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PSA: Check your inbox for email from stellar.org, you may be sitting on $

20 points by throwawayfish ↗ HN
I saw a link for Stellar.org on HN back in 2014 and signed up because it seemed interesting. They granted me 6000 coins in their currency back then and I simply forgot about them.

Turns out they're worth like 0.63 USD right now. I just cashed out.

Maybe you have money too?

14 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] thread
csorrell
Yep, I remember a thread on HN during that time where we were all signing up. Finding them now is a welcome surprise.
GFischer
Crap, now I feel very bad about not having seen it :(
chatmasta
Yeah, I remember that thread too, and I already checked my inbox. Couldn't find it haha. I think I thought it was a stupid idea because it was centralized and borne out of Ripple's very bad reputation from its first implementation...

And to be fair, I still think that. But I wouldn't mind having $5k for free.

achairapart
Hurry up. If all HN users are cashing out now they're going to crash soon. :)
AznHisoka
During the Christmas holiday, when bitcoin was slumping, I saw that some dude was giving millions of dollars worth of bitcoin to charities, and was like "NOOO!! Anybody but charities!! They're just gonna dump it in the damn market and crash the price"
take4
This is exactly what happened to me and what I did. Unfortunately I sold them 3 or so weeks ago when it was 0.25. :/
jrowley
Anyone have tips for cashing this out? A good exchange you'd recommend? Binance is closed for new users right now apparently. I'd either want ETH or BTC or USD
MattPearce
I just checked and found that I did receive coins way back then, haven't dealt with cryptocurrency but did some research and this is the process I went through (can't guarantee it's the best/easiest/cheapest, but it worked):

- Recover account using recovery code from Stellar email

- Convert Stellar into Lumens (it will do this automatically when you log in)

- Create account on Binance, and use Stellar site to log into wallet and transfer to Binance

- Trade Lumens for Bitcoin on Binance (took a couple of tries of playing with sell price for them to sell, watch the price coins are trading for to get an idea of a good price point)

- Sign up for LocalBitcoins.com and transfer Bitcoins from Binance to LocalBitcoins wallet

- Find someone willing to buy Bitcoins for a decent price in your country who will pay via your preferred method (NZD into bank account for me)

- Use LocalBitcoins.com to sell to them, it places them into escrow and you release the coins once the money is in your account

jrowley
Thank you! When I tried to sign up with binance yesterday I couldn’t register. I’ll have to try again later!
mburst
Anyone having issues with upgrading your old account? I get the message that my account has been upgrading after signing in and that I now need to use my secret and public key. However, when I use those in the account viewer it tells me that my account doesn't exist on the network.
subrat_rout
Is it like whoever signed up got 6000 coins? When I checked my email I found out also I have signed up for stellar and tried to recover the account using recovery password. Now I am not seeing any private/public key for the old account and the balance also shows me as zero. Not sure what happened.
neversorry
I found the email and tried logging in. It prompted me to upgrade. However there was no secret and public key shown. I upgraded and got the email. But now I don't know how to login as I never copied the secret key.

Any ideas?