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Comment by malka | Hacker News Reader

"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.

Liberty Reserve was such a trusted party for a long time before Bitcoin became popular. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that the US government shutdown of Liberty Reserve is exactly what kicked off bitcoins popularity in the first place.

On May 6, 2016, the operator of Liberty Reserve was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison

Including with Bitcoin, since 51% ownership of hash rate is simply a function of who has the most pooled resources (read: money)

One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation.

It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).

It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap.

Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.

Is this a press release?

Where are you seeing $250 tx fee on btc? Are you in any way related to stellar? Reported

My mistake, Bitcoin transaction fees are lower around $25 according to this chart[1]. Everything else in my comment still stands though. No I’m not related to Stellar, I’ve just known about Lumens and have used them for a few years now. I figured there might be some people here that didn’t already know about it.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

>It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).

market cap =/= trust, especially when you consider that in the past there were outright scams that were in the top 15 (eg. IOTA).

I don’t like IOTA. It was pretty overhyped for it’s value. I don’t know how many cryptocurrencies there are, maybe 10s of thousands, but being in the top 15 by market cap lends more credibility than in the top 1000 by market cap. Anyone can make a cryptocurrency, but not anyone can make it valuable.

This is utter nonsense. XLM is founded by Jed McCaleb of Ripple and Mt Gox fame, and it's not a cryptocurrency. It certainly is not money. Bitcoin tx fees are readily verifiable on mempool.space and are currently $11-12 for a low-medium priority transaction. (One can easily get in for several dollars less, as well) When you insert such blatantly misleading and outright false information it brings into question everything else you said. Plus, it should be noted this fee is pretty high. The BTC tx fees lately have been averaging only around $5-8 and that is sending on Legacy.

My mistake, bitcoin transaction fees are lower around $25 according to this chart[1].

Everything else in my comment still stands though and it certainly is a cryptocurrency.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

> It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap.

lol, Dogecoin is #6 and XLM is #14. Are you saying your currency is less trusted than one with a dog on it?

Possibly, yes? It’s not my cryptocurrency, it’s just one I’ve used and known about for a few years. Dogecoin is something else; I don’t know how that meme coin got so big. Also by your same logic, should we not trust the USDC stablecoin because it’s #18? Lol

Should definitely not trust the USDT stable coin in spite of its position at #5. I'm just saying market cap isn't a function of trust.

Right on USDT. But Marketcap is a function of overall value and what gives money value oftentimes (but not entirely) is trust.

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