Right, and that's where (most of) the rest of my concerns lie. It's not completely clear to me why they needed to implement a new currency and why it's being distributed the way it is. It's possible there's a good reason though; I just haven't had time to think about it enough yet.

We chose to help fund Stellar because we were very impressed with their mission and their thoughtful approach to how to get cryptocurrency into the hands of as many people as possible.

I think we all would have preferred a route that didn't require creating a new currency, but this was the best approach they could find to moving forward on their vision. Certainly the long-term hope is that the stellar will mostly help provide liquidity between other currencies, rather than become something used primarily as a first-class currency itself.

The distribution strategy here is actually something that, as far as I know, has never been tried before. It's correspondingly very difficult to know exactly how it'll turn out. The underlying motivation is to distribute the stellar as fairly and as rapidly as possible, and this model (given lots of transparency and upfrontness) was the best they could think of. (If you come up with a better one, I'd certainly love to hear it — I'm gdb@stripe.com if you'd like to talk more.)

I work at Stellar. re: the distribution method: mining obviously has many benefits, but it's still limited to people who are highly technical and/or who have money to spend. That eliminates most people in the world. We wanted to provide much broader access to digital currency to normal folks, and so stellars will be given away for free at the click of a button. Hope that helps clarify.

But isn't Stellar intended for technical folk? Like, it's supposed to be a currency used between gateways, right? Where the gateways provide an interface to less technical people?

I understand that peer-to-peer is also a possible use case, but realistically the people who don't know how to mine aren't going to care about transferring cryptocurrencies... that's why the gateways are valuable in the first place.

The fact that you're giving it to users isn't what raises questions, it's that you're first issuing it to yourself so that you control who gets it.

The reason is strictly for fundraising. They have Naval Ravikant as an advisor and he is a proponent of using that model to fund a project. It's a viable model, but I don't think you can call yourself a nonprofit and use it.