They're based on all lumens in existence, including the lumens already generated from previous inflation rounds (compound, not simple)

The Stellar distributed network has a built-in, fixed, nominal inflation mechanism. New lumens are added to the network at the rate of 1% each year. Each week, the protocol distributes these lumens to any account that gets over .05% of the "votes" from other accounts in the network.

The inflation operation lets you "vote."

More info:
https://www.stellar.org/developers/learn/concepts/inflation.html

Just to clarify, the total amount of lumens is transparent, but it isn't static.

The Stellar network has a built-in, fixed inflation mechanism. New lumens are added to the network at the rate of 1% each year. The network also collects a base fee for each operation in a transaction. The funds from base fees are added to the inflation pool

The fixed inflation rate and base fee are nominal; however, as anchors and integrators join the network, lumens may become more valuable. 

As a balancing measure for the ecosystem, anyone who holds lumens can vote on where the funds in this pool go. Each week, the protocol distributes these lumens to any account that gets over .05% of the votes from other accounts on the network.

Big news for Stellar! Deloitte is using the Stellar network to power cross-border transactions

Here's a live demo of Deloitte's Stellar-powered software here.

 

Big announcement in the Stellar ecosystem: Deloitte is using the Stellar network to power cross-border transactions!

Here's a (video) demo of Deloitte's Stellar software here.

 

You can use the Account Merge operation to do this.

If you aren't a coder, or if you'd prefer a quick process of executing the operation, you can use the Stellar Laboratory.

1) Build the transaction. You'll need to enter your pubic key for the Source Account and fetch the transaction sequence number. Enter the new wallet's public key in the Destination field.

2) Sign the transaction: copy the XDR code at the bottom of the page and import it in the transaction signer. Sign it with your secret key of the original account.

3) Submit the transaction: paste your transaction enveloped (signed) into Post Transaction. Click submit and confirm that the transaction goes through.

Hope this helps, and feel free to follow up or DM me if you have any questions.

Sorry for the DIY process;  In order to stay focused on our core mission and encourage community ownership of the ecosystem, we aren't significantly developing the account viewer. Instead, we’ll continue to improve open-source developer tools so that participants in the ecosystem can build a variety of new services

We'll have to see how the initial round goes. that's one reason we're doing it in multiple rounds rather than all at once. The method may change on the next one.

Awesome, see you around! Welcome to the Stellar community

19 billion total, 3 billion for the initial round.

We understand this kind of sucks, but as a U.S. entity we do have to comply with local regulation.

If you're uncomfortable with giving us your Facebook data (again, totally understandable) you can still go through an exchange instead. 

We’re Giving Away 3 Billion Lumens to Bitcoin Holders

(an announcement from Stellar.org cofounder and CTO Jed McCaleb)

When we were designing Stellar, Bitcoin acted as a profound inspiration. The Bitcoin network was the first to show that it's possible for a group of untrusted parties to agree on a common database, and the Bitcoin community still influences our understanding of this technology's impact.  

With all that in mind, Stellar.org has reserved 19% of the initial lumens—a total of 19 billion lumens—for people who hold bitcoin. On July 5th we’ll make available these lumens to any bitcoin holder who wants them.

How will it work?
We'll give away the 19 billion lumens in several rounds. The first round will consist of 3 billion lumens.

Read about the full details here.


Hope to see you on July 5th!

Interesting application of the Stellar network: Social media network Philafy will use Stellar to transform social media “likes” into micro-donations.

More details: https://innovationmtl.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/transforming-likes-in-money-for-a-good-cause/

Data Management, Federation, and Coinstar for Coffee Beans

Follow the link for a roundup of technical updates and news from the past couple of weeks.

Technically, some highlights are:

• the ability to attach any key/value pair to a Stellar network account. Using the manage data operation, the account can have an associated encryption key, publicly attest to some fact, or provide other metadata about itself.
• Stellar.org dev Bartek also built a prototype of a Go cold wallet designed for Raspberry Pi. (If you give it a try, please be sure to attempt transactions on the testnet first).
  

For broader ecosystem news, check out Stellar integrator bext360's proposal for Ideo.org's Open Challenge: Stellar-powered smart coffee kiosks that automatically pay out farmers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each kiosk, which functions like a Coinstar for coffee beans, will serve around 4,000 farmers.

@kame.japan2 it sounds like you created an account on the Stellar test network. Congrats! You can now try out other API commands in the Stellar Laboratory. For instance, you can send lumens, issue your own asset, and build a multi-signature transaction.

@toThemJoy awesome, all of the code is on GitHub. Tobias also hangs out a lot on Stellar Slack, so you can easily get in touch there (username powderfan)

@John999 You can use the Endpoint Explorer in the Laboratory. Search by account, ledger, operation, etc.

@Weltumschauung here's how you could create an account, buy lumens, and store them w/o handing over your private key:

1) Use the Account Creator tool to generate your public and private key. Save them somewhere safe, like a password vault.

2) Purchase lumens on an exchange and have the exchange send them to your public key.

3) From there, you can use the account viewer to send and receive lumens and check your balance.

The reason that you're seeing a focus on developers precisely because most people need apps/services/tools to interact with the protocol. We're focused on getting people to build localized tools to serve their own communities. We hope this encourages community ownership of the ecosystem, rather than a centralized ecosystem with Stellar.org at the center. Hope that makes sense.

The network is still called Stellar. Only the native currency name has changed from stellar to lumen. That's actually one of the main reasons for the different name - to clear up confusion around network vs currency.

The main community space is slack.stellar.org (also mirrored on IRC at #stellar and #stellar-dev )

Would be great to see you there, ontopicplease