[rms]

Your github led me to https://turtlecoin.lol/ which makes your point and undermines it at the same time. Turtlecoin launched with an incremental and a catchy name and no ICO and on the surface sounds like it achieves a lot of what Mobilecoin attempts to.

Ultimately though, Turtlecoin is a parameter tweak and relaunch of existing coins that doesn't solve the core problem of consumer payments. Mobilecoin is at least attempting that, and for $30M, they should at least get a fancy mobile UI, hopefully one that filters up to an improvement of the Signal UI also.

It's right to be skeptical. Blockchain applications aren't being delivered. Still, the promise of blockchain convergence requires us to believe in a future that we can't quite see at hand where applications start being delivered all at once and the ecosystem hits critical mass. I'm now in the business of skeptically predicting the future and I've basically started pre-rejecting all ICO pitches if it's not being delivered imminently.

MobileCoin still stands out as a clever, simple design where the economic value comes from one trusted crypto anarchist saying that we as a society can in fact use Intel SGX for critical applications -- like a simple implementation of consumer micropayments. I, like many others, didn't believe this until Moxie said it was ok, but I believe in this because Moxie is in fact the most trusted person in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious about your blockchain side projects beyond Turtlecoin hacking, feel free to email me if you have any interesting code running...

Also I recommend Moxie's English language writing to everyone; it's sublime. https://moxie.org/stories.html

[deft]

Thanks for the detailed reply. To me TurtleCoin is just a fun project that's trying a different approach: make something first. It has a long way to go and as it exists now is how you describe. In the long run the project members are hoping to take it well past that, which I'm sure you saw on the site.

When I first heard about mobilecoin I thought it was different too. The problem I have is why are they raising money right now? Show me a working MVP (not a sketch UI) first. It's crazy that people are raising this amount of money with absolutely nothing to demo. I have more faith in mobilecoin launching something worthwhile compared to other coins but I'm still very skeptical... name recognition and private raises don't change much.

As for now I've just been messing around with TurtleCoin. The project (along with the low price) has managed to create a community that's interested in building things with it. I like being able to hack on something, and no other crypto project has offered that environment.