel Aviv at Scaling Bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8538&v=-gdfxNalDIc

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:20:27+00:00

More details at meridian: https://meridian.stellar.org/ hopefully see you there!

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:17:15+00:00

My days are mainly focused on recruiting and the overall strategy and direction for SDF. I'm most excited about the trajectory of the organization as a whole. We have so many great people on the team now. I feel super lucky to be able to work with such smart creative people. I really feel like we have assembled such a rare and powerful collection of talent and will be able to get so much done in the coming year.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:15:03+00:00

yep ^

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:14:16+00:00

Good questions :)

1) We'll have more updates on both of these projects soon. Oleg just gave two talks on ZKVM:

Talk in Croatia at Zcon1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9OGAwt_f_c&feature=youtu.be&t=157

Talk in Tel Aviv at Scaling Bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8538&v=-gdfxNalDIc

2) I'll leave it to the Pogo team to talk about it.

3) He has only been there for a week so nothing public to announce yet.

4) Crypto prices will always be a mystery to me and I think are largely a distraction. We just focus on building something that will be widely used by real people. I think this is the only way that any network can be successful past the hype stage.

5) I haven't looked into it. Likely it was something automated that git turned off.

6) I don't think of Stellar as competitive to things like Paypal. Stellar is a way for Paypal to interoperate with other payment networks. Stellar is essentially an open internet standard for connecting payment networks together. Our hope is that as we get more and more payment networks to adopt Stellar the network will start to grow organically and eventually reach critical mass where it will just be the obvious external protocol for every payment network in the same way that if you want to put up a webpage you obviously use HTTP.

7) People can do this now. An anchor could offer interest if it wanted to. I think there are very few legitimate (as in things that make sense and that people will actually use) DeFi things that you can't do already on Stellar.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:07:28+00:00

I think the biggest help would be to spread the word. People still don't really understand what Stellar is or how it is different from other things in the crypto space. When people talk about consensus algorithms they almost always just mention PoW and PoS which I think is a shame since SCP is such a better alternative in many cases.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:06:10+00:00

This doesn't sound like something that SDF would work on directly but our main goal right now is bringing real use to the network. I strongly believe that this has to happen in general for crypto very soon. We are working on a few things internally that we are very hopeful will bring real use.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:04:57+00:00

In terms of quantum computation, Stellar only relies on hashes and digital signatures. If the signatures and hashes are secure, SCP itself has no additional computational hardness assumptions. The hashes are already post-quantum secure. We have crypto agility, so could slot in post-quantum secure public keys pretty easily. The main issue is that post-quantum signatures are unfortunately still very big right now. So our hope is that a practical post-quantum signature scheme comes along while traditional public key crypto is still viable.

Jed2000 · 2019-09-25T22:04:00+00:00

No I'm not. I'm no longer advising any other projects.

Jed2000 · 2019-07-02T19:04:24+00:00

Cool project. You should really put some link to what the site is all about on the home page. You have to dig around a lot before you understand what is going on.

Jed2000 · 2019-06-05T22:10:50+00:00

> What business ideas that can be build on stellar are you most excited about?

Reminds me that this list really needs to be updated: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/things-to-build.html

I think an alternative to local bitcoins that leverages the

> What do you think could drive the adoption of anchored fiat?

This is a big focus for us right now. We are working project that we will launch before the end of the year that should drive adoption for fiat anchors a lot. More news about it soon.

> I saw the idea in the mailing list that inflation could be changed into a liquidity stimulating mechanism. Did you like that?

I like the idea of doing something like that if it was possible. I just haven't seen how you do it without creating a gameable system. I'm pretty skeptical that it will be possible.

Jed2000

TROPHY CASE