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by SilasX 2477 days ago
Sorry to be the pedant here, but this isn't the correct use of "airdrop", or at least, not how it's commonly used in the cryptocurrency community.

And airdrop typically refers to a fork that someone starts of an existing cryptocurrency, but keeps the same global ledger (blockchain or equivalent) up to a certain date. At that date/time, anyone who held the cryptocurrency at the time is treated as having that same amount in the new fork.

Hence why it's called an "airdrop": from the perspective of existing users, it feels like someone just dumped some freebies on you.

This is not an airdrop, in that meaning. It's just a regular giveaway.

(With that said, this finally gave me the kick in the pants to sign up for Keybase. I initially ignored it because, well, I don't hold any XLM or have the software for it set up, why would I benefit from an airdrop? Glad I read the fine print.)

1 comments

The 'airdrop' analogy doesn't really capture anything about the involvement of branching ledgers, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair to use the same giveaway jargon the community's previously used. But definitely, a different mechanism is involved here.
It captures the metaphier of “you do nothing further on your end, and stuff of value falls in your lap”. This offer doesn’t do that and requires active steps on your part. If it’s air-anything, it’s “air rendezvous” :-p
ah, well, for preexisting Keybase users with linked GitHub accounts it fits that description - I found out about it because I got given some without doing anything.
I thought you specifically had to approve the participation even if you already met the criteria?
apparently not!