- Moxie's involvement with MobileCoin (could be as simple as saying: "for the same reasons Signal's interested in MobileCoin, moxie is as well").
- The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
- Why it involved hiding the server source code.
The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive, but I very much hope the obvious concerns won't play out in practice (which time will tell), and it would be good if they'd also addressed the above.
Also: why Mobilecoin, which is as far from "an alternative payments infrastructure" as most other cash-grab cryptocurrency ?
It isn't known how much of it was premined, and from an early version of their whitepaper, the founders might have as much as 80% of the total supply of the coin. This isn't fine for a cryptocurrency which aims to be "an alternative payments infrastructure", and it isn't fine for Signal to try to promote them as such.
At best we know that he (claims to) have no coins. But that he was an advisor for them and focused on what he saw as a problem with crypto payments: speed. But yeah, there are still a lot of open questions here.
> The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
They addressed this before and the code reflects it. They whitelist country codes that allow it.
> Why it involved hiding the server source code.
This was weird and I'd like it addressed but probably not relevant to this particular topic/post.
> The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive,
Same. I mean it is a core element of the cyperpunk manifesto[0]. But I don't want to use a payment system that is volatile. If I have to choose to be beholden to services that collect my data or use a currency that is volatile, I'm going with the former every time. This is the question that I would have liked to be further addressed.
> - Why it involved hiding the server source code.
My guess: to reduce the noise and speculation. Much better to deal with it now that there's something to be gained (feedback from beta testers and actual deployment). There was little to gain before, since the server accepts very few contributions anyway.
I wander enough on GH to see how much time big open-source project maintainers spend addressing toxic comments. Open-source is nice when you get relevant contributions and constructive feedback, but it's really not free, you have to deal with all the rest as well.
> I’m not a beta tester, but cryptocurrency is the worst
100% this. I'm not a beta tester, but I am a signal user. I reeeally don't want to have to hedge my recommendation of signal because it's involved with some cryptocurrency BS. Please, just be a chat app.
I somewhat disagree. Sometimes I need to send payments internationally; in the US most chat apps allow for this. Or people use CashApp/PayPal. Sometimes I'm chatting with friends outside of the US and the choices to send money are very limited and problematic (e.g.: Argentina inflation, low PayPal adoption outside US and I think CashApp isn't available)
I don't know the specifics of the cryptocurrency being used, but adding the ability to send money is welcome
I think signal is and have been very clear that they won't remain "just a chat app". I don't have anything against cryptocurrency but I'm taking this as an opportunity to evaluate my alternatives.
It would have been more interesting to read your reaction to their answer to this concern, which is:
> We’ve only been testing this in beta in one country, so lots of people haven’t seen this yet and are imagining the worst. Don’t worry, it’s an opt-in feature, so if you don’t ever want to use payments in Signal, you never have to.
Over time the standard expectation for a chat app has become send text + online status + image + gifs + video + link previews + typing indicators + @ mentions + emoji reactions + stickers
Fundamentally I don't see why adding "send money" violates it being just a chat app.
Beyond all the technical issues with this—and there are many—the product just doesn't make sense.
In the US, bank transfers are a pain. The credentials needed to send someone money are the same ones needed to take their money, and in any case, they often take several business days. So nobody uses them, instead preferring a whole industry of apps to do "that, but easier": Apple Cash, Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, all the features built into messaging apps.
On the other hand, the UK's Faster Payments system just works; you give someone your account number, they punch it into their bank's app, and the money goes through instantly. None of the aforementioned apps work in the UK, because nobody needs them. Bank transfers work well enough.
So the value proposition here is "Instead of sending someone a bank transfer, you can send us a bank transfer, send the coins to someone via Signal, then have them turn it back into real money via bank transfer. Also, be quick, since the coins are volatile and might lose value if you don't turn them back into real money quickly enough." I can't see how anyone would use that. (Sure, it might be more private, so people who really need it could use it. But Signal's whole value proposition is building privacy-protecting tools that are usable enough that they'll be used even by people who don't need the privacy feature per se.)
It's a feature designed by Americans for Americans, but released in a market where it doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm am American in their first year as a student at a UK university. I think my understanding of the UK cultural issues here are decent, but I could be wrong.)
> Instead of sending someone a bank transfer, you can send us a bank transfer, send the coins to someone via Signal, then have them turn it back into real money via bank transfer. Also, be quick, since the coins are volatile and might lose value if you don't turn them back into real money quickly enough.
You missed "pay us 50p for the privilege of doing something that's 100% free otherwise"
Bank transfers in the US are about to become much better once banks implement FedNow (scheduled to launch in 2023)[1]. You'll have to you use your bank's app but it should be possible to send PayPal/Venmo/CashApp-style payments without having to involve third parties in the transaction so all these payment apps and payment features in chat apps are running on borrowed time (unless they can offer some kind of value-add to justify themselves).
A private currency still provides added privacy guarentees even assuming the steps you've outlined. Private payments would also be useful in a number of countries outside of the West.
Currency volatility is obviously unsolved but remains an area of active research - Algorithmic stablecoins like Dai and MakerDAO are obvious candidates but live on the public Ethereum blockchain. Private smart contacts chains like SCRT exists but are mostly under explored. Most privacy cryptocurrencies also have secondary OTC, P2P or will have atomic swaps.
This is all to say that a privacy preserving stable cryptocurrency is possible.
> UK's Faster Payments system just works; you give someone your account number, they punch it into their bank's app, and the money goes through instantly.
In Switzerland, they punch in your account number, tap send, and then wait until the next business day for it to go through (for no technical reason at all, sometimes payments do go through instantly, usually next business day, because the law says they need to do it by next business day at noon).
That's still fine for a friend to pay you for a pizza, because you know they'll actually pay you, but sometimes you still want instant payment confirmation. It's not just the US.
Similarish in the Netherlands, there's an app called Tikkie (some banks have their own app, but everyone still calls it tikkie), with that app you can make a link "please pay me €20 for pizza" to share through any messenger, that opens an app or a website that takes you to your bank, you authenticate with that (often using the bank app on your phone so it's a quick process), approve the transaction, and in about 5 seconds the sender has a notification that you paid. It's so convenient and useful, and free, that people use it all the time even for tiny amounts - to the point where there are jokes about people asking for €0.50 "for mayo on your fries"
In New Zealand it's more like you describe in the UK, you type in someone's bank account number into your banking app and send it. There's a bit more overhead (exchanging the number), but not a whole lot. Also free and pretty quick.
No one is going to use something restricted to one messenger client that costs money to use, and presumably requires work to put money in/take it out, when these more convenient and free methods exist.
I can guarantee you that almost no Germans will use this feature. There are many places here where you can't even pay with EC cards, only with cash. Many people I know are hesitant to use PayPal.
In all of the previous discussions, josh2600 has very pointedly avoided answering the question of what financial interest Moxie has in the MobileCoin companies. He's only said that Moxie doesn't personally own any of the currency, without saying whether he has any financial interest in the company that owns most of the coins. This does not engender trust.
This forced integration is the worst decision Signal ever made (assuming they're sincere in their attempt to remove phone numbers as IDs).
If we really need a payment system, why not use GNU Taler? It's not a coin but just a distributed way to move real currencies around. Also, it does not run afoul or taxing and does not allow pump and dump or price speculation. (maybe this question just became rhetoric)
What a handwavy article full of stuff that's not addressing the real issue in discussion; collusion with MobileCoin.
WhatsApp management must be really happy with this sudden move from Signal. Signal has lots of detractors who would like to discredit it, and Moxie and co. just handed it on a platter to them.
> It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out
Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer?
The best part about this is that besides all the obvious criticism for hooking up your chat app to a pump&dump cryptocurrency scam, the cryptocurrency is also just a legitimately terrible way to implement this feature. Manual wire transfers? 50p per transaction? Fucking price volatility?
>"Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a _____ wire transfer?"
Yeah, it clearly did and they didn't like that you and everyone else doing that now has their transactions tracked. They know X paid Y an amount of $Z. They want you and everyone else to be able to transfer without anyone knowing to who. Just like using cash money in a shop (withdraw, transfer to Y, Y deposits in their bank and your banks know nothing as opposed to a direct deposit from X to Y where your banks know precisely when and who is on either end of the transfer).
Yes, as they note their current solution has issues. Transaction fees are too high. Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely.
So what is this? A start that can be improved on. If you want your transaction to be secret from your banks and those your banks share info with a wire transfer is probably not an improvement.
Might not work at all. Might have other issues as yet undreamed of. We'll see. Given I don't ever have to use this and Moxie has earned a reputation of not being neither crook nor zuck I'm kinda happy to watch and see what happens.
Immense amount of "Signal is terrible" on this site which doesn't make much sense to me.
> Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer?
You may have misunderstood what they're saying. The full sentence from which you quoted:
> It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out of cryptocurrency exchanges that support MobileCoin, which costs money.
They're saying that you need a wire transfer to buy and sell MobileCoin using the currently-available exchanges. Once you possess MobileCoin, you can then send or receive it using the app without further wire transfers unless you choose to cash out. A wire transfer isn't necessary for a transaction in Signal.
In addition to the conflict of interest Moxie has (and, honestly, I can see that side -- of course he'd want to be involved in the cryptographic design of a privacy-preserving payment system -- but he still needs to come clean about his relationship with MobileCoin), the most disturbing thing to me remains that the source to the server wasn't publicly updated for nearly a year while they added this feature, the timing of when the source went dark clearly indicates that specific intent, and Moxie's statement as recently as January that they didn't have specific plans to add payment/cryptocurrency when it's clear from the server source that they had been working on it for many, many months at that time.
They begin by describing what I had in mind when they said "Signal will integrate payments": some kind of framework for existing wallets/exchanges to send info via Signal that enables transactions to take place. QR codes that are "auto scanned" (like paper wallets that can be swiped), or something else entirely. I thought they would focus on building this framework, making it available to the crypto community, and then seeing what happens.
Instead, they are still pushing their own coin, which has been heavily criticised for many reasons. They mention in the article that many cryptos have been nothing but "asset speculation" for a while. Well then why did the Mobile Coin creators premine so many coins? If they don't want to speculate on the value of their coin, why not just release it into the wild from Day 1? Every crypto founder cannot escape the FOMO of the Bitcoin era. They all wish they had made it big like some of the early lucky Bitcoin adopters, and no amount of grandstanding, or tech speak is going to convince me otherwise about any crypto founder.
> They all wish they had made it big like some of the early lucky Bitcoin adopters, and no amount of grandstanding, or tech speak is going to convince me otherwise about any crypto founder
If you do the math on the 80% ownership of coins, total coins, the ridiculous price ramp that occurred before this was even announced, and the current price ... some people did "make it big". Very big.
There's a difference between how many Mobile Coin premined (all of them) and how many they currently own, aren't available for sale and was sold for partners at what price.
Unfortunately their CEO has made no comment about this distribution or why they chose this as their coin distribution strategy. The topic is nuanced but it is very suspect they didn't select a more fair strategy.
I'll not be using this cryptocurrency, but whether I continue to use Signal seems to be down to how much effort I have to put into trying to explain away the apparent conflicts of interest here. They certainly don't seem to be putting any effort in. "hey, relax, guy!" is not an explanation. They seem to be happily spending the Foundation's credibility on this though, so I guess the clock has started.
Why am I seeing payment integration while I still lose my place in an audio playback when I switch from landscape to portrait? Or the fact that I still can't tell whether I've listened to a message yet or not? Still losing messages in the middle of recording.
Honestly, having a hard time with my switch from WhatsApp to Signal, and certainly don't need any cryptocurrency integration.
After the last discussion I have been trying Element. It has some rough edges still but it has vastly improved since the last time I tried it.
Additional bonus, no electron based client, native apps for ios, Android, Web, Mac and even Linux.
If they can make the verification process for a new device smoother, I can recommend to folks. My worry is the amount of influence I used to get people to switch over to Signal only to ask them to switch again
Isn't the biggest question: Why not a different app with some sort of signal integration? If that takes off and is successful, it could eventually be merged to be one application I suppose. But leveraging a huge user base from Signal (a messaging app with a sales pitch of a certain purity and no bs attitude to the problem at hand) to push a cryptocurrency payment system?
Don't tell me anyone involved in doing this felt like this was 'the right way to go'. Which makes exact motivation behind it all the more questionable.
> But leveraging a huge user base from Signal (a messaging app with a sales pitch of a certain purity and no bs attitude to the problem at hand) to push a cryptocurrency payment system?
> Don't tell me anyone involved in doing this felt like this was 'the right way to go'. Which makes exact motivation behind it all the more questionable.
If this feature is to stay relevant, it has to be integrated within Signal. Otherwise competitors (who do integrate a payment feature) will just have a better UX.
Sadly, the LAST thing I ever wanted the signal foundation to do. And this adds to the PIN & cloud "features", insistence of a phone number, refusal to work with 3rd-party apps...
I'd rather them have done _nothing_ at all.
Oh well.. further proof you really need federation.
No, you do not need federation. You need an organization and leadership in it that is focused on their mission.
For example, Let's Encrypt reliably, like clockwork, distributes certificates and maintains related PKI infrastructure. That is what Signal was supposed to be (at least, my interpretation based on their PR) with regards to secure messaging, and they have utterly failed to maintain the focus you'd expect of a non profit with their mission.
If I want payments (unregulated payments at that), I would use and donate to a payment app, not a messaging app. But heh, report it to regulators and let them be the bullwhip to Signal and their poor choices if they ignore the community (who are their stakeholders as a non profit entity). Of all the ways to kill your project, this doesn't seem like the "hill to die on." Don't drag secure messaging into your fight against nation state currency regulations, and have some common sense about compartmentalizing around regulatory risk.
One problem I don't see anyone talking about is that there's likely a taxable event nearly every time you want to get money out of this ecosystem. With MobileCoin so volatile, you may earn a 10%...30%...taxable gain from the time you put it in and take it out. It's going to be a bit of a pain and the ass for a mobile payment system.
Thought experiment: If the payments feature was based on a fork of MobileCoin that distributes all pre-mined coins evenly to all existing Signal users, rather than the status quo, would people be still upset?
I think it would address some concerns, but personally, mixing concerns of secure messaging and cryptocurrency payments would still make me too uncomfortable.
Something somewhat similar already happened: Stellar gave away XLM to Keybase after Keybase added an integrated Stellar wallet. Many people didn’t like it[0], even I was not too impressed despite working in the Stellar ecosystem. Some people didn’t like the mix of cryptography and cryptocurrency (at least, I certainly didn’t)
I'm not a fan of any kind of crypto, but the handwaving excuses for why they aren't pursuing alternative currencies are laughable. You could say the same about MobileCoin, and you don't provide any other justification other than blanket statements without citations.
Signal, your bias is showing, and it makes me wonder what other vendors will get your ear and be integrated in the future.
I’m in the crypto field and no, it’s not laughable, it makes sense to me. Very few cryptocurrencies are good at targeting mobile users unfortunately. I think both Celo and Diem have good chances due to the fact that you can prove everything pretty easily to the client (and Celo does it with recursive zero knowledge proofs) but they are not privacy coins.
[+] [-] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
- Moxie's involvement with MobileCoin (could be as simple as saying: "for the same reasons Signal's interested in MobileCoin, moxie is as well").
- The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
- Why it involved hiding the server source code.
The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive, but I very much hope the obvious concerns won't play out in practice (which time will tell), and it would be good if they'd also addressed the above.
[+] [-] SuchAnonMuchWow|5 years ago|reply
It isn't known how much of it was premined, and from an early version of their whitepaper, the founders might have as much as 80% of the total supply of the coin. This isn't fine for a cryptocurrency which aims to be "an alternative payments infrastructure", and it isn't fine for Signal to try to promote them as such.
[+] [-] frombody|5 years ago|reply
https://www.coindesk.com/signal-founder-may-have-been-more-t...
The thing that gets me the most though is not what they are doing, it's the way they are going about it.
The leader of a privacy focused app is now hiding secrets from everyone about the technology he convinced people was safe.
I've had to write off signal for this reason alone. I mean the only reason I ever used the app was trust.
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
At best we know that he (claims to) have no coins. But that he was an advisor for them and focused on what he saw as a problem with crypto payments: speed. But yeah, there are still a lot of open questions here.
> The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
They addressed this before and the code reflects it. They whitelist country codes that allow it.
> Why it involved hiding the server source code.
This was weird and I'd like it addressed but probably not relevant to this particular topic/post.
> The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive,
Same. I mean it is a core element of the cyperpunk manifesto[0]. But I don't want to use a payment system that is volatile. If I have to choose to be beholden to services that collect my data or use a currency that is volatile, I'm going with the former every time. This is the question that I would have liked to be further addressed.
[0]https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
[+] [-] hiq|5 years ago|reply
My guess: to reduce the noise and speculation. Much better to deal with it now that there's something to be gained (feedback from beta testers and actual deployment). There was little to gain before, since the server accepts very few contributions anyway.
I wander enough on GH to see how much time big open-source project maintainers spend addressing toxic comments. Open-source is nice when you get relevant contributions and constructive feedback, but it's really not free, you have to deal with all the rest as well.
[+] [-] wheybags|5 years ago|reply
100% this. I'm not a beta tester, but I am a signal user. I reeeally don't want to have to hedge my recommendation of signal because it's involved with some cryptocurrency BS. Please, just be a chat app.
[+] [-] arenaninja|5 years ago|reply
I don't know the specifics of the cryptocurrency being used, but adding the ability to send money is welcome
[+] [-] epalm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qqii|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiq|5 years ago|reply
> We’ve only been testing this in beta in one country, so lots of people haven’t seen this yet and are imagining the worst. Don’t worry, it’s an opt-in feature, so if you don’t ever want to use payments in Signal, you never have to.
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|5 years ago|reply
This seems like a natural next step to me.
[+] [-] bosswipe|5 years ago|reply
Chat apps used to be just: send text.
Over time the standard expectation for a chat app has become send text + online status + image + gifs + video + link previews + typing indicators + @ mentions + emoji reactions + stickers
Fundamentally I don't see why adding "send money" violates it being just a chat app.
[+] [-] Gaelan|5 years ago|reply
In the US, bank transfers are a pain. The credentials needed to send someone money are the same ones needed to take their money, and in any case, they often take several business days. So nobody uses them, instead preferring a whole industry of apps to do "that, but easier": Apple Cash, Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, all the features built into messaging apps.
On the other hand, the UK's Faster Payments system just works; you give someone your account number, they punch it into their bank's app, and the money goes through instantly. None of the aforementioned apps work in the UK, because nobody needs them. Bank transfers work well enough.
So the value proposition here is "Instead of sending someone a bank transfer, you can send us a bank transfer, send the coins to someone via Signal, then have them turn it back into real money via bank transfer. Also, be quick, since the coins are volatile and might lose value if you don't turn them back into real money quickly enough." I can't see how anyone would use that. (Sure, it might be more private, so people who really need it could use it. But Signal's whole value proposition is building privacy-protecting tools that are usable enough that they'll be used even by people who don't need the privacy feature per se.)
It's a feature designed by Americans for Americans, but released in a market where it doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm am American in their first year as a student at a UK university. I think my understanding of the UK cultural issues here are decent, but I could be wrong.)
[+] [-] ascorbic|5 years ago|reply
You missed "pay us 50p for the privilege of doing something that's 100% free otherwise"
[+] [-] MrRadar|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
[+] [-] qqii|5 years ago|reply
Currency volatility is obviously unsolved but remains an area of active research - Algorithmic stablecoins like Dai and MakerDAO are obvious candidates but live on the public Ethereum blockchain. Private smart contacts chains like SCRT exists but are mostly under explored. Most privacy cryptocurrencies also have secondary OTC, P2P or will have atomic swaps.
This is all to say that a privacy preserving stable cryptocurrency is possible.
[+] [-] lawl|5 years ago|reply
In Switzerland, they punch in your account number, tap send, and then wait until the next business day for it to go through (for no technical reason at all, sometimes payments do go through instantly, usually next business day, because the law says they need to do it by next business day at noon).
That's still fine for a friend to pay you for a pizza, because you know they'll actually pay you, but sometimes you still want instant payment confirmation. It's not just the US.
[+] [-] eythian|5 years ago|reply
In New Zealand it's more like you describe in the UK, you type in someone's bank account number into your banking app and send it. There's a bit more overhead (exchanging the number), but not a whole lot. Also free and pretty quick.
No one is going to use something restricted to one messenger client that costs money to use, and presumably requires work to put money in/take it out, when these more convenient and free methods exist.
[+] [-] dunefox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascorbic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius_baltar|5 years ago|reply
If we really need a payment system, why not use GNU Taler? It's not a coin but just a distributed way to move real currencies around. Also, it does not run afoul or taxing and does not allow pump and dump or price speculation. (maybe this question just became rhetoric)
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|5 years ago|reply
WhatsApp management must be really happy with this sudden move from Signal. Signal has lots of detractors who would like to discredit it, and Moxie and co. just handed it on a platter to them.
[+] [-] stefan_|5 years ago|reply
Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer?
The best part about this is that besides all the obvious criticism for hooking up your chat app to a pump&dump cryptocurrency scam, the cryptocurrency is also just a legitimately terrible way to implement this feature. Manual wire transfers? 50p per transaction? Fucking price volatility?
[+] [-] harry8|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, it clearly did and they didn't like that you and everyone else doing that now has their transactions tracked. They know X paid Y an amount of $Z. They want you and everyone else to be able to transfer without anyone knowing to who. Just like using cash money in a shop (withdraw, transfer to Y, Y deposits in their bank and your banks know nothing as opposed to a direct deposit from X to Y where your banks know precisely when and who is on either end of the transfer).
Yes, as they note their current solution has issues. Transaction fees are too high. Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely.
So what is this? A start that can be improved on. If you want your transaction to be secret from your banks and those your banks share info with a wire transfer is probably not an improvement.
Might not work at all. Might have other issues as yet undreamed of. We'll see. Given I don't ever have to use this and Moxie has earned a reputation of not being neither crook nor zuck I'm kinda happy to watch and see what happens.
Immense amount of "Signal is terrible" on this site which doesn't make much sense to me.
edit: Immense amount.
[+] [-] vinay427|5 years ago|reply
You may have misunderstood what they're saying. The full sentence from which you quoted:
> It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out of cryptocurrency exchanges that support MobileCoin, which costs money.
They're saying that you need a wire transfer to buy and sell MobileCoin using the currently-available exchanges. Once you possess MobileCoin, you can then send or receive it using the app without further wire transfers unless you choose to cash out. A wire transfer isn't necessary for a transaction in Signal.
[+] [-] dogecoinbase|5 years ago|reply
In addition to the conflict of interest Moxie has (and, honestly, I can see that side -- of course he'd want to be involved in the cryptographic design of a privacy-preserving payment system -- but he still needs to come clean about his relationship with MobileCoin), the most disturbing thing to me remains that the source to the server wasn't publicly updated for nearly a year while they added this feature, the timing of when the source went dark clearly indicates that specific intent, and Moxie's statement as recently as January that they didn't have specific plans to add payment/cryptocurrency when it's clear from the server source that they had been working on it for many, many months at that time.
As usual, it's not the crime, it's the coverup.
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
Instead, they are still pushing their own coin, which has been heavily criticised for many reasons. They mention in the article that many cryptos have been nothing but "asset speculation" for a while. Well then why did the Mobile Coin creators premine so many coins? If they don't want to speculate on the value of their coin, why not just release it into the wild from Day 1? Every crypto founder cannot escape the FOMO of the Bitcoin era. They all wish they had made it big like some of the early lucky Bitcoin adopters, and no amount of grandstanding, or tech speak is going to convince me otherwise about any crypto founder.
[+] [-] EMM_386|5 years ago|reply
If you do the math on the 80% ownership of coins, total coins, the ridiculous price ramp that occurred before this was even announced, and the current price ... some people did "make it big". Very big.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/mobilecoin/
[+] [-] qqii|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately their CEO has made no comment about this distribution or why they chose this as their coin distribution strategy. The topic is nuanced but it is very suspect they didn't select a more fair strategy.
[+] [-] verytrivial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WrathOfJay|5 years ago|reply
Honestly, having a hard time with my switch from WhatsApp to Signal, and certainly don't need any cryptocurrency integration.
[+] [-] high_derivative|5 years ago|reply
(https://www.coindesk.com/signal-founder-may-have-been-more-t...)
[+] [-] bilal4hmed|5 years ago|reply
Additional bonus, no electron based client, native apps for ios, Android, Web, Mac and even Linux.
If they can make the verification process for a new device smoother, I can recommend to folks. My worry is the amount of influence I used to get people to switch over to Signal only to ask them to switch again
[+] [-] Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL|5 years ago|reply
Don't tell me anyone involved in doing this felt like this was 'the right way to go'. Which makes exact motivation behind it all the more questionable.
[+] [-] hiq|5 years ago|reply
If this feature is to stay relevant, it has to be integrated within Signal. Otherwise competitors (who do integrate a payment feature) will just have a better UX.
The choice was basically:
1. have the feature within Signal
2. have no user
They chose 1.
[+] [-] gojomo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsdubernerd|5 years ago|reply
I'd rather them have done _nothing_ at all.
Oh well.. further proof you really need federation.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|5 years ago|reply
For example, Let's Encrypt reliably, like clockwork, distributes certificates and maintains related PKI infrastructure. That is what Signal was supposed to be (at least, my interpretation based on their PR) with regards to secure messaging, and they have utterly failed to maintain the focus you'd expect of a non profit with their mission.
If I want payments (unregulated payments at that), I would use and donate to a payment app, not a messaging app. But heh, report it to regulators and let them be the bullwhip to Signal and their poor choices if they ignore the community (who are their stakeholders as a non profit entity). Of all the ways to kill your project, this doesn't seem like the "hill to die on." Don't drag secure messaging into your fight against nation state currency regulations, and have some common sense about compartmentalizing around regulatory risk.
[+] [-] pixiemaster|5 years ago|reply
more like: open protocols for certain interactions, irrespective of the app that implements it.
[+] [-] mayneack|5 years ago|reply
the PIN & cloud features are explicitly designed to facilitate breaking the phone number requirement.
[+] [-] twostorytower|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qqii|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lxgr|5 years ago|reply
I think it would address some concerns, but personally, mixing concerns of secure messaging and cryptocurrency payments would still make me too uncomfortable.
[+] [-] alanpearce|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913496
[+] [-] input_sh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candiddevmike|5 years ago|reply
Signal, your bias is showing, and it makes me wonder what other vendors will get your ear and be integrated in the future.
[+] [-] EMM_386|5 years ago|reply
The "vendor" in this case is the creator of Signal. The rabbit hole runs very deep on this situation.
https://www.coindesk.com/signal-founder-may-have-been-more-t...
[+] [-] baby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiq|5 years ago|reply