This is why we can't have nice stuff....

Sigh... Keybase had a really nice collaboration going with the Stellar Development Fund where Stellar Lumens were being dropped to users of the encrypted chat application. Each month, there would be an airdrop of 100 million Lumens (XLM) to the Keybase accounts.

However, right from the beginning... people were gaming the generosity of the Foundation and Keybase. With a flood of fake accounts and also various attacks on the website and Keybase itself. Even after restricting new registrations to countries that DID NOT attack them in the previous month, there was no way to stop people using VPNs or Tor to mask their country of origin.

So... with the onset of the 4th (or 5th?) monthly airdrop coming on the 15th of December, there was a flood of new fake accounts that appears to have overwhelmed the ability of the Keybase and Stellar Development Fund to monitor and vet.... and the whole program has now been cancelled completely. After all, it isn't the job of the Stellar or Keybase team to be doing this job... it was a generous gesture for users of the Keybase platform... but Keybase should be focussing on developing their best encrypted chat and account verification platform possible, and Stellar needs to be developing their own crypto-ecosystem and adoption.

Now, I do understand that there will always be bad actors and people who are trying to milk the system... and the justification is that if people can steal or get more than what they are entitled to, then someone will... so, in many ways there should be some way to already block and verify these new accounts and some scalable way to vet the all.

However, there is also something to be said for the fact that if there is a table full of free goodies and a sign saying just take one.... then you should NOT try to take more. That is just screwing everyone else over for your own selfish gain... if if you have a GREAT justification for why you DESERVE more... (ha ha, this could be an allegory for many things in society!).

So, due to the selfish actions of a few... the whole program has been cancelled. Thanks...

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However, on the bright side, the Keybase team have started developing measures to combat this sort of identity fraud and spam. You can read about their latest developments here... including some pretty hilarious fake profiles!

... also, on the actual Keybase application. My wife and I have been using it since I heard that Google Hangouts was closing down within the year. For communications, I do use Whatsapp, Facebook, Telegram, Discord and Signal for different groups of people.

Whatsapp - General usage with friends and colleagues.
Facebook - for those people who I don't have phone numbers for...
Telegram - Crypto stuff....
Discord - STEEM stuff....
Signal - encrypted SMS style communication
Google Hangouts - family

So, as you see (and it is probably the same for most people I guess...), the type of app that I communicate with other people with is something that is a bit linked to how I interact with them in real life. In this way, I can easily compartmentalise my communication life. If I see a Hangouts notification, then I know it is urgent... otherwise, other things can wait.

So, to replace Google Hangouts, I wanted something that was unique to the family group.... something that would allow photo sharing, teams and preferably encrypted. I had found that in Keybase... but I after toying around with it, I found that it was something more than all of this!

There is file sharing and teams... but it also acts as an account verification tool as well! So, you can "claim" various profiles via a posting of a unique code to the particular account. Handy...

The ability to have the application on mobile AND computers is a huge plus... I can see and respond to messages regardless of what device I'm using.... all of it synced easily and all in a beautiful dark theme to boot!

So, Keybase has been a great replacement for Google Hangouts... a huge upgrade. However, there is no video chat, which is a bit of a downer... but we can use something else for that. For daily text communication, I'm loving it!