This is a very long but EXTREMELY INTERESTING article in the NY Observer about Jeb McCaleb, his wife, his kids, his girlfriend, Mt Gox, Ripple, Stellar, Wells Fargo's credibility, and the tragedy of coinpunk babies.
http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin"Stellar’s credibility depends on exploiting the fundamentalist strain of libertarianism that animates the coder community."
Bitshares does the same thing: it's designed from ideology not pragmatism. That's a weakness imo.
More pull quotes for tldr:
"One of the things Stellar has been doing to distinguish itself from Ripple Labs is to remove the protections that Ripple Labs had built to accommodate the “know your customer” and anti-laundering needs of its banker partners."
"It would be naïve to think the federal government will stand idly by when its control over currency and financial transactions is threatened. Mr. Shrem’s experience was just one example."
“This is clearly the end of the line for Stellar. I mean, they’re not admitting that, but I mean, my God, you might as well be running a currency on an Excel spreadsheet. Stellar is now counterparty to a currency. And it’s a very weak counterparty. If Stellar Development Corp goes out of business, holders have nothing. Compare that to ripple or Bitcoin—if there was no Ripple Labs, ripple the currency would still exist, just like Bitcoin. The new proposed Stellar protocol defeats the whole purpose of distributing protocol and they’ve had to stop that because their consensus was broken. They’re trying to pin this on Ripple but from where I sit, Ripple has never been more stable. They’ve never been doing more transactions and have something like 90 people on the team. I suspect Jed probably broke something about a month ago, but make no mistake—this is a catastrophe for them. This idea that Jed is gonna invent a new consensus system in a couple of months and their phony 4 million accounts will just sit there and wait …”
The insider trails off and collects his thoughts. “At its core, Stellar is no longer a cryptocurrency. It’s a token form counterparty, and what is the risk of that counterparty? They don’t disclose how much money they make. I mean that’s why the SEC exists, right? So not only can you not rely on transactions of any kind going through because, as the sole validator, Stellar is the entire arbitrator of that, you’re holding assets that used to be a digital asset that is now a digital liability. That’s a fundamental change, especially ironic coming from Jed, the purist libertarian. Now he runs a sort of unregistered central issuer of liability. It’s really stunning.”