STELLAR LUMENS : I'm in two minds
*Cracks knuckles* ~ "Let's give this tricky format a bash..."
I came across this article and it left me in two minds about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Let's analyse it:
From https://pixabay.com/en/angel-clouds-fantasy-heaven-sky-2827148/
From https://pixabay.com/en/angel-clouds-fantasy-heaven-sky-2827148/ ; Klaus toxic [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
| Stellar (XLM) Partnership With IBM Backed By Australian Gov | Stellar (XLM) Partnership With IBM Backed By Australian Gov |
| Stellar Lumens (XLM) is a popular platform coin designed for cross-border money transfers. It's a good platform: fast, cheap and decentralised - exactly as a cryptocurrency should be. | Stellar Lumens (XLM) is a payments platform coin that I have always been wary of because of its close ties to Ripple, which I regard as a mass-adopted but centralised "shitcoin". |
| Stellar has teamed up with Keybase (an encrypted social networking service) to further improve its cross-border capabilities. Stellar is already designed to work easily and harmoniously with government tenders and banks; making it attractive to traditionally centralised entities and greatly enhancing Stellar's chances of adoption by them. Obviously this would have a very positive effect of the price of XLM, which is great news for crypto enthusiasts lucky enough to be "hodling" it. | Stellar has teamed up with Keybase (an encrypted social networking service) to further improve its cross-border capabilities. It worries me that Stellar is now strongly pushing for partnerships with governments and banks. This is reminiscent of Ripple and would create links to centralised entities, surely compromising its objectivity as a cryptocurrency. With over 80% of XLM coins not in circulation yet, that leaves the door open for exploitation by centralised money. |
| Stellar's "cousin" Ripple (they share origins) has already secured many traditional financial sector customers worldwide, a fact which should further speed the adoption of Stellar, being of the same trusted crypto "brand". Being a non-profit entity, Stellar has an inherent advantage over Ripple (which is out to make profits). Hedging their bets with both centralised and decentralised coins was a clever move back when these cryptos were envisioned. | Stellar's "cousin" Ripple (they share origins) has already secured many traditional financial sector customers worldwide, a fact which further calls into question the impartiality, objectivity and decentralised nature of Stellar Lumens. Using its non-profit model as a means to enter the market cheaply, Stellar could become the proverbial centralised money wolf in decentralised blockchain sheep's clothing. |
| Stellar's latest partners include IBM, a large, old corporation that seems to be increasingly getting involved with cryptocurrencies in an effort to grow this developing technology sector. IBM is already involved in assisting the Australian government with their progressive move towards an electronic government, (beginning to fulfil the prophecy I penned in this post). With the Australian government specifically looking to leverage Stellar's blockchain to fulfil some of its service delivery mandates, Stellar looks like it will increasingly been seen as a respected solution to real world problems by governments and big business alike. That's a lot of available capital to pour into crypto... | Stellar's latest partners include IBM, a large, old corporation that seems to be increasingly getting involved with cryptocurrencies in an effort to exploit this popular developing technology. IBM is already involved in assisting the Australian government with their move towards an electronic government, (beginning to fulfil the prophecy I penned in this post). With the Australian government specifically looking to leverage Stellar's blockchain to fulfil some of its service delivery mandates, Stellar looks like it may be willing to sell out to governments and big business alike in exchange for centralised "blood money". |
| Yours in crypto, | Yours in crypto, |
| Bit Brain | Bit Brain |
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I like this a lot! Maybe to most readers it wouldn't be clear very quickly what you're doing here but I think it's actually pretty cool to have these side by side. It does show the subjectivity in reporting.
(also, steemit formatting sucksssssssssss!!!! I've gone back and messed with it so often right after posting and it really sucks! I don't know how so many bugs and weirdness got in there)
Thanks! You should have seen some of my earlier attempts. I eventually gave up trying to put the angel and demon pics side by side, even after resizing them exactly the same, I had a wide column and a very narrow one with half the text cut off!
To make life even more complicated, I publish from TIMM which looks slightly different! I had to do some cut-and-paste cross-platform checking while I was typing. Here is the TIMM version: https://mentormarket.io/cryptocurrency/@bitbrain/stellar-lumans-i-m-in-two-minds
Steem formatting DOES suck! The markup / html hybrid (neither of which are great for blogging with) needs serious work. I can't image that the non tech-savvy would be interested in using it! Most people I know struggle enough just using the basics of Word and Excel!
Yes, tell me more about this TIMM. I saw it before in your posts and you mentioned something about it. Is this something anyone can sign up for? I looked at the site but wasn't completely sure what kind of site I was looking at - it looked like more than 'just' a STEEM interface.
And what's with the massive TIMM upvotes you get? Is it like how busy.org gave out big upvotes at first as a way of promoting itself?
TIMM is the Traders & Investors Mentor Market. It's a Steem interface designed for (surprise, surprise) traders and investors (not just crypto ones). The site is still under construction, but gets better by the day.
I was recruited by TIMM as a potential Alpha Tester, an opportunity which I jumped at. I like crypto, blogging and I have a little experience in coding, so I thought that I would be a good fit. There are a few of us Alpha Testers who have been working with TIMM daily for roughly a month now. We chat on discord all the time and work to identify bugs, test new functionality, suggest ideas etc.
Ultimately TIMM will exist as a platform where the experienced can help the inexperienced. It will be a paid service, probably with various subscription fees for various levels of service. Those with experience are the "mentors" and they will offer their expertise in their respective fields. The exact nature of these offers will vary fro mentor to mentor; I could, for example, offer to proofread whitepapers prior to their publication. If people wanted that service then they could pay me/TIMM for it.
There is a lot of other functionality to TIMM, or at least there will be when it is complete. Stock tickers, charting tools, favourites, individual profiles, the blogs, a chat channel etc are some of the things in the mix.
THis was the first ever post published on TIMM, it introduced the Alpha testers. The good news for you is that a week ago TIMM moved into Beta and they are looking for Beta testers. I did resteem the post, but in case you missed it, here is the link: https://steemit.com/money/@timm/seeking-beta-all-are-welcome I suggest that you give it a try, you have nothing to lose. I will vouch for the validity of the platform and I can also tell you that the TIMM crew are a great bunch of guys who are dedicated to making their project a good one. I'm not sure about what busy did because I missed the start, but yes, us Alpha Testers have been fortunate to have TIMM support us on Steem, it's enabled me to grow at a much faster rate than what would have otherwise been possible! Hope to see you in the TIMM Discord chat soon! 😃 (We could definitely use a female perspective or two!)
I indeed missed that post! I will have to look more into it. I've bookmarked the links you gave me to look into later on and I will probably try it out when I have some time free. Thanks! I do like more interfaces to STEEM.
Nice read! I agree Stellar is on the path of becoming more centralized. That said, love it or hate it...there will always be centralized currency. Might as well profit from it. Stellar is one of my longterm holds since $0.03. Jed McCaleb is brilliant in my opinion. Obviously I strongly support decentralized crypto as well. That’s an entirely separate market. I say profit off both.
Thank you. A nice realistic perspective. I've held Stellar for over a year now. I may have to wait a lot longer for it to become something big, but I'm in no rush.
After three (horrible) attempts at posting this, a misspelling of "Lumens" in the heading (quickly corrected immediately after publication) and a few visible formatting punctuation marks in the double signature is all that was wrong with this version. Good enough! I'm not changing it again, because every time I do, then something else goes terribly wrong!
Hi bitbrain,
Nice read, I agree with a lot you write, I also hate banks and centralised entities and I think the long and the short of it is that they both have a usecase for banks and governments so it is inevitable that they will use it for that purpose of cross border payments.
If I remember correctly though I thought Stellar Lumens (the ceo also created Ripple but move onto Stellar) His primary goal with stellar is to help the unbankable?
I wrote a benchmark on my website about Xrp and Stellar would love to hear if you like it.
https://cryptoowls.com If younthink you can do better feel free to have a go! The more research data we have the more accurate we can judge to rate crypto. Benchmarks will be posted on steemit as well!
If you like to discuss crypto research with others feel free to join our telegram, we are investors and want to do shared research: https://t.me/joinchat/FrZCmw_Xqcj7i3sH65BU-g
Also I created https://cryptoowls.com first ranking website based on benchmarks written on Steemit. So feel free to write benchmarks about your favourite crypto to see how it scores.
Hey there Mr Old Cheese! Thanks for the feedback!
Yes, I do remember the purpose of Stellar being to bank the unbankable. At least I think that was Stellar. There are so many cryptos in my head...
I've seen your benchmarks on your site. I think that you scored Ripple way too high for my liking! The more I dig into the dirt on that coin, the more horrible information I find. I think that it is a lot more centralised than you realise, in various ways, and that if you approach it from that perspective you'll see what I mean. Dig into the obvious bank connections, the history of the team members, the coin distribution etc etc.
I liked you Stellar rating. A few points of constructive criticism I have to offer for the future: I would not punish it so harshly for not being a first mover. It's still relatively old for what it does, newer upstarts launch all the time and Stellar has a sizeable lead on them! Also it's different enough to Ripple not to compare them head-to-head.
I think it is more centralised than you score it. It has centralised developer roots, comes from code designed to be centralised and has strong ties to centralised partners.
I would be very careful by allocating a binary score to fungibility, Sometimes you want a fungible coin/token, sometimes you don't. There is a big difference between e.g. a privacy coin like ZCash and a coin like Enjin which requires some tokens to represent unique in-game items. They require the exact opposite in terms of fungibility, so check each case carefully to see how you score that metric.
Unfortunately I don't use telegram, but I will bookmark your owls site and drop by again!
so with my vote that puts it at $6.66 haha :) wow bitbrain congrats you've come a long way since i first followed you! keep up the good work you deserve everything you get.
also what I like to do cuz i'm lazy with graphics is just make them on paint or adobe then print screen and paste the image on the chat box so that it seems like i'm using the text and added features but i'm not. also added benefit of being able to post certain images/memes that can't be posted otherwise.
Clever! The only problem is that it might not work well between various front-ends or with night mode/day mode.
Thanks man. Appreciated.
I find it curious that Alex Tomzack (Author of both posts) has such a polar view of the same project. I'm going to go with a poorly planned SEO attempt at ranking which, given the amount of duplicate content on the same site on different posts will not end up as a bed of roses in Google's eyes. That and he's clearly lost credibility with his audience over this.
That's probably my fault, I appreciate that this post can be confusing! I only post original content. The posts are all my work, but they are inspired by the article of Alex Tomzack and are based on some of the information that he spoke about in his post. The links to his post are identical, they are links to the exact same post. It is I who wrote two contrasting perspectives on it, thereby demonstrating how I am "in two minds" (as per my post title) about the information Alex wrote about. Sorry for the confusion!