Last October we concluded our first lumen distribution program for bitcoin holders as part of Stellar.org’s commitment to reserve 19% of the initial lumens—19% of the initial lumens—a total of 19 billion lumens—for people who hold bitcoin.
Today, we are announcing that for the next round, we are distributing up to 16 BILLION lumens to bitcoin holders or 16% of the initial lumens. On June 27th, 2017, we will make available these lumens to any bitcoin holder who wants them, including those that received lumens during the first giveaway round.
If this is new to you, you may ask why are we doing this? When we were first designing Stellar, Bitcoin acted as a profound inspiration. The Bitcoin network was the first to show that it’s possible for a group of untrusted parties to agree on a common database, and the Bitcoin community still influences our understanding of this technology’s impact.
How will it work?
June 26, 2017: We’ll take a snapshot of the blockchain at the first block mined with a timestamp on June 26th (UTC/GMT). This snapshot will record the coin balances of all bitcoin accounts at that time.
June 27, 2017: We’ll publish a claim page, allowing bitcoin holders to verify that they control a given bitcoin address. We will then send that address’s share of lumens to the provided Stellar account.
To get a sense of the giveaway math, take Rachel as an example:
Quote:
At time of snapshot
16,215,950 bitcoins in existence
Rachel owns 10 bitcoins
Rachel can claim
16,000,000,000 * (10/16,215,950) = 9,886.83 lumens
Calculation
Rachel owns .00006167% of the bitcoins in existence at the time of the snapshot.
Her 1,911.72 lumens therefore equals .00006167% of lumens given away.
August 27th, 2017: The bitcoin lumen program will conclude. If there are unclaimed lumens, they’ll go to Stellar.org’s operational fund and to the Build Challenge.
Due to regulatory restrictions, this program is closed to residents of the U.S. states of New York, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Connecticut as well as the nations of Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and other countries subject to sanctions by the United States. These restrictions are subject to change to account for changes in regulatory posture.
Members and board members of Stellar.org will not participate in the bitcoin-lumen program or claim any lumens from it.
Claim lumens: Individuals
On June 27th: we will provide a link to the claim page, which will walk you through the simple process.
Participating exchanges (we’ll update this list as exchanges contact us):
Kraken
BTC38
Poloniex
Now for the part we’re less excited about.
If you’re not using an exchange, then law requires us to ensure you’re not on the U.S. sanctions list or located in any of the restricted jurisdictions listed above. We’re using Facebook account verification to complete this check.
We know this kind of sucks. Privacy is a top concern for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Stellar.org won’t use your Facebook data for any other purposes and will never post to your account. If you’d rather not share your Facebook information, you can still go through a participating exchange.
Claim lumens: Exchanges and businesses
Before June 27: If you’re an exchange or other business that holds a pool of bitcoins for customers, email
[email protected] from your business email. Include your hot wallet Bitcoin address, and we’ll ensure that the lumens given to that address are sent only to you.
After you receive lumens, we encourage you to give them to each of your customers proportionately. Email
[email protected] with questions or to discuss options.
Claim lumens: XRP holders
On June 27th we will provide a link to the claim page, which will walk you through the simple process.
In addition to distributing lumens to bitcoin holders, we have also reserved 1% of the initial lumens (1 billion) to holders of XRP. For XRP, we took a snapshot of the ripple ledger 6,762,000 (a ledger occurring May 22nd 2014). Any ripple account holder with less than 7.5 million XRP (~$50,000 USD at that time) in their account at that ledger qualify for the giveaway. Every qualified XRP holder can participate as follows:
Pro-rata: Similar to the bitcoin holders, eligible XRP holders may receive their pro-rata share of lumens allocated to this giveaway (1%) and be credited for up to 1.5 million XRP.
Donation: Eligible XRP holders may also donate up to 1.5M XRP to a selection of charities and receive an equal amount of lumens in return.
How does Stellar compare to Bitcoin and other networks?
The Stellar network is inspired by Bitcoin—we’ve taken lessons from it and added the ability to tolerate non-rational actors in an environment with low computing power.
There are a few other key differences between Stellar and Bitcoin:
In Bitcoin, nodes that work to confirm transactions mine bitcoin, distributing the currency slowly over time to miners. Stellar doesn’t have mining: 100 billion lumens were automatically created at the start of the network. 95% of these lumens will be available to the world.
Stellar operates on a new consensus algorithm, the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), which uses federated Byzantine agreement. Stellar transactions confirm in a few seconds and nodes use fewer computational resources.
Bitcoin is very inflationary during the first several years eventually settling to a near fixed supply, while the supply of lumens increases at a fixed rate of 1% per year.
Find out more
We believe in community-based ownership of the Stellar network and want early digital currency enthusiasts like bitcoin holders to feel at home in the Stellar community. Feel free to ask us questions about the bitcoin-lumen program:
Join the conversation at slack.stellar.org
Jump into the official Bitcointalk thread
And if you’re a developer interested in building applications on Stellar, explore our documentation.
See you on June 27th!
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Yoda the force is with me
