There was a thread on twitter (https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/832041974735654912) debating this question and I wanted to move it here since discussions on twitter usually aren't that productive.

In my view Stellar is definitely permission-less. Anyone can run a validator. You don't need permission from anyone to join or use the network.

Greg, in the case that you are concerned with that there could be some "cartel" of validators that are all listening to each other and no one else, it is trivial for people to set up their own validators outside this cartel and listen to each other.

Keep in mind that this can also easily happen in bitcoin, if a cartel of miners with over 51% of the hashing decide to stop accepting blocks from people outside of cartel they can do this. The difference is in bitcoin it would be hard to ignore the cartel and there is economic incentive for the cartel to take all the blocks.

[Read more]

2 Billion or more lumens to be awarded to people building out the stellar ecosystem.

To encourage creativity and development in the Stellar ecosystem, we’re announcing the Stellar Build Challenge.

Stellar.org will grant awards in the following four categories: Anchors, Applications, Exchanges, and First-Time Submissions. We’ll announce the first round of winners on October 1, 2016.

Build Challenge awards will be funded by unclaimed lumens from the bitcoin-lumen program. This pilot challenge is simple by design: it’s an experiment to find ways to develop services that are fair, affordable, and community-driven, and at the same time drive uptake of the Stellar network to maximize efficiency and reach. We plan to learn from it and offer similar programs in the future.

Read more: https://www.stellar.org/blog/build-challenge/

Look forward to seeing what people build!

#stellar and #stellar-dev on IRC
QQ Group: 275158187

Stellar (XLM) is a completely decentralized consensus platform.
It is designed to support any type of currency.
It has a built in decentralized exchange that can be used to trade any type of currency or asset.

Features & Specifications

• 3-5 second confirmation time
• Supports thousands of transactions per second
• Can be used to send or trade any currency, asset, or token.
• Open-source
• Uses SCP rather than Proof of Work. Whitepaper
• Simple, clean API
• Multisig and smart contracts
• Decentralized distributed database
• 100B XLM created initially
• 1% fixed annual inflation

Coin Distribution
Since the Stellar network doesn't use mining, all the coins exist when the network starts.
The majority of these are held by the non-profit Stellar.org.
Stellar.org is distributing the coins in the following way:

• 50B XLM: to be given in small increments to as many people as possible.
• 25B XLM: to be given to other businesses and non-profits to reach people that stellar.org wouldn't otherwise be able to reach through the Direct Signup program.
• 20B XLM: to be given to bitcoin and XRP holders (announcement about the details of this coming soon)
• 5B XLM: retained by Stellar.org for operations.

More information about the coin distribution can be found here.
You can see the distribution to date here.

How it works
Decentralized network
A decentralized network consists of peers that can run independently of each other.

This means that the Stellar network does not depend on any single entity. The idea is to have as many independent servers participate in the Stellar network as possible, so that the network will still run successfully even if some servers fail.

Ledger
Like a traditional ledger, the Stellar ledger records a list of all the balances and transactions belonging to every single account on the network. A complete copy of the global Stellar ledger is hosted on each server that runs the Stellar software. Any entity can run a Stellar server.

These servers form a decentralized Stellar network, allowing the ledger to be distributed as widely as possible. The servers sync and validate the ledger by a mechanism known as consensus.
This entire process of coming to consensus on the Stellar network occurs approximately every 2-5 seconds.
Prof. David Mazières describes the technical process of consensus in his white paper, The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). You can also explore other resources explaining SCP.

Anchors, trust, and credit
Anchors are simply entities that people trust to hold their deposits and issue credits into the Stellar network for those deposits. They act as a bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. All money transactions in the Stellar network (except the native digital currency of lumens) occur in the form of credit issued by anchors.
Anchors do two simple things:
1) They take your deposit and issue the corresponding credit to your account address on the Stellar ledger.
2) You can make a withdrawal by bringing them credit they issued.
You have to trust the anchor to honor your deposits and withdrawals of credit it has issued.
Anchors exist in the pre-stellar world now. For example, to use Venmo, you deposit money in from your bank account. Venmo then gives you credit in your Venmo account. You can now send that Venmo credit to anyone that trusts Venmo (anyone with a Venmo account). Someone that received your Venmo credit can convert it to real money by withdrawing it to their bank.
Anchors perform the same function in Stellar. The difference is, all the "Venmos” and other anchors are operating on the same network so they can all transact with each other now – this makes the system way more powerful. People can now easily send and exchange all these different anchor credits with each other.


Distributed Exchange
The Stellar ledger is able to store offers that people have made to buy or sell currencies. Offers are public commitments to exchange one type of credit for another at a predetermined rate. The ledger becomes a global marketplace for assets.
All these offers form what is called an orderbook. There is an orderbook for each currency/issuer pair. So if you are wanting to exchange Virgin Bank/EUR for bitstamp/BTC you look at that particular order book in the ledger to see what people are buying and selling it for.
This allows people to not only buy and sell currencies in a foreign exchange like manner but also to convert currencies seamlessly during transactions.

Multi-currency transactions

Stellar allows you to send any currency you hold to anyone else in a different currency through the built-in distributed exchange. People can receive any currency through an anchor they added.
For example, Amy wants to send Bob euros, using her BTC balance. Stellar will automatically convert her BTC to EUR. The network will find the best exchange rate for the transaction.

Stellar Development Foundation
Stellar.org (Stellar Development Foundation) is a nonprofit organization that contributes to the Stellar network’s development and ensures it remains open and accessible to everyone.
Our mission is to connect people to low-cost financial services to fight poverty. We envision a prosperous world where everyone can improve their own lives through access to affordable payments, credit, and savings accounts.
More details and FAQ’s about Stellar.org
Press

• Tech Startups Chase Something Other Than Profits | Wall Street Journal
• Stellar Partners With Oradian To Bring Instant Money Transfer To Nigeria | TechCrunch
• A New Competitor for Bitcoin Aims to Be Faster and Safer | MIT Technology Review
• The Power of Developing Platforms not Products | PSFK
• Stellar’s Jed McCaleb: What’s New on the Upgraded Stellar Network | Bitcoin Magazine

Videos

• 6 million financial transactions for just 20 cents | PopTech
• Non-Profit On Purpose | Bullish
• Joyce Kim, Stellar at Fast Forward Demo Day | Fast Forward

Developers
Make money move as easily as email: develop a Stellar application or run a node on the network.

• Libraries and tutorials
• Horizon (API server)
• Stellar Core
• Create a test account
• Ideas for what to build
• Interactive developer tools

Dev help: #stellar-dev on IRC or slack.stellar.org #dev channel (they’re mirrored)

Community
The main community space is slack.stellar.org, a real-time chat group with over a thousand members.
You can also join a local Stellar community.

Wallets/apps
https://galactictalk.org/d/6-stellar-wallets-overview/7

https://github.com/TbLtzk/Centaurus Centaurus was the first stellar wallet available on google play. It is completely open source!

https://saza.com.ng/ Saza is a stellar wallet that helps users manage lumens and other assets. Features include: Manage multiple Stellar accounts, Send payments in different assets, Create/Manage Trustlines, Create/Manage Offers, View all operations on account, Set all account options.   

https://www.ecliptic.co - Ecliptic is a Stellar Wallet and Trading Client. It has the ability to add multiple wallets, including hosted, client-side and read-only accounts.

https://github.com/Proxiweb/starwallet

https://luuun.com/  Luuun is local lumens made easy. It is the easiest way to send money to the remotest areas of the world. Anyone can buy/sell lumens for cash from a local agent. Simply, 1.) Place a buy/sell request for lumens in your local currency, 2.) Wait for local tellers to respond. View and accept a teller offer nearby. 3.) Navigate to teller, provide a code and exchange cash. In addition, Luuun is a web based wallet for your lumens, digital currencies and other assets on the Stellar network.

http://lobstr.co/ Lobstr is a wallet for Stellar. Lobstr is available as a web app and also has native Android and iOS apps. Lobstr is a smart and secure way to send and receive Lumens. It's clean design and helpful features like email notifications simplify the whole experience and make Lobstr one of the most user friendly wallets.   

https://github.com/jojopoper/go-StellarWallet Can run in windows and linux, can support the record query and send and receive Lumens. Command line application mode, easy operation. Does not save the local file, you can use as a cold wallet. Supports Chinese and English.

https://stellar-portal.ngfar.io/ Stellar Portal is a web application to view and manage stellar accounts. It relies completely on Horizon and has no backend. You can view balances, offers, orderbooks and payment, and do most of operations.
   
http://equid.co/wallet/ The eQuid wallet holds eQuid. eQuid is a complementary currency that is different from other crypto currencies by the way it is injected into the economy. It is earned into existence rather than mined.   

http://ledgercn.com Stellar xlm send and receive, account trade history , merge account. Support federation service. Support Chinese and English language UI. Multi-Account manage, easy to use. Support friend manage.   

http://ledgercn.com/wallet Easy to use. No need to register, open the web page can be used. Support Chinese and English language. Support send and receive lumens, merge account, and simple trade history. UI support mobile web explorer.   

https://getstargazer.com Stargazer is a wallet application for mobile (i.e. Android) and desktop. Multiple accounts, multiple assets, multiple networks, multiple languages. The vision is to push the limit; to raise the bar for what a wallet is, and what you can do with it -- without adding to much fluff. For a overview of the capabilities, and how they work, walk through the tutorial.   

https://stellarterm.com/ StellarTerm is a web based trading client. With full ability to interact with the Stellar distributed exchange. It aims to make it easy and safe for users of any skill level to trade on the Stellar network. One big feature is that it has a up-to-date list of all the anchors so that users will have a simpler and safer experience.

http://ledgercn.com/wechat Service for wechat user. Support Chinese and English. Now includes wallet and blockchain browser features, convenient, safe, fast, without the need to install any APP can be used. Support Federation service, send and receive Lumens more convenient.   


http://stellarchain.io - Transaction explorer

http://ledgercn.com/wechat/blockchain/index.html  Stellar network block chain explorer. Support Chinese and English language.The most comprehensive block chain browser for the Stellar network is now available.

http://codetip.io/  -A simple and easy way to show your appreciation for people on github. It allows you to send lumens to anyone with a github account.

https://www.256kw.com/lucky/ -site for giving lumen gifts to multiple people or groups.

http://stellarinflationpool.com  - An inflation pool.

https://stellardice.com - Gamble with your lumens

https://sta2020.github.io/stellar-twitter-alerts/ It allows users to subscribe to notifications of operations on their stellar account. All that is required is your twitter ID and stellar account ID. Once subscribed you will get transaction alerts on twitter via direct messages

https://stellarlookout.com/ - service that lets you get text message notifications regarding transactions that happen on your Stellar account.

http://www.bikewin.co Bob lives in Berlin, Bob pay the deposit to "own" a bike in Shanghai. Bob remote "invest" a bike which is belong to Bob , and the bike rent incoming everyday will come back to Bob's account. technology: stellar payment special: Bob pay not only the deposit, but a invest   

https://twitter.com/dearstellar DearStellar is a Twitter bot that listens to mentions from Stellar users who want their account balances to be checked. The Stellar users are instructed to tweet their account ID's in a particular format. The Twitter bot collects the account ID from the tweet and makes use of it to find the account balance. When this is done, the Twitter bot tweets back at the Twitter user to inform them about the success of the process or an error report. The account balance is then sent as a direct message to the Twitter user.

http://kish.pythonanywhere.com/ My app provides account details of a Stellar Account.   

http://stellardesk.org/ StellarDesk provides a powerful yet simple way to look into the Stellar network, query data, and make transactions.   

https://rehive.com/ - White label wallet that supports Stellar.

http://stellar.network/  -A graphical representation of the validating nodes in the network.

https://github.com/eyecandyDev/stellar-instant-transfer  - Add lumen donations to your site.

https://github.com/bjfish/stellar-core-es-indexer - Indexes Stellar Core data into Elasticsearch

https://jfbramson.github.io/stellar_rekey/ Simple web app to re-key or completely move all stellar account assets from one address keypair to another.

https://github.com/thor1887/stellar-extended-merge It merges stellar accounts that have custom assets and offers. The normal merge function only merges xlm. This takes it a step further. It basically copies all assets/offers from source to destination account. It also sets up trustlines. All this is done in the browser. The application allows you to choose if it is to run on the Test network or the public network   

https://multisigstellar.github.io/multisig/  It allows users to easily create and sign multisignature transactions.

https://zee2093.github.io/stellar-slack-bot/ A slack bot for stellar. It works in 2 ways. Streaming: It streams all operations on the stellar network to a channel. Queries: It allows users to query the stellar network for basic information such as accounts details, balance and transaction details.

https://github.com/hamzonation/stellar-mailgun-notify It listens for operations in the network and sends out notification using the mailgun api.

https://eyecandydev.github.io/stellar-instant-transfer/ This is a plugin that allows Instant transfer of assets to a given account. It has been modified to handle transfer of non-native assets, and an option to use on live/test network. The transaction is built and signed in the browser so your private key is not transferred through the network. Will be ideal for donation plugins.   

 https://jgban.github.io/stellar-tradex/ It gives information about recent offers the stellar network. It also allows users to query for bids/asks and recent trades for a given asset pair. It gets the recent trades by querying the most recent operations and then filtering out the manage offers and create passive offers operations. In doing so, it gives an idea of what offers are currently being made for any asset pair and you can bid accordingly.

https://app.ledgercn.com Open stellar to users of various SNS sites(currently wechat supported only) and everyone can issue and manage their assets easily.   

http://www.funtracker.site/chart/index.html A simple web app that displays tables and charts of stellar.org asset history prices. Data feed is from funtracker.site API.   

https://github.com/sparrow-ai/ofac Facilitates U.S. anchors' compliance with BS and AML regulations by providing a webservice that scrubs names against the OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals List.   

http://vaultuser.pythonanywhere.com/ It generates random key pairs for use with Stellar account.   



Markets
You can purchase lumens on any of these known markets and exchanges.

Announcements

• Sign up for the general newsletter for monthly updates
• Sign up for the developer newsletter for tips, best practices, and updates
• Join the integrator releases mailing list for important software update information (this is mainly for people actively building on the Stellar network)
• Join slack.stellar.org for real-time info
• Forum https://galactictalk.org/

If you are in SF this is a great way to understand how this new consensus algorithm works:
http://www.meetup.com/SF-Bitcoin-Devs/events/227871781/
He also explains paxos in the beginning of the talk. Which is great if you have ever tried to read the paxos paper.

Lightning is a pretty cool idea and I think something like it will be necessary to get any of these systems to scale to being used worldwide.
Here is a technical rundown of how you would implement Lightning Networks on Stellar: http://jedmccaleb.com/2015/12/08/lightning-for-stellar/

Hi I'm involved in a cryptocurrency related project and we are looking for a talented graphic designer. Some UX experience is a plus.

We aren't ready to release details of the project but it will be pretty awesome.

We are funded and based in the SF bay area. We strongly prefer someone local but can make exceptions for the right person.
please email jed ! open coin dot com if you are interested. Please send a link to your portfolio.

Here is the link to a prior post of us looking for another programmer if you want to read that discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108782.0

Hi I'm involved in a cryptocurrency related project and we are looking for someone that can work magic with javascript and jQuery.
We are also hiring an experienced C++ developer.

We aren't ready to release details of the project but it is very exciting.

We are funded and based in the SF bay area. We strongly prefer people local but can make exceptions for the right person.
please email jed ! open coin dot com if you are interested. Please send links to things you have done preferably outside of work/school.

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20273158-announcement-extension-of-reduced-trade-fees

Dear Mt. Gox users,

We are pleased to announce that as a way to say we sincerely appreciate our customers who are “hanging in there” with us as we recover from the “hackcrash” (not to mention our growing pains), we will be extending the current discounted trade fees.

Those who are trading at 0% will continue at that rate until July 27. After the July 27 customers with the 0% trade fees will migrate to 0.3% trade fees which they will be able to take advantage of until August 9.

Those who were trading at 0.3% will continue at the same rate until August 9

We would also like to remind those users who are trading at 0% that they are eligible for a free YubiKey, a new One Time Password security feature at Mt.Gox that will ensure the security of your online transactions with us. Unfortunately, we will only be able to offer this for a short time so please make sure to order your key at http://Yubikey.mtgox.com (be sure to login) before July 27.

Sincerely,

-Mt. Gox Team.

I just saw on the site. Mtgox now accepts GBP deposits.

Mark says Canada is on the way soon...

[Everyone's bitcoins are safe on the site. We still are holding all the coins safely in reserve. The vast majority of the coins are stored offline so they are impossible to compromise.]

Hello everyone, MagicalTux is busy getting everything back in order on mtgox so he asked me to post here and answer any questions people have.

First, only a small amount of BTC was stolen. MtGox will refund the stolen BTC to the compromised user.

Everyone's bitcoins are safe on the site. We still are holding all the coins safely in reserve. The vast majority of the coins are stored offline so they are impossible to compromise.

He understands the rollback won't be popular with people who were able to pick up coins for .10 or whatever but none of those trades were legitimate so mtgox has a legal obligation to reverse the trades.

I'm sure when you think about it you don't actually want to buy stolen coins and take advantage of the situation.

Things have been very hectic with mtgox since MagicalTux took over. He has simultaneously been trying to fend off persistent ddos attacks, hire more staff, deal with the huge increase in users, improve the code to support the much larger trade volume, ensure regulatory compliance and deal with various security issues. Obviously things haven't gone as smoothly as we would like but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel with more people being hired and the backend changes done. MtGox will hopefully be able to regain your trust in the coming weeks.

The site should be up again shortly. I'm asking him to clear all the standing orders.

Please post any questions you have here and I'll do my best to answer.

[node]

So I've been thinking...
 bitcoin mining seems like such an unfortunate side effect of the system since it is so wasteful. It will be a bit obscene how much will be spent mining if the network ever gets large. It would be cool to come up with a bitcoin that doesn't need miners.

There are several issues but I’ll ignore how coins are distributed and focus on the central problem of creating some way to trust the central ledger*.
Currently this is what mining solves. The network trusts the ledger with the most mining done on it. So now to trust bitcoin you have to trust that >50% of the current mining power is "good". And actually the way the network has evolved with pools we are actually trusting that every large pool operator is “good” since even if the pool isn’t over 50% the operator could have non-pool mining going on bringing the total over 50% or two pools could collude to defraud the network etc. Also if say some government decides to wreck the network it wouldn’t be that expensive for them to do so. (This is all discussed in other threads so no need to go into this here) My point is that although the current network uses mining as a way to solve the trust issue it really doesn’t since you still must trust the large pool operators.

My idea is to make this issue of trust explicit.

Let’s say a node has a public key that the client generates for them. There is no connection between this key and a wallet key. It just allows you to be sure you are talking to the node you think you are.

So when you run a node you choose which other nodes you trust. So you could say “I trust my 3 friends’ nodes, Gavin’s node, and these 5 businesses’ nodes.” This trust just means that you believe these people will never participate in a double spend attack or otherwise manipulate the ledger. 
The ledger would basically be like the current bitcoin block chain but it would also have a list of what nodes believe the current ledger to be valid. <hash of current ledger signed by node’s public key> (This list doesn’t have to be complete. Nodes can just collect this list as needed. They could even just ask the nodes they trust if they think the current ledger is valid since those are the only ones they care about)

Transactions are still sent to all nodes connected to the network. There would be a network wide timestamp. Transactions would only be accepted if they were within a certain time period of the network timestamp. So you would need to wait maybe 10min before you could fully trust a given transaction. After this waiting period you could be sure those coins weren’t double spent.

If a node ever encounters two conflicting ledgers it would just go with the one that was validated by more nodes that it trusts.

So there should always be a consensus among the trusted members of the network.

There would be a way to look up particular nodes in the network and ask them questions. (I’m imagining this whole thing running on Kademlia, a DHT)

So obviously this is still vague because I haven't had time to work out all the details. I’m hoping someone else will be inspired.

ok rip into it!

*(I guess you could try to come up a way to get rid of the central ledger but I have a feeling that might not be possible)

[I'd delete this post if I could. It doesn't say much now. I had a post here saying we weren't in a bubble but I had a mistake on my spreadsheet. It now looks like we are. ]

I would argue that BTC price is essentially determined by the number bitcoin users there are. In order to be a bitcoin user you must hold bitcoins. This means each additional bitcoin user creates demand. It is of course hard to determine exactly how many bitcoin users there are so I'll assume it is proportional to the number of forum users. (This isn't exactly true since the number of forum accounts is strictly increasing but the userbase isn't necessarily but I think since it is so new we can ignore this)
Anyway this is a chart of (BTC Price*# of coins)/(# of forum users)




(If someone has another metric to use other than forum membership I'd be glad to plug that in also)

I, and I assume many other people, feel that bitcoin will take off once it finds some killer app that really makes use of the strength of BTC. And anyone with any amount of BTC benefits greatly from bitcoin taking off since that will cause the price to skyrocket. So we should all be very interested in this happening.

The best use of BTC I can think of that also has the benefit of spreading the idea of BTC rapidly is a tipping service. Here are some key parts of the service that I and other people have thought of:

o  Twitter tipping system.
 Allow people to tweet BTC tips to other twitter users. Has great
potential to go viral and spread throughout the entire twitter
population.
 A twitter user would just tweet to us: #tip @bob
then we would tweet this fact to bob and send him 1 BTC
If bob already was registered with us then great. Otherwise we would
give him a link to register and claim his coin.
Obviously can spread quickly since this stuff will show up in people's
twitter feeds.
And I think people will like publicly showing their support for what they are tipping.

o   Web based tipping.
A browser plugin that allows you to tip the webpage, facebook page or
blog you are currently reading. The page doesn't have to know about
the tipping service. If it is some new page we will scrape it or the
site for an email address that seems appropriate and send the tip to
it.
Once tipped the site owner will be encouraged to place a tip button on
their site thus spreading the knowledge of the service.

o   SMS tipping.
A service that allows you to send small BTC amounts by text message to
any phone that can receive SMS.
they would just text to our number: send <amount> <number>
Basically the same as the twitter thing but with SMS.

o   Forum tipping plugin.
Plugin for popular forum software allowing people to tip posters they like.

The beauty of all these is that they only require the tipper to know
about the service. Once people are tipped they will naturally want to
find about it to retrieve their coins. I think it would spread pretty
quickly. People who own BTC have extra incentive to tip since tipping will increase the popularity of BTC and thus the value of the BTC that they own.

If you make this you should call it CoinToss

I get the impression that many people think that price of BTC is somehow influenced by difficulty.
I actually I don't agree that difficulty going up will increase the value of coins.
The only thing that will increase the value of coins is more actual users.
Miners don't really increase the value of BTC. And difficulty going up just means there are more miners.
It is a misconception is that difficulty drives price. Price is as always determined by supply and demand.
And difficulty doesn't effect the supply of coins since the rate of new coins is unrelated to the difficulty. So it isn't a factor in price

But as price changes difficulty does change. Since as price goes up it attracts more miners.

Price determines difficulty. Not the other way around.