I keep hearing people say this, but I don't understand it. It was a fun little giveaway experiment funded by someone else, in the spirit of the company's focus on cryptography.

I don't visit the cryptocurrency tab anymore, and it's not like it gets in the way or anything.

> It was a fun little giveaway experiment funded by someone else, in the spirit of the company's focus on cryptography.

It was not "someone else". Keybase is directly funded by Stellar (source: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-stellar) and the crypto offering was just a PR/marketing move to increase adoption for crypto of Stellar not something "in the spirit of the company's focus on cryptography".

It was a trainwreck that damaged the project's reputation and harmed its users.

If you know crypto, it had several problems. There are worse coins to airdrop on your users but not many. The user experience resembled that used by scammers on Telegram and the project's overall behaviour looked like a de-anonymization attack (I mean that seems to be Keybase's business model but this looked exactly like one). All of this led to crypto chats on Keybase being targeted by social engineering attacks, and Keybase's famously bad moderation tools made that much harder to deal with than it could have been.

If you don't know crypto it made Keybase look like a crazy crypto project, which isn't an easy sell.

In either case you could be forgiven for wondering when Keybase got their money transmitter license.

So this did get in the way, and the sooner Keybase remove the tab the sooner it will be clear that they are past the denial stage.

This was a bad enough fuck-up that I removed my social proofs and now recommend that people not use Keybase. But if they fixed a few things (remove the Crypto tab, fix moderation, fix name changes) I'd pay them a subscription in a heartbeat.

In all honesty I believe the crypto offerings were a smart idea that didn’t undermine Keybases reputation , it attempted to highlight a user friendly exchange of Stellar and any further crypto to come along . What did undermine the reputation was allowing a system that could be scammed which called for the closing of the offering . Clearly not thought out enough .

> This was a bad enough fuck-up that I removed my social proofs and now recommend that people not use Keybase

What do you recommend people use instead?

I for one didn’t appreciate being spammed by them in the app I only keep running for secure private messages.

This is very misleading, they didn't "offer" any coin, and they don't have their own coin. They added a wallet for a coin that already existed. A pretty good wallet, too.

It seems this has literally nothing to do with the main functionality of keybase though.

They added a wallet feature that was compatible with an existing crypto coin, there was no offering.