[gexla]

They aren't giving away money. They are creating these coins out of thin air. The only way anyone is losing money is possibly by deflating the value of existing coins by creating more supply. That these coins are worth anything at all was sort of luck by being early in the race. The top 10 - 20 coins don't seem to change much.

These airdrops were an expectation from the start. The first coins from this organization were also airdropped and they have done other airdrops since.

I'm not a guru in this space, but I believe the idea for Stellar was to be more of a utility coin as opposed to a store of value.

[Legogris]

In general, this is definitely something to watch out for.

As far as I understand it, that's not the case here, however. These coins were already in existence held by Stellar, who is now giving them away. I.e. no coins being printed.

I see airdrops regularly, and this is the first one I have not dismissed as a waste of time and attention right away. Unless they mess it up somehow, I think this is a great move by Stellar - I think the people using Keybase (especially combined with GH/HN) are exactly the early-adopters-power-users they want to extend adoption to.

[whatshisface]

Why would anyone back a cryptocurrency whose operator can simply whisk new coins into existence?

[Legogris]

Unless there's some other factor in place, you probably shouldn't.

This is not the case here, though. Stellar has been sitting of huge piles of coins (par for the course these days at least) that they are now distributing.

[james_pm]

This is different from US dollars how?

[whatshisface]

The US government is ultimately beholden to US citizens, who don't want to get hosed by inflation. People who can't vote in America do actually have a legitimate reason to be concerned: if the US ever can't maintain its debt, it will likely become in the voter's interests to devalue the currency to nothing. That's basically the "default risk" on Treasury bonds.

[crispyporkbites]

Approximately 300m people vote for, pay taxes to and support the creators of US dollars, the US government. Approximately 8 billion people recognise the US dollar as a global unit of value exchange which has a known local currency value.

A new cryptocurrency is just a database with some private keys shared remotely.

[novok]

Creating more of a currency is typically known as inflation. Deflation is the opposite.