I definitely agree with the article that it felt a bit like a betrayal. I've pushed some friends and family to use it over Telegram despite significant usability issue, and now I see that instead of implementing some IMO basic features like proper message sync and easy backup when you get a new phone, they prefer to implement a... micropayment system? Based on some niche altcoin which doesn't even exist on mainstream exchanges?
It goes beyond the usual issue with cryptocurrencies. Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea? You can already send wallet addresses over signal if you care to do it.
I'm willing to give the Signal devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that they meant well and aren't actively trying to benefit from the move (even though I'm not completely dismissing this possibility) but at the very least it's just showcases a very strange way to lead the project and prioritize issues. I can think of a dozen things out of the top that would do more to drive Signal adoption than integrating with some "literally what?" cryptocoin.
This is going to drive the adoption of this niche cryptocoin, it's not going to do anything at all for Signal.
The perceived advantage of Signal over Telegram is LITERALLY not having an option for a cloud-synced chat and ONLY having end to end encrypted chats. That's all.
You give up of usability to get that advantage. Explain to your mom why she has to give up Telegram to get basically the same functionality as Telegram secret chats.
Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was sponsored by the US Govt. Before you believe "OMG Telegram crypto is bad!" FUD, do 15 minutes of research.
As someone who has been defending Telegram against certain claims here from time to time this is still a sad day for me.
I'd appreciate however if everyone who has been saying ugly things about the alternatives would take a step back now and consider if there is more to security than E2E-encryption.
E2E-encryption is a seriously nice and useful property of a messaging system, but in the long run it is only one of many important details, and while E2E-encryption is always a good thing for end users as far as I can see other useful properties are often directly at odds with each other:
- incentives and funding. Free to give everyone the ability to use it or paid to align incentives?
- anonymity or verified identies? Both have significant advantages.
- repudiation or non repudiation? Depends on if you agreed on a contract or discussed something that the new regime doesn't approve of.
- backups? or ephemeral? Again, depends on if you are sharing family photos in a group or or sharing something that should stay between you and the recipient
Edit to add: As for solutions I think healthy competition is one of the best ways to ensure every messaging system tries to be tje best they can be.
I just recently got a new phone, and used the new feature to do this (uses wi-fi direct) and I have to say it seemed like it would be easy enough for non-techy users to use.
Mobilecoin (Foundation) is a technological, ethical, and legal tour de force. I recommend you read their FAQ, but, to me anyway, it is obvious why Signal/Moxie needed to create a new coin (tl;dr: It needed to be a private venmo-like experience). To prevent conflicts of interest, a new org was created. Hence Mobilecoin, not SignalCoin. A few highlights:
Technological:
* First Oblivious RAM implementation, "fog", so that transacting parties cannot be revealed
* Their Rust codebase is really nice
* Instant transfers with little computing power (CO2 emissions)
Ethical:
* Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees. The Mobilecoin foundation has some awesome partners, e.g. the Long Now Foundation.
* Mining is not ethical, it pollutes the planet and is just bad. The only alternative is a "pre-mine" given to an independent org, ie Mobilecoin Foundation
Legal:
* The US's laws are not clear on what is allowable with privacy coins, so Mobilecoin has played it conservatively by saying US residents can't own the coins.
In summary, the critiques of Mobilecoin (in any of its incarnations, foundation, moxie, etc.) are assuming the agents involved have a financial interest in MOB being expensive -- I contend that is not the case. Please show your evidence.
>Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea?
No, not private. Also slow. Also pollutes planet. Monero is close on the privacy front, but takes 3 minutes to send (very stressful). It's possible a coin with the proper attributes could be made on stellar, but that raises questions towards ownership of Lumens (and pumping them) and their stellar reimplementation in Rust is likely more secure.
>Niche coin
nit: MOB has a top 15 market cap with 250m coins in distribution. Though I would hesitate to compare to other cryptocurrencies which are almost entirely scammy, polluting garbage.
Proper message sync is hardly possible with end-to-end encryption everyone so excited about (without fully understanding the implications of true secrecy). If you have e2ee and then sync messages via google drive (looking at you, Viber), you are kinda missing the point.
This article mirrors my feelings toward this announcement well. I spent a significant amount of time trying out different messaging apps and convincing my friends and family to move over from Telegram and WhatsApp. I used my reputation and their trust in my expertise.
The whole blockchain industry is just too mixed with scams that I feel comfortable to have my non-tech relatives dealing with it. It's enough that I have to educate them on 'investments' in random coins (it's gambling) and cure their FOMO regarding NFTs. Now the technology will be integrated into the messaging app that I endorsed, well-packed together with the smelly involvement of Moxie with the currency.
I've always hesitated to recommend Signal to people due to Moxie's attitude towards the more traditional security and privacy community where things like federation and open source are respected concepts. Tack this on the list and Signal just seems like a crazy thing to recommend now.
If they can get the onboarding process on Element to be just a little bit easier, maybe a phone number based default, I'll be dumping Signal in a heartbeat.
I've been highly impressed with the UX for quite some time, but have refrained from pushing it (and the likes) onto friends. My family and friends seems to have slowly drifted towards signal, and I haven't bothered affecting that, but if I would go from a pure UX, I'd suggest telegram. So, I'm genuinely curious to know others' thoughts on it. I have only limited knowledge, just vague recollections of Russian developers (?), which might or might not have distanced themselves from political pressure (?), as well as the app itself being somewhat open sourced (?), based on the same protocol as signal (?).
I interviewed at signal a while back, and none of their recent mishaps surprise me. At first, they had me talk to Brian Acton on the phone for about an hour, who seemed to think I was already getting an offer, and he was there to sell me on it. He was cool to talk to, so I didn't mind, but I was surprised at this level of confusion for a company that small.
Next, I was given a lengthy take home project (which I was warned not to do in a language other than Java, because Moxie would reject candidates if they didn't pick a language he liked). After I finished it, they disappeared for a month.
Apparently I passed. They said I was basically the only one out of 200 people they sent it to that did pass. I assumed this meant I would be getting an offer, but they then wanted me to do a full onsite. The "onsite" weirdly consisted of another take home, but shorter, and a live interview. After not hearing back again for a while, I got an email titled: "Hello from Signal!". Great! I opened it, excited: it was a rejection.
I tried to get feedback on why I was rejected but never heard back. The best thing I can come up with: in the system design interview, as a solution to a postgres node being overloaded, I didn't come up with the solution of having a SPOF redis node with a full key scan every 10 minutes acting as an intermediate data store before transferring to postgres. I was told this is how they actually do things.
Take this with a grain of salt, since I'm obviously still irked by the experience, but it's all true.
> I didn't come up with the solution of having a SPOF redis node with a full key scan every 10 minutes acting as an intermediate data store before transferring to postgres.
Obviously that is bad architecture smell.
But if you didn't already know; redis supports high availability through "sentinel"[0].
> SPOF redis node with a full key scan every 10 minutes acting as an intermediate data store before transferring to postgres
On the one hand, oof.
On the other hand, the number of massive software architectures on extremely well-known platforms held together by exactly that system (not an equivalent one, exactly Redis-in-front-of-RDBMS-with-cronjob-flush, no RDB backups, AOF, Sentinel or anything either) I've seen is also depressingly high.
I was recently pulled onto Signal by a non-techie who values his privacy. I talked to him about Matrix/Element and he had no idea what that was, but was very happy with Siganl. I must admit, the app is very nice. All I had to do was give it access to my contacts and bam, I am now able to chat with all my contacts.
By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to connect with that person from GitHub" instead of "messaging the cute girl I met last night" or "messaging my grandpa". And yet, it feels to me like Matrix/Element is the platform less likely to pull something like this. Then again, Keybase seemed that way as well...
> By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to connect with that person from GitHub"
Element is what messaging should have been from the START: a federated service just like email, where you register an account with your provider of choice, just like email, and start adding/chatting other people after getting to know their address, just like email. So, instead of asking that cute girl her phone number or her email address, you would ask her her element address.
Whatsapp spoiled this approach years ago, so now we are basically screwed because everyone is used to the central approach and it's almost impossible to move away from it. But TODAY's implementation of Element and their shiny clients 12 years ago, would have been a great success just like WhatsApp was (whishful thinking at its finest, I know).
I think you hit the nail on the head with "Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger". Me and a friend experimented chatting with Element (Riot at the time), and while it certainly "worked", the process of getting everything working was not something I would expect a non-programmer to be able to figure out. We had to finagle different keys across different computers and phones and it was fairly painful. Both of us are software engineers, so at some level we have fun figuring this stuff out, but I cannot see a universe where Element catches with the general public unless the process is as quick and painless as Signal.
I feel like Element works better as a competitor to Slack or IRC than as a competitor to Signal or Whatsapp.
They are less likely to do this kind of secretive development, but they could go that direction. They have considered cryptocurrency in the past, see https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc.... They are open, but still driven by a single company which could change direction at any time.
They also surprised their community multiple times with renames of their app and weird redesigns (remember the horizontally-scrollable unordered bubbles for room selection?)
Would you say this is a weakness of element or matrix itself? In principle you could made a clone of signal, WhatsApp, telegram etc. using mobile APIs right?
1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal requires.
2) MobileCoin Inc. intends to maintain an extreme minority of the coins once the dust settles.
3) This is designed to be used as a payment rail, which requires us getting coins in the hands of users. As you might imagine, navigating the regulatory waters of how to do that with compliance to how governments want us to behave is non-trivial. It’s important for us to move with correctness over speed.
4) this project is 4 years of my life building real technology. This is not a pump and dump scam. We have been very careful in the design, operation, and development of this system to give it the best chance at surviving in the world of cryptocurrency projects. It is non-trivial to deliver a coin that is useful for payments (the requirements are speed, privacy, low-energy footprint, and operation in resource-constrained mobile environments).
Let me put it simply, I love signal and we intentionally designed this currency to be as oblivious as possible with respect to user data so that signal could maintain their relationship with their users, one of retaining as little information as possible without compromising on the user experience. Nothing else in cryptocurrency, or payments, comes close to the level of privacy and performance that MobileCoin has achieved.
I welcome any questions I am able to answer. Note that some questions revolve around tightly regulated areas of concern and may take longer to answer as I must check with outside counsel before replying.
Every time Matrix is brought up here, the federation and open spec is criticised as being too slow moving compared to Signal's BDFL approach. Well, this is what happens when the interests of the BDFL and community diverge. If New Vector decided to fuck up Element on the other hand, you could just move to a new client and not deal with marketing a network move to your social network.
Did anyone ever consider that this is actually on purpose to deter people from using Signal by it's authors?
Lets imagine, theoretically, some three letter agency in the US has forced signal to backdoor their platform somehow, and so signal stops posting source code to the clients, and everyone just keeps on using it for a year even though the authors thought that maybe this would be a big red "DANGER" signal to the users (who they're not legally allowed to inform, or shutdown the platform for any more) then how else could you try and mitigate this?
Pushing a shitcoin onto a largely tech user base may do the trick eh?
Or maybe I just put on my tinfoil hat this morning..
I'm a little surprised that nobody is mentioning that any kind of blockchain payment system creates a permanent, public ledger. One US Attorney called Bitcoin's blockchain "prosecution futures" as it's only a matter of time before the sender/receiver addresses for transactions are correlated with unique individuals. This permanent, public record of a transaction between a Signal account and another user or a service flies in the face or Signal's presumed goal of completely private e2ee communication.
MobileCoin uses a combination of two other private coins, Monero and Zcash. There are no addresses on the MobileCoins's blockchain to be correlated. Didn't it cross your mind that a private messenger would probably use a private cryptocurrency?
While I like your line of thought and agree that pairing meta information from messages and financial transaction might weaken anonymity, the trajectory of cryptocurrency development (like zk-SNARKS) will make this incredibly difficult.
But I thought moving from the walled garden owned by Facebook to another walled garden owned by a Non Profit Organisation whose main maintainer controls the entirety of the platform and discourages any forks/federation would solve all our problems. Surely they would never dare to push shady shit in their application since they are the good guys™.
While I'm generally happy with cryptocurrency for reasons of practicality, privacy, and broader governance,
connecting both your private communications and your private purchases to your phone number (and to each other) is exceedingly unwise. Especially as most western countries insist on connecting your phone number with government-issued ID. Anybody with technical knowledge and a modicum of appreciation for privacy should be either bitterly amused or straight up appalled.
The correct solution: decouple messaging from your offline identity (phone number etc.). Decouple transactions from offline identity and from communications - proper use of cryptocurrency is good for that.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can connect online identity with offline identity. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." [1]
--
[1] with apologies to jwz - his original is: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
Very much a betrayal. Signal has an image of "for the weak against abuse by the strong". Cryptocurrency is "I'll sell my grandmother and everyone I know for money. HODL YOLO!", which is not exactly compatible.
And it's not just disappointing, it's also dragging the to-the-core corrupt world of these people into Signal.
This is making Signal lose the moral high ground, making it that much easier to drag its name through the mud that is cryptocurrencies.
Oh well. No such thing as free lunch after all. Yet again, a user-funded nonprofit would be the way to go, but users want free stuff. Minority would donate, but good luck having a steady cash flow and being able to pay for the infrastructure and your wages.
Moxie seems to think that they need to do this to keep up with the Joneses, as they try to build some kind of decentralized alternative to WeChat. I guess we should have seen this coming when he got involved with MobileCoin. I'm not a psychic and it might turn out okay but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Yeah ... well the update that includes MOB will be the uninstall event trigger for me.
I remember skimming that article from 2018 before I'd switched myself and all my friends (the shame!) to Signal and counted it as a negative for that platforms reputation. I guess my honeymoon is over. On to the next chat platform!
It could be nothing, but it seems like it should have been disclosed and the article author neatly avoided it. They're the CTO of something very financ-ey/crypto-ey oriented in the B2B payments space, although the site (adjoint.io) explains little. Going by their GitHub most of their work somehow relates to cryptography.
Super sad. I played a major part in getting a lot of people I know onto Signal and felt vindicated by the masses switching recently, and now this.
So how do I adjust my filter for who I trust now? Are all American organisations corrupt, not just big tech? Why would I ever support any app again if even Signal is corrupt?
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
It goes beyond the usual issue with cryptocurrencies. Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea? You can already send wallet addresses over signal if you care to do it.
I'm willing to give the Signal devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that they meant well and aren't actively trying to benefit from the move (even though I'm not completely dismissing this possibility) but at the very least it's just showcases a very strange way to lead the project and prioritize issues. I can think of a dozen things out of the top that would do more to drive Signal adoption than integrating with some "literally what?" cryptocoin.
This is going to drive the adoption of this niche cryptocoin, it's not going to do anything at all for Signal.
[+] [-] skrowl|5 years ago|reply
The perceived advantage of Signal over Telegram is LITERALLY not having an option for a cloud-synced chat and ONLY having end to end encrypted chats. That's all.
You give up of usability to get that advantage. Explain to your mom why she has to give up Telegram to get basically the same functionality as Telegram secret chats.
Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was sponsored by the US Govt. Before you believe "OMG Telegram crypto is bad!" FUD, do 15 minutes of research.
[+] [-] matkoniecz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eitland|5 years ago|reply
I'd appreciate however if everyone who has been saying ugly things about the alternatives would take a step back now and consider if there is more to security than E2E-encryption.
E2E-encryption is a seriously nice and useful property of a messaging system, but in the long run it is only one of many important details, and while E2E-encryption is always a good thing for end users as far as I can see other useful properties are often directly at odds with each other:
- incentives and funding. Free to give everyone the ability to use it or paid to align incentives?
- anonymity or verified identies? Both have significant advantages.
- repudiation or non repudiation? Depends on if you agreed on a contract or discussed something that the new regime doesn't approve of.
- backups? or ephemeral? Again, depends on if you are sharing family photos in a group or or sharing something that should stay between you and the recipient
Edit to add: As for solutions I think healthy competition is one of the best ways to ensure every messaging system tries to be tje best they can be.
[+] [-] vodkapump|5 years ago|reply
I just recently got a new phone, and used the new feature to do this (uses wi-fi direct) and I have to say it seemed like it would be easy enough for non-techy users to use.
[+] [-] xg15|5 years ago|reply
How many "benefit of the doubt" cards do they have left by now?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bdcs|5 years ago|reply
Technological: * First Oblivious RAM implementation, "fog", so that transacting parties cannot be revealed * Their Rust codebase is really nice * Instant transfers with little computing power (CO2 emissions)
Ethical: * Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees. The Mobilecoin foundation has some awesome partners, e.g. the Long Now Foundation. * Mining is not ethical, it pollutes the planet and is just bad. The only alternative is a "pre-mine" given to an independent org, ie Mobilecoin Foundation
Legal: * The US's laws are not clear on what is allowable with privacy coins, so Mobilecoin has played it conservatively by saying US residents can't own the coins.
In summary, the critiques of Mobilecoin (in any of its incarnations, foundation, moxie, etc.) are assuming the agents involved have a financial interest in MOB being expensive -- I contend that is not the case. Please show your evidence.
PS. I am assuming good faith and honesty in statements, eg "Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own any MobileCoins." https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...
PPS. Some direct responses:
>Let's assume that they integrated with Bitcoin or Litecoin or some "mainstream" CC, would it still be a good idea?
No, not private. Also slow. Also pollutes planet. Monero is close on the privacy front, but takes 3 minutes to send (very stressful). It's possible a coin with the proper attributes could be made on stellar, but that raises questions towards ownership of Lumens (and pumping them) and their stellar reimplementation in Rust is likely more secure.
>Niche coin
nit: MOB has a top 15 market cap with 250m coins in distribution. Though I would hesitate to compare to other cryptocurrencies which are almost entirely scammy, polluting garbage.
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyjstark|5 years ago|reply
The whole blockchain industry is just too mixed with scams that I feel comfortable to have my non-tech relatives dealing with it. It's enough that I have to educate them on 'investments' in random coins (it's gambling) and cure their FOMO regarding NFTs. Now the technology will be integrated into the messaging app that I endorsed, well-packed together with the smelly involvement of Moxie with the currency.
What now?
[+] [-] arsome|5 years ago|reply
If they can get the onboarding process on Element to be just a little bit easier, maybe a phone number based default, I'll be dumping Signal in a heartbeat.
[+] [-] okamiueru|5 years ago|reply
I've been highly impressed with the UX for quite some time, but have refrained from pushing it (and the likes) onto friends. My family and friends seems to have slowly drifted towards signal, and I haven't bothered affecting that, but if I would go from a pure UX, I'd suggest telegram. So, I'm genuinely curious to know others' thoughts on it. I have only limited knowledge, just vague recollections of Russian developers (?), which might or might not have distanced themselves from political pressure (?), as well as the app itself being somewhat open sourced (?), based on the same protocol as signal (?).
[+] [-] niutech|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrwaway3892|5 years ago|reply
I interviewed at signal a while back, and none of their recent mishaps surprise me. At first, they had me talk to Brian Acton on the phone for about an hour, who seemed to think I was already getting an offer, and he was there to sell me on it. He was cool to talk to, so I didn't mind, but I was surprised at this level of confusion for a company that small.
Next, I was given a lengthy take home project (which I was warned not to do in a language other than Java, because Moxie would reject candidates if they didn't pick a language he liked). After I finished it, they disappeared for a month.
Apparently I passed. They said I was basically the only one out of 200 people they sent it to that did pass. I assumed this meant I would be getting an offer, but they then wanted me to do a full onsite. The "onsite" weirdly consisted of another take home, but shorter, and a live interview. After not hearing back again for a while, I got an email titled: "Hello from Signal!". Great! I opened it, excited: it was a rejection.
I tried to get feedback on why I was rejected but never heard back. The best thing I can come up with: in the system design interview, as a solution to a postgres node being overloaded, I didn't come up with the solution of having a SPOF redis node with a full key scan every 10 minutes acting as an intermediate data store before transferring to postgres. I was told this is how they actually do things.
Take this with a grain of salt, since I'm obviously still irked by the experience, but it's all true.
[+] [-] dijit|5 years ago|reply
Obviously that is bad architecture smell.
But if you didn't already know; redis supports high availability through "sentinel"[0].
[0]: https://medium.com/@amila922/redis-sentinel-high-availabilit....
[+] [-] zbentley|5 years ago|reply
On the one hand, oof.
On the other hand, the number of massive software architectures on extremely well-known platforms held together by exactly that system (not an equivalent one, exactly Redis-in-front-of-RDBMS-with-cronjob-flush, no RDB backups, AOF, Sentinel or anything either) I've seen is also depressingly high.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|5 years ago|reply
By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to connect with that person from GitHub" instead of "messaging the cute girl I met last night" or "messaging my grandpa". And yet, it feels to me like Matrix/Element is the platform less likely to pull something like this. Then again, Keybase seemed that way as well...
[+] [-] darkwater|5 years ago|reply
Element is what messaging should have been from the START: a federated service just like email, where you register an account with your provider of choice, just like email, and start adding/chatting other people after getting to know their address, just like email. So, instead of asking that cute girl her phone number or her email address, you would ask her her element address.
Whatsapp spoiled this approach years ago, so now we are basically screwed because everyone is used to the central approach and it's almost impossible to move away from it. But TODAY's implementation of Element and their shiny clients 12 years ago, would have been a great success just like WhatsApp was (whishful thinking at its finest, I know).
[+] [-] tombert|5 years ago|reply
I feel like Element works better as a competitor to Slack or IRC than as a competitor to Signal or Whatsapp.
[+] [-] CA0DA|5 years ago|reply
Agree, I've been using Matrix/Element, and it's a bit slower/buggy but seems like it'll be around for longer.
[+] [-] remram|5 years ago|reply
They are less likely to do this kind of secretive development, but they could go that direction. They have considered cryptocurrency in the past, see https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc.... They are open, but still driven by a single company which could change direction at any time.
They also surprised their community multiple times with renames of their app and weird redesigns (remember the horizontally-scrollable unordered bubbles for room selection?)
[+] [-] twobitshifter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2wrist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephu5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josh2600|5 years ago|reply
I am the CEO of MobileCoin.
A few points:
1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal requires.
2) MobileCoin Inc. intends to maintain an extreme minority of the coins once the dust settles.
3) This is designed to be used as a payment rail, which requires us getting coins in the hands of users. As you might imagine, navigating the regulatory waters of how to do that with compliance to how governments want us to behave is non-trivial. It’s important for us to move with correctness over speed.
4) this project is 4 years of my life building real technology. This is not a pump and dump scam. We have been very careful in the design, operation, and development of this system to give it the best chance at surviving in the world of cryptocurrency projects. It is non-trivial to deliver a coin that is useful for payments (the requirements are speed, privacy, low-energy footprint, and operation in resource-constrained mobile environments).
Let me put it simply, I love signal and we intentionally designed this currency to be as oblivious as possible with respect to user data so that signal could maintain their relationship with their users, one of retaining as little information as possible without compromising on the user experience. Nothing else in cryptocurrency, or payments, comes close to the level of privacy and performance that MobileCoin has achieved.
I welcome any questions I am able to answer. Note that some questions revolve around tightly regulated areas of concern and may take longer to answer as I must check with outside counsel before replying.
[+] [-] joosters|5 years ago|reply
a.k.a. we intend to sell all of our vast stacks of pre-mined coins onto gullible users. This is exactly how a pump and dump scam works.
[+] [-] driverdan|5 years ago|reply
What is a "payment story" and why do messaging apps need it? Signal should be secure SMS with a better UI, nothing more.
[+] [-] Macha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberpunk|5 years ago|reply
Lets imagine, theoretically, some three letter agency in the US has forced signal to backdoor their platform somehow, and so signal stops posting source code to the clients, and everyone just keeps on using it for a year even though the authors thought that maybe this would be a big red "DANGER" signal to the users (who they're not legally allowed to inform, or shutdown the platform for any more) then how else could you try and mitigate this?
Pushing a shitcoin onto a largely tech user base may do the trick eh?
Or maybe I just put on my tinfoil hat this morning..
[+] [-] mikece|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychlops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarkin2|5 years ago|reply
Signal's tying encrypted messages and phone numbers to a publicly available ledge of transactions?
[+] [-] twobitshifter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|5 years ago|reply
edit: Blocked at the cloudflare level without even an explanation of why if you go there.
[+] [-] as1mov|5 years ago|reply
I am shocked.
[+] [-] dexen|5 years ago|reply
connecting both your private communications and your private purchases to your phone number (and to each other) is exceedingly unwise. Especially as most western countries insist on connecting your phone number with government-issued ID. Anybody with technical knowledge and a modicum of appreciation for privacy should be either bitterly amused or straight up appalled.
The correct solution: decouple messaging from your offline identity (phone number etc.). Decouple transactions from offline identity and from communications - proper use of cryptocurrency is good for that.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can connect online identity with offline identity. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." [1]
--
[1] with apologies to jwz - his original is: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
[+] [-] lottin|5 years ago|reply
You must have other reasons because cryptocurrencies fail flat out on every one of these aspects.
[+] [-] VectorLock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knorker|5 years ago|reply
And it's not just disappointing, it's also dragging the to-the-core corrupt world of these people into Signal.
This is making Signal lose the moral high ground, making it that much easier to drag its name through the mud that is cryptocurrencies.
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dt3ft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotbikes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verytrivial|5 years ago|reply
I remember skimming that article from 2018 before I'd switched myself and all my friends (the shame!) to Signal and counted it as a negative for that platforms reputation. I guess my honeymoon is over. On to the next chat platform!
[+] [-] lovedswain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firebaze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|5 years ago|reply
So how do I adjust my filter for who I trust now? Are all American organisations corrupt, not just big tech? Why would I ever support any app again if even Signal is corrupt?
[+] [-] macintux|5 years ago|reply