Literacy
That should be enough. Stellar has made it part of their mission to promote literacy. You can read this. Imagine if you couldn't.
The thing is though - there is more. Much much more. Stellar wants to bring low cost financial services to the entire world. They want to make the world a better place through literacy and access to financial services.
But wait there's even more. Stellar's cryptocurrency XLM aka Lumens are really really good. Today I did multiple transactions with multiple currencies. Here are the results:
- Bitcoin Cash - Took a couple of minutes and cost me .37 cents. I was impressed, but the thing with Bitcoin Cash is that it just feels a little bit like a great piece of literature that no one wants to read. I'm not sure why, but the feeling is there. It's like visiting a rich uncle who possibly killed his heiress wife to become rich. I just don't want to go there.
- Ethereum - It was a couple of minutes and cost $1.12. I like Ethereum.
- Cardano - The transaction was cheap and fast but waiting for my ADA wallet to load was an agonizing fifteen minutes.
- Bitcoin - The transaction cost about $7 and took more than 2 hours. I had the option of expediting if I paid an additional $17 but from what I've read, you only have about a 20% chance of that working. So I waited. It wasn't as bad as the days long delays I've heard of, but it was definitely not a way to do a retail transaction of any sort.
- Stellar - The transaction took less than a minute and cost less than a penny.
- Litecoin - The transaction was 2.5 minutes and cost a little less than a nickel
BCC - 2 min - $.37
ETH - 2 min - $1.12
ADA - 1 min - $.03 (Daedalus Wallet 15 mins to Load)
BTC - 128 min - $7.24
XLM - 1 min - <$.01
LTC - 2.5 min - <$.04
The speed and low fee are enough to make it viable as a medium of exchange but when you start thinking about the possiblity of sending money to someone in another country, making micro-loans with no need of exchange, or even using XLM to pay virutal assistants who live in other countries for their work in a common currency. The mind-blowing potential of XLM (Lumens) are only exceeded by the potential of the Stellar Network itself. Actually, it's not surprising when you look at who is involved in this project - Matt Mullenweg, the guy who invented Wordpress is just one of a list of internet luminaries - most of whom have great street-cred for actually doing good!
There are professors, bankers, venture capitalists, CEOs of well known companies, and a whole host of other talent involved in this project. I've spent a great deal of time digging into the teams behind blockchains and cryptos lately and this one literally blew my mind. Forget Ripple, this is the one that may very well change the world.
Dig into Stellar at http://www.stellar.org
