The product is simply not good in its current form. It's a strange mix of instant messaging, web of trust, and cryptocurrency scam. It doesn't strongly give any particular goal. The tools are shiny, pleasant enough to look at any use, but isn't going in any direction.

A lot of push recently has been into making it a "team chat" platform, which is great except that all of the participants are public, and tied to their name. It makes for hideously bad opsec if any company were to seriously use it.

God, that cryptocurrency scam. If ever there was a clear message screaming "we have no idea how to turn this into something profitable/sustainable," that was it.

Not sure why people keep saying things like this.

The truth is that sharing money in the same way we share messages and images (i.e. chat) is a good idea, and in my opinion is absolutely inevitable.

Now we don't have to do that via cryptocurrency, but the reason we don't already have it in the west is because it's a coordination problem, and there are entrenched interests that won't care about giving the user a good experience until forced to by competition. Cryptocurrency lets you avoid that problem, and given that it is entirely around managing keys, it's a very natural fit for KeyBase.

I thought the integration into keybase chat was genius, and the user experience of transferring money in that way was much better than anything traditional banking has ever offered me.

> It's a strange mix of instant messaging, web of trust, and cryptocurrency scam.

They ended their Stellar airdrop early, but I guess it didn't help that bots were joining the platform, and affecting the other parts of the Keybase community, just to get a share of it.