[icelancer]

I won't repost my entire comment here, but I noted in 2017 on Hacker News some pretty shady stuff going on with Stellar/XLM and their customer support team / developers.

You can read the entire account here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935583#15936174

It starts with this:

---

I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was:

"I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information.

You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ....

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point.

Apologies we cannot be of further help."

[gexla]

Same here. It was my first and only entry into the coin space. I figured I would let the coins sit there and see what happens. Good thing I didn't try to acquire more coins because I ran into the same issue. It was a cheap first lesson (free) but it has kept me from wading in further anywhere else.

I think this goes back to a critical point in the crypto space.

If you don't have your key pair, then you don't own the coins. I think everyone who lost coins had wallet issues. Maybe there would still have been issues even if you had your key pair, but the general rule still stands.

Back when Stellar got stared, you had to use the API to create a key pair and then you needed the API again to interact with that address (send coins from it.)

[thanatos_dem]

Yup... I was part of one of the first XLM grants. I saved my credentials and stopped paying attention until recently when I tried to go to my account. There was some sort of wallet migration needed due to a security issue, and it needed to be done years ago, so it’s all just gone now.

Stellar, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, can go die in a fire as far as I’m concerned.

[ricardobeat]

So you're angry that the virtual money you got as a handout, from a system in early development, was lost four years later after you failed to act on an upgrade announced months in advance. Sounds fair.

[thanatos_dem]

Not so much angry as frustrated.

Crypto currencies overlook the benefits of a centralized currency - some entity to correct mistakes. Fiat currency is backed by the trust in a nation state for example. If my money disappears, I have some authority I can appeal to for addressing it. Whether they do address it or not is a different question, but at least there’s a process.

When someone in stellar screws up and locks out wallets, or when Mt. Gox loses mounds of bitcoins, there is no recourse. Just a “oh, the math makes fixing that impossible” response. Or they can take the ethereum approach and just rewrite history to cover up your mistakes, delegitimizing the entire currency in the process.

In a world with pure intentions and no mistakes that may work, but the real world is messy and people are any combination of stupid, forgetful, and malicious.

Crypto currencies and distributed ledgers are interesting in theory, but will fail due to the implications of needing to operate in the real world.

[Aeolun]

I don’t know about you, but the bank cannot arbitrarily decide that my money is gone because I didn’t deign to respond to them within a certain time period.

The moment the bank starts doing that it’s not a bank any more, it’s a scam.

[mmcclure]

Brushing aside the "giveaway" aspect of the parent comment, banks decide that money is gone (or inaccessible) because actors didn't respond within "reasonable timeframes" pretty frequently. For example:

- Banks are not legally obligated to honor checks older than 6 months

- Dormant accounts where the bank is unable to contact the account owner have their balances transferred to the state (State Seizure)

The latter probably makes a little more sense in this case since you could (depending on the issuer) just request another check from the source.

[Aeolun]

Ah, I tried just now. As I was waiting for this to become slightly more useful. Seems my account has also disintegrated (I can actually log in, but the XML, or stellars) are gone.

[tgb]

Are you sure? I migrated mine last year and it worked.