Nice to see someone able to move the ball forward with distributed consensus systems-- The bitcoin community as a whole has been stuck in the mud for far too long at this point.
Sadly, I still can't shake the subtle feeling that something greasy is still going on here-- The sins of Ripple continue to haunt us all I guess.
I tried googling but only saw some mentions of "problems with the existing consensus algorithm" which seem to have been remedied with Stellar's 2015 April whitepaper.
It was a "consensus algorithm" in name only-- any conflict in consensus was "solved" by a central or semi-central control structure. It was also "pre-mined" in that all the ripples already existed and had been magically bestowed upon a few anointed individuals.
In addition to these shortfalls at an architectural level, the folks who seemed to be both in control of the centralized authority and sitting on top of all the premined ripples had well documented histories of shady behavior.
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.
Sadly, I still can't shake the subtle feeling that something greasy is still going on here-- The sins of Ripple continue to haunt us all I guess.