The cat was out of the bag before you even tried. The only difference is others showed restraint and didn't break Stellar's mechanism intentionally.
When I pointed out you could buy access to FB accounts, you weren't actually supposed to go out and do it, y'know?
Just because we can break dumb mechanisms like these just means we have to show restraint. :/
Dumb mechanisms inherent in a cryptocurrency should be broken early and often. This is just one inherent in Ripple/Stellar. Everett is a hacker hero.
"Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course all become immensely rich."
If I had meant "creating Facebook accounts", I'd have stated that. This is a technique that has been used before on various blackhat forums.
Generally farming is getting people in countries with cheap labor to go out and perform the action for you. Mechanical Turk is one way to do that.
e.g. Term in a different way: http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2009/captcha-farms/
Captcha Farms do the same thing but with a private pool of cheap labor.
Gdb, I was trying to be circumspect and not spelling it out so some script kiddie didn't go and immediately use the technique.
Why the flying fuck would I show restraint towards a system that claims to be designed for the safe storage and transport of money?
You bet your ass I, along with ten thousand others, tried to find ways to game/break Bitcoin. And guess what? We can't, because it's well designed.
If Ripple/Stellar are gameable, they deserve to be gamed.
51% attacks? http://www.coindesk.com/ghash-io-never-launch-51-attack/ ?
Etc.
Please don't tell me you can't game/break Bitcoin. With enough capital, you can. Just no one has bothered.
Please don't make obviously false statements in defense of your position.
> Why the flying fuck would I show restraint towards a system that claims to be designed for the safe storage and transport of money?
I could steal people's credit card information and use it without triggering the fraud alert until after I get the goods. I could flee the country to a place that wouldn't extradite me for such behavior before anyone was the wiser.
I don't because I have no desire to abuse breakable systems just because I can.
I guess I just have more restraint than most people.
>We expect that as a price for stellar becomes more established, we'll have to continually adjust the total amount of the giveaway to make sure it keeps making sense.
So they're already dialing back their distribution promise. This is exactly what happened with Ripple. When Ripple first started, there were assurances that all but 20% of Ripples would be distributed "as quickly as possible".
That didn't happen.
Several years later now, Ripple has decided to basically keep as many ripples as they can, which is supposedly part of what led to the split between Jed and the Ripple leadership/owners.
All this is a funny commentary on human nature. As an outsider, it's as clear as day to me that in order to succeed, Ripple needed to rapidly distribute as many XRP as possible. After all, 5% of a lot of money is worth much more than 50% of nothing. The only other missing ingredient for Ripple was community engagement.
And with Stellar I fear we'll see the same thing (at least with respect to a rapidly decreasing distribution rate).
These issues are exactly why Bitcoiners are so scornful of "pre-mined" coins. All things considered, proof-of-work and proof-of-burn are still by far the fairest and most successful currency bootstrapping methods. Stellar uses neither.
Bootstrapping a currency is the ultimate Zen undertaking: in order to make money as a crypto-bootstrapper, you must find ways to distribute it, either by giving it away or (preferably) by fostering entrepreneurship and spending it on those merchants who take a chance on accepting it.
A lesson much of the Bitcoin community still hasn't taken to heart, which is likely the only reason why interest in the coin is failing to pass on from the early adopter to the early majority.
What makes you think it is failing? Literally all the indicators show that interest in Bitcoin is growing:
- Payment processors are growing very fast (eg. BitPay is signing up 500-1000 new merchants every week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8YSivdLKf0 and see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7974197)
- Even very large companies began to accept Bitcoin: Dell, Expedia, Newegg, Dish Network, Overstock, TigerDirect...
- BTC continues to gain value --chaotically through bubbles but still gaining value overall: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg730zigWeeklyzc...
- Bitcoin VC investment reached $158 million this year, and is on target to reach $200-300 million, approximately 2x-3x more than last year: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/
If you can show any metrics pointing to an increasing rate of adoption among users, I would be greatly heartened.
Instead, we seem to be reaching a wall between the early adopters and early majority. This is a well-known chasms in the technology adoption cycle, and I'm a bit concerned about Bitcoin's ability to jump it, particularly given the current "hodl" mentality of most users of the coin.
On the other hand, if there's another big jump in price (not unlikely), then there will likely be increased interest among users. So I'm not saying Bitcoin will never gain majority adoption. I'm just saying that at this point, things don't look as promising as they did a year ago.
After all, new users are a limited commodity (particularly after the honeymoon period). So almost by definition, if you chose to decrease the amount of Stellars distributed because the price is increasing, then you're slowing down the rate of distribution.
Which is exactly what Ripple has done.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this one, but I'm definitely taking a wait and see approach.
Mechanical Turk workers are used to low-paying and high-volume jobs. The $1.00 fee is very attractive for the steps involved, if this was a repeatable job. It's only natural to assume that every worker would attempt to create another Stellar account and retry the steps anew, only to be confronted with a an error after the first attempt.
And, unbeknownst to them, if Stellar does become a success, those workers will forever be left on the sidelines. Considering that Stellar has the potential to include the world's underprivileged into the global economy, often without bank accounts or identities, it's a shame that we are the first to take advantage of them.
Most people aren't even aware of Bitcoin, let alone all the random pump-and-dump schemes floating around.
Which is currently around $0.000353USD/STR ($2.05/5800)
IF stellar is a success, hoarding can be a good idea. But if this has a fate similar to to Auroracoin (also heavily premined, handed out for free to everybody) the price may drop 20 fold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin
Instead of inventing yet another premined coin Stripe should have integrated Ripple.
(Edit: it seems more likely to me that, if this was done over MT, the people working on MT were in turn using botnets for scale.)
Update: If you don't believe it, here's a screenshot straight from HIT Scraper, a Greasemonkey script MTurk workers often use to display job listings on Mechanical Turk in a more easily parsable fashion: http://imgur.com/DOAIuy3
Not sure how he pulled this one off, considering Amazon is now requiring a verified SSN or tax ID for requesters to purchase money to post HITs, but there you have it.
Per my original HN post last night which broke the story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119], I still think that he gamed the system. If I remember correctly, he asked mTurkers to create a Stellar account _without_ an identifiable account name so the transaction couldn't be easily backtracked. Also, he did not use his real name in mTurk and impersonated someone else. Not sure if his actions violated the ToS.
It was right for Everett to have come forward and disclose his means. His suggestions to improve the system are excellent. It will improve the Stellar system for everyone involved. Nevertheless, I believe that he should donate his balance to a charity. It will be an honorable thing to do.
Sandro
Just because he didn't use his real name doesn't make the transaction less valid. And just because the task didn't use an identifiable account name doesn't make the transaction less valid.
What you're insisting is that you can't buy something from someone on Craigslist using a fake name and meeting in a place that nobody else can tell where you made the transaction. In other words, 99% of Craiglist transactions.
If you disclosed to these people that this is a one-time transaction, and that they will forever be parting ways with their only allotment of currency which might appreciate in the future, and which is currently valued 50X higher, I bet you wouldn't get as many takers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124119
He got outed.
Arguably Bitcoin was the same initially, except in Bitcoin's case you paid CPU manufacturers and electrical utility companies who preferred to be paid cash than mine Bitcoin themselves. Division of labour in action.
