- Accelerando by Charles Stross
I was one of the (thousands of?) people who Keybase/Stellar/mysterious parties decided to gift some of their tokens to. I tried to transfer them to a provider with my bank information, and immediately flushed them into /dev/null because I didn't understand the separate sequences of numbers that I was supposed to provide.
I wasn't exactly upset, but it really solidified my opinion of the entire space: as an end user, my single greatest interest is the fidelity of the transactions that I take part in. Tack onto that the constant whirlwind of technical compromises that lack legal recourse, and my feelings of confidence approach zero.
This isn't a problem with Stellar itself, but more how Coinbase decides to approach the issue. But Stellar does require a 0.5 XLM commitment to "open" an account on-chain, which is probably what holds Coinbase back.
Otherwise, Stellar is a very reliable and focused chain, and has a stable fee market (which means a lot these days!).
> Still, user mistakes keep occurring with unenviable regularity. In late October, someone sent 28,050 AAVE tokens—worth around $1.1 million at the time—to the wrong address, which resulted in the irreversible loss of their funds. It’s a scary world out there.
Incredible.
All I’ve ever heard are exchanges that are so grossly incompetent that I would never even think about engaging with. Months of waiting for verification that never happens. Waiting for transfers that never happen.
Uploading passports and drivers licenses to an exchange, and bank account information, to only think that 6 months from now there will be a breach and all my information is downloaded by criminals. It’s a full stop to not even consider proceeding.
I would love to know how someone can convert Bitcoin or other digital currency to millions of USD that are capable of hitting a bank account, that can be spent at the local grocery store.
I watched as Bitcoin became a thing and never even considered touching it because I didn’t even remotely wanted to be associated with criminals using it for drugs and other illegal stuff.
Anyways, digital currency is just so bizarre to me.
They send a cent and see if the recipient received it or not. If the money went through and is secured, then send the rest. Simply by doing this, you could avoid almost all incidents like these.
1. Voting
2. Irreversible transactions
Wallets should do more to prevent these types of sends from occuring, providing warnings. But you should also never ever send $50K without a test transaction of some token amount first.
The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.
Maybe the UI for wallets should do more to defend against erroneous sends, or warn the user to make a test transaction before sending large amounts? A lot more can be done with UX.
That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested parties from the time they are cast to the time they are counted.
The more technical you get with your voting solutions, the less overall trust the public will have in the final vote counts.
If you allow physical voting places, then just make a machine that gives a paper recipt and do risk limiting audits. Problem solved.
1) Votes must be private and anonymous (i.e. not linked to your identity)
2) Voting must be secure
It's easy to satisfy either one of these requirements, but currently impossible to satisfy both.
DNS and domains instead of IP addresses
