Joyce from Stellar here. We are really proud of this project as it is directly situated in villages all across Nigeria. These MFIs been doing the hard work of offering financial services in really rural areas and now will be able to connect these communities to a larger economy.
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.
As the executive director of a tech nonprofit (https://www.stellar.org/), this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. Certain problems need scalable, open, global public infrastructure, like global open system for identity, money, healthcare, energy research, climate data, etc. Unfortunately, the current model of foundation philanthropy doesn't fund these kinds of solutions well because the current charity funding model focuses on funding "programmatic services" (programs that service recipients directly). To put in more familiar HN terminology, foundations prefer to fund front-end services rather than back-end infrastructure. But Wikipedia cannot exist without http. And who funds the development of http-like projects?
With the growth of the Internet and the open-source movement, we, the tech industry, understand why open protocols and technology are crucial to providing access and opportunity to more people. I am a big believer in for-profit companies too, but there are certain things in tech that should be executed with a more philanthropic bent. When asked why Stellar.org is nonprofit, decentralized and open-source, we reply, "Can you imagine if the Internet had been owned by a for-profit company?
The thesis of Parker's post in the WSJ really struck a chord with me. There is a unique role that technologists can to play in philanthropy. We understand infrastructure and we should be funding the big tech bets that the world needs. Our industry is full of the unreasonable optimists - let's take that optimism and invest in an unbelievable future:)
Everything you're saying is great but I'm not sure I understand how a for-profit would be that different from a non-profit owning the Internet. Isn't the contentious bit on "owning" and not on "profit"?
Funny you pick that example! We just had an internal hack day on Friday and Bartek (who also worked on Interstellar) was working on a SMS client as his project. I'll ask him to swing by and post some thoughts on it here but he is in Europe so asleep now. (I work for Stellar.org).
And thanks for the kind words - in our view, to handle the last mile problem, we need to build things to be accessible and as modular as possible which will hopefully make things much easier for developers everywhere. By bringing down the barriers of use of the code base, we will hopefully see more developers building things for their local communities and starting to fill in the gaps in the last mile. Goal: let a thousand flowers bloom!
Joyce from Stellar here. Thanks! As we were working on the white paper, we realized how difficult it was to explain complex concepts like federated Byzantine agreement.
We know it’s part of our jobs to make these ideas understandable. That way more people can join the dialogue and think of ways this infrastructure can be used to build services for their communities, which may be really far from the nearest computer science program. So we decided to add a lighter approach in hopes of making it fun for people to learn.
Hi Joyce, thanks for chiming in! I'm glad Stellar is committed to elucidating the ideas behind the technology, and this is a thoughtful and creative approach. Reading the graphic novel first helped me understand the idea behind quorum slices while reading the paper. Can't wait to see more of this!
This is Joyce from Stellar. One of the most interesting parts of this project for me is the fact that airtime (prepaid mobile minutes) will be a method of savings. And in many places in the world, there are many locations and agents where people can pay for mobile minutes (essentially cash in/ cash out). It is ubiquitous. This means Praekelt and their users can piggy back off of existing networks and reach more people at lower cost.
Joyce from Stellar here. Yes, that is correct. When given the choice between temporary centralization and guaranteeing the security of the protocol and therefore user funds, the choice is obvious. Once the new consensus algorithm is complete, it will be safe to run with more than one node again.
How'd you centralize your decentralized system? It sounds like something that shouldn't be possible unless it's actually centralized to begin with.
I'm a layperson when it comes to crypto currencies, but my impression is that most people would consider the fact that you can centralize a bug (separate to the hiccup you had in the article).
I'm just guessing here, and I hope that Joyce or someone from Stellar could correct me if I'm wrong. It could be as simple as announcing that you're going to make this change to de-decentralize, describing what that process entails, and asking all the invested parties (in this case validating nodes) to follow suit. I imagine that the process is similar to when bitcoin has done a hard fork in the past. The bitcoin core developers see the need for a hard fork, announce the hard fork, and ask everyone to update. If the majority of nodes agree than the hard fork was successful. So in Stellar's case, they could be asking people who run validating nodes to update their software, or to simply modify their UNL to point to only a single node (similar to seeding your bitcoin client with only a single peer). I think (and hope) that the Stellar Foundation doesn't have the ability to actually force people to de-decentralize.
Howdy - so at the time of the ledger fork, the Foundation was running all 5 of the validating nodes and there were other parties not associated with us that were running non-validating nodes.
We do not have the ability nor do we want the ability to control other people's nodes.
Since Stellar only launched 4 months ago, the number nodes in the network was still small. In the future, when the network is on the new consensus system and able to run safely in a truly decentralized, then it would be up to individual nodes to decide what to do.
