Author here: I was actually pretty excited about XLM, until I flushed about $50 (at the time) of it into the void from the Keybase thing. I still don't really know what I did wrong, other than it never ending up in my (since liquidated) Coinbase wallet.
You may have missed the memo_id[1]. If you still have access to your Keybase account, you can try Coinbase support. Assuming you sent it to the correct address, they should have the funds and may return it to you if you can prove you own the sending address. (No idea if this will actually work).
Stellar has since fixed this by enabling exchanges to require a memo.[2]
This reads as though you were only interested in the Keybase airdrop to immediately cash out and not actually interested in learning about the technology.
Like other commenters have said, I think Stellar either accomplishes lots of the things you're hoping for or gives you the tools to build them and if you're genuinely interested in these problems I think it's worth another look.
If you send me your Keybase address or a coinbase deposit address and memo I'll send you $50 worth of XLM at current prices. In return, please try using Stellar and learning more about it.
I appreciate the offer, but I'd rather not. I should also be clear: I wrote this from the perspective of a lazy consumer; I'd rather pay and use a solution than write my own.
I'm not sure how Stellar will help me, unless my local bar has started taking XLM. I suppose I can ask them tonight.
Fair enough. I think this is a common misconception -- cryptocurrencies aren't for the "lazy consumer". They're financial plumbing and, especially at the moment, useful for very low level primitives.
To continue with your bar analogy and relate to Stellar, the bar would be unlikely to have any involvement with cryptocurrency. Someone else would build on top of Stellar so that you could pay USD at a Japanese bar and the bar would receive yen.
All of the features exist on Stellar to do that today for far less than a cent in transaction fees, settlement time in minutes, and less carbon impact than a single Facebook data center. The major barriers are all around regulation in the "real world", something that no cryptocurrency is equipped to solve. :)
> The major barriers are all around regulation in the "real world", something that no cryptocurrency is equipped to solve. :)
Correct. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, the Stellar blockchain has the suitable use-case of powering CBDCs which is where more financial companies will side with if more regulations hit cryptocurrencies in the future.
There you go. Post like this are still thinking that Bitcoin / Ethereum represents all cryptocurrencies. These two have proven that it is unsuitable to use for paying for your groceries at the local supermarket. Hence the author of this post mentioning:
> I’m not one of them. But it’s hard enough to get my nonagenarian grandfather to let me pay for dinner with my own payment card; I am not going to try to get him to accept Ethereum.
There are better cryptocurrencies that solves all of this and Stellar is one of them which is also being used for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) [0]