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.
The problem is entirely that its cryptography was sketchy and just plain weird to begin with. It wasn't wrong, per se, but raised some eyebrows. And then some of the questionable choices were silently fixed removing the ability to MITM, etc, but with no real notice.
It's not FUD.
>Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was sponsored by the US Govt
Funny that you're talking about FUD.
But the simple fact is that for most people the security profile of Telegram is good enough and its UI is miles ahead of Signal.
I've already complained about that in the past but the fact that the desktop client still won't let me set the spellchecking language is baffling to me. It's an application that's meant mainly for exchanging text, and it won't let me configure the spellchecking, and let's not even talk about formatting options.
It amused me when in the announcement they said that the reason for testing the payments in the UK was that they were English speaking. You can tell that this is an application developed my monolinguals...
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.
It's 2021, I don't want to be platform locked and none of the other popular messaging apps have that issue.
Unfortunately day-to-day my issue is more with syncing the desktop to the phone client's history and as far as I know it still won't let me do that.
An other super convenient feature of Whatsapp and Telegram is that they offer a pure web interface with basic functionality which is super convenient if you're in a pinch and don't want to/can't install the standalone desktop application.
How many "benefit of the doubt" cards do they have left by now?
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.
Right, the foundation sells the premined crypto-currency at a pumped up price. The foundation pays Goldbard and Moxie for their work. Employees are paid from the VC. No one connected has to hold any of it, nor will they want to after the dump.
Could you provide a concrete link please? There's a bewildering array of officials looking websites with zero information. And a widely shared white paper (among others linked from Wikipedia) that Josh claims isn't the whitepaper he originally wrote. It's hard to know what's what.
It works (FSVO "works") for small levels of transaction, but does not scale to "a substantial fraction of humanity uses it for payment" (low-end, imagine 2.5 billion people trying to make on average 3 economic transactions per day, you'd need to be able to sustain about 80k transactions per second; now note that I low-balled bot the number of economic transactions AND the global population).
Moxie, this is seriously disappointing.
I'm not sure why you find Monero's confirmation any more stressful than instant-like blockchains, most wallets will show pending transactions as soon as they enter the mempool.
I am sure that Signal could implement the same peer-to-peer sync scheme with full end-to-end encryption without any secrecy compromises.
iMessage (and soon WhatsApp) would beg to differ.
It is much more difficult, yes, but definitely not impossible.
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?
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.
My understanding is that is a part of the amateur 'security' community, not the professional or expert one?
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 (?).
As it stands, it’s not E2E by default and it’s E2E scheme is homegrown- which is usually not recommended (though IMO was not a dealbreaker), the big issue there was that there were flaws in the original design of the encryption scheme which makes it harder to look passed the fact it’s homegrown.
Telegram can intercept most messages on the platform, however, ultimately I trust them more than Facebook; so I’m less concerned.
Additionally, since Facebook controls _both_ ends of whatsapp _and_ does not support third party programs, then even though WhatsApp is E2E there’s little preventing Facebook from pushing an update to your phone which backs up all your chats to their cloud.
Also, Telegram is not federated. It is just another vendor lock-in.
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/6841
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/16068
Contrast that to email. Even if gmail.com bans you or shuts down, you can still use a different email vendor or self-host. (You lose your old email address if you don't own a domain, but you can still communicate with others.) The only good IM that has this characteristic seems Matrix.
There are other considerations too, like that fact that I often got notifications that someone joined Telegram but that person was a friend of a friend and not in my personal contact list. One of my friends works for an actor's agency and then I got notifications when some of his clients joined the platform. I'm pretty sure they weren't aware of it and from a privacy standpoint this is very questionalbe and left a very sour taste. I always feared that I missed a privacy setting and am exposed the same way.
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.
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....
...and none of those change the fundamental durability/performance tradeoff of the system, nor do they replace a proper scaling strategy for an RDBMS.
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.
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...
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 feel like Element works better as a competitor to Slack or IRC than as a competitor to Signal or Whatsapp.
To me it's a competitor to Keybase. "I want to send my co-worker/client an API key that I don't want exposed to the public" is about the only use for Keybase I've had. I have like 5 contacts on there for this reason. Slack/IRC is much more usable for getting shit done, but not being E2E I wouldn't send anything sensitive over them. Element is currently a "this is a mildly nicer experience over PGP + Email/Slack.
Agree, I've been using Matrix/Element, and it's a bit slower/buggy but seems like it'll be around for longer.
However the comparison between this and signal falls flat due to the metadata that needs to be stored on matrix servers due to its federated setup.
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?)
Element is none of those things. It's name is so forgettable and so generic that people often don't even know whether it's an app, a library, a website, etc. The mobile app is yet another chat app with nobody on it until I do the legwork of pulling them in. It's just not usable on day one after I already spent the time to figure out which app I need. In the meantime, Signal can become your default messenger on Android within a few minutes and do everything you used to be able to do but more and better.
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.
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.
There are multiple different things to consider here: 1) regulatory, 2) economic system design, 3) usability, and 4) user-first commerce.
In short, it’s much more important for us to be correct than it is to move quickly. When all is said and done, users of MobileCoin will have obtained coins many ways: through giveaways, sales, and commerce activities. Making sure we do these things correctly is the only way the ecosystem will be able to operate long term.
What is a "payment story" and why do messaging apps need it? Signal should be secure SMS with a better UI, nothing more.
It looks to me like either there's a lot of selling out going on here or there's a lot of great examples of how not to market a good thing to reasonable, aware, suspicious people (which is, in short, pretty much the core market demographic of privacy software users).
As for me, I'm starting to wonder whether Session is much better than Signal, and I think that if you want privacy in a cryptocurrency you're probably better off with Monero.
If not, it's useless. I'm a chat app user, not a Forex trader.
You could have avoided most of the criticisms if you had a clear explanation of why you pre-mined. Saying that you intend to sell it is not as reassuring as you seem to think it is.
Seems your early investors certainly have a large chunk https://threader.app/thread/1335948142022311936
So I think that's the base of what people are upset with. Signal suddenly essentially became a for-profit (it decided to prop up a for-profit company which would in turn fund it as a revenue model). Now a lot of people that donated to and promoted what they considered to be a non-profit project feel cheated.
If there's some way this can be explained away by MobileCoin people, I think it'll make a great story, because there seems to be a lot of stuff there that doesn't look explainable.
Clearly this would prevent the "get rich from pre-mine" benefit, but also remove 99% of the criticisms related to greed, centralization, geographic limitations, etc.
I don't see how MobileCoin can be censorship-resistant, neutral or permissionless in the long run. Are those goals of the project?
1) tx settlement time is ~3 seconds on mobilecoin, p99 latency right now with single block finality. Eth and Btc are great but they aren’t that fast (for payments speed really matters).
2) with respect to privacy, the key innovation of MobileCoin is that when all of the systems are operational, there is no transaction graph stored in the ledger. The links between transactions are known only to the counter parties to those transactions. In the event of a failure of the Secure Enclave, links between transactions degrade to probabilistic links between transactions (and forward secrecy can be restored upon recovery of the enclave).
The effect is a payment system that is both fast and privacy-protecting with no central authority, a quality not present in any other payments system I am aware of today.
Does that answer your question?
Oh, last and perhaps most important, because of our consensus design, we don’t use a ton of energy like btc and eth.
No, it does not.
There are two distinct groups of people using Signal. None of these groups needs MobileCoin-based payments.
Group one is probably the biggest and consists of "normal" users which use Signal because it's the free messenger that is NOT affiliated to Facebook and has a good reputation with regard to privacy and data protection. There's another messenger with similarly good reputation, Threema, but that one costs money, hence Signal is the more popular choice. These users may indeed find a simple payment solution through their messenger a useful feature, but they want to send each other "money", not "MobileCoins". Those are not interchangeable for this kind of user; they expect to send whatever is their local currency, USD or EUR or whatever, and they expect the entirety of the money they send to arrive at the target - having 20% crypto market swings within minutes eradicate 20% of their share of last week's restaurant check while they're transferring it to their friend is a non-starter for this group. So are exchange fees for USD-MOB/EUR-MOB exchanges before and after sending money, even if the exchange execution itself may be automatically run in the background. This is true especially since there are already well-known and established solutions out there specifically targeting this particular need - PayPal Friends and the Cash App for example. Sure, it would be nice to have messenger integration, but if the only way to get that is to transact in MOB instead of USD and always send 10% more value than you intend to pay just to ensure the receiver gets "enough", the established out-of-band solutions which don't have those problems will simply be used. Also, this group doesn't really have strict anonymity requirements, because they usually send money (and messages) to people they know in real life as well. Whether your awesome crypto coin is more anonymous than PayPal thus doesn't matter at all for these guys.
Group two consists of those that actually depend on Signal's security, privacy and anonymity features because they need exactly that in a messenger. Think whistleblowers, journalists, people doing stuff that's illegal where they live. A lot of these want to send information to their contacts, not monetary value, and don't have any use for a payment option in a messenger. And even those that do want to transfer monetary value won't exactly be enticed by a one-click crypto transfer feature in their secure messenger, since they can be assumed to be technically competent enough to utilize the already-existing cryptocurrencies (especially those with a much longer history of privacy protection, such as Monero) and crypto exchanges to perform whatever monetary exchange they want to do. I would even say that these people would explicitly NOT want to use a messenger-integrated cryptocurrency, because that limits them in their choice of cryptocurrency and fiat on/off-ramps, which are crucial decisions to be made carefully if you want to preserve your anonymity. And the entire idea that these guys would switch from Signal to WeChat just because "WeChat has a money sending function" is blatantly absurd.
I do not see any sufficiently large group of people that might get any value out of this MobileCoin-Signal-integration feature. Hence I predict this feature to ultimately fail due to lack of user interest. But that will only become clear AFTER a lot of good-will from tech- and privacy-minded people has been burnt by this unnecessary stunt, as can be seen for example here in the HN comments.
MobileCoin Inc....
Your privacy belongs to Signal which stores your data,MOB is a centralized,premine ,hidden ico.
Convince me.
In other words, cha-ching! then what?
To be fair I don't think that the slowness and complexity is being put forward as an example of why Matrix is "bad", but rather as an example of why it can't compete with Signal for "normal" users — and if you want to create something that competes with Messenger, Whatsapp or Snapchat, you need to put "normal" users first, it can't be an afterthought.
Is it that all such producers plan to do something evil once they have enough users locked in, which an open protocol like Matrix would impede?
Or is it that the protocol is not yet mature enough? In which case, a deliberate approach to evolving the spec may be for the best so long as it eventually gets to where it needs to be?
A couple years ago the Riot client was unusable on Mac. Now Element seems to be fine. Why won't it continue to get better?
Normal users primarily want what their peers already use for communication. Hence a power user who is able to use two messengers and switch between them has a disproportionately big market impact. /s
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..
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eaqp8/whats...
Signal's tying encrypted messages and phone numbers to a publicly available ledge of transactions?
edit: Blocked at the cloudflare level without even an explanation of why if you go there.
It's absolutely hilarious, the SEC has gone after so many different coins, ICO's and exchanges now who have gone to far greater lengths in excluding Americans. The first person who gets around it opens you up to all sorts of civil and criminal charges.
I don't understand how after years of this happening any company thinks it's somehow safe with nothing more than an IP geofence.
This kills the Signal value proposition.
You can move money electronically legally, or you can be anonymous in the U.S. It us incredibly difficult if not nigh impossible to do both.
It's part of the U.S. soft power projection scheme. If you want access to American markets/easy movement of financial assets, you leave audit trail.
Bad news for them then: there are lots of American citizens in the UK.
I am shocked.
A sequel [0] describes how an open platform/protocol isn't a silver bullet, since open platforms can become (or act) closed if we're not careful. It goes over XMPP, email, and Matrix; I described Matrix in a generally negative light but I think it still shows promise.
[0]: https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html
TLDR of [0]: the key is to combine open platforms/protocols with simplicity and diversity.
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.”
You must have other reasons because cryptocurrencies fail flat out on every one of these aspects.
Some candidates are
* GNU Jami: https://jami.net/
* Matrix with Element: https://element.io/
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.
How do you conclude that?
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!
(Apart from hopping from startup to startup every 3 months I guess)
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?
It's almost like Zoom forgot that Keybase users are more likely from the more technical end of the spectrum and thus more security conscious.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671
They airdropped XLM to Keybase users. About 2 billion IIRC. It resulted in bit accounts for obvious reasons, so they had to make many changes to their original plan.
I converted what I received into BTC, and it looks like XLM is still functional to this date though.
Keybase was a very well regarded app, but users lost a lot of trust with the cryptocurrency news.
Zoom bought Keybase, and we didn't really hear any big news from them lately.
Then I guess adding AI is next.
There are numerous devs who are devoted FOSS zealots and randomly dive into the idea of using blockchain to fund their work.
Blockchain seduces hackers the same way Walmart seduced small towns to give it every incentive conceivable to move in and suck up the local economy.
"Et Tu, Signal?" simply isn't a grown-up argument. If it were, the vast majority of Hacker news would have quit adtech and already figured out fast homomorphic encryption by now.
If you want to help, figure out what social problem hackers think they are routing around with blockchain. Then explain sensible approaches to those social problems in a way hackers can understand. If Richard Stallman's endless world tour of his boring-ass one-man-play is any indication, it is possible to convince hackers of ethical arguments that have implications outside of software. But you've got your work cut out for you. (Also notice-- the least convincing part of his play comes when he tries to imply you're a bad person betraying a cause if you write proprietary software.)
Edit: clarification
Someone here mentioned Keybase, which I would have gladly donated to as a heavy user back before the Zoom buy out. They instead tried their own crypto integration, then Zoom bought them, leaving that platform in a questionable state.
I get the excitement of wanting to integrate or even create your own crypto but after the fiasco a few years ago where everyone and their parents spun a new variant it seems to have left a bad taste to most people while causing a major issue: how to get people to actually use it? Especially through a chat app where chat in itself is fragmented.
Note that keybase's payment integration wasn't their own, but was presumably a (paid) advertising deal with the B-list cryptocurrency in question, Stellar.
A lot of organizations that raised a lot of money during the 2017 boom are now trying to turn that into marketshare. Most integrations are paid marketing.
I'd happily pay a couple of bucks per month for myself and my family.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/09/mobilecoin-a-cryptocurrenc...
"This news really cut to heart of what many technologists have felt before when we as loyal users have been exploited and betrayed by corporations, but this time it felt much deeper because it introduced a conflict of interest from our fellow technologists that we truly believed were advancing a cause many of us also believed in. So many of us have spent significant time and social capital moving our friends and family away from the exploitative data siphon platforms that Facebook et al offer, and on to Signal in the hopes of breaking the cycle of commercial exploitation of our online relationships. And some of us feel used."
I don't understand how any of that is the fault of Signal and not the user. Don't treat the products you use like they mean anything other than the profit motive that built them. It just seems kind of naive to say "every consumer messaging app you use is terrible, come use this one instead and we'll all hope that a massive userbase doesn't inspire them to monetize their platform" when that is essentially the job of what I roughly estimate to be half of the people on HN.
I think it's whack that Signal thought this was a good idea, but I also think it's insane how many people are up in arms as if Signal was once a utility for public good and not the product that it is. They did this because they know how many people bent over backwards to get their loved ones on the platform and they know most people aren't going to get their entire extended family to switch to another messaging app because they added in GarboCoin or whatever the fuck.
Quid facis, Signal? Quid cogitas?
"Quid facis, Catilīna? Quid cōgitās? Sentīmus magna vitia īnsidiāsque tuās. Ō tempora! Ō mōrēs! Senātus haec intellegit, cōnsul videt. Hic tamen vīvit."
"What are you doing, Catiline? What are you thinking? We know your great treachery and plans. Shame on the age and on its principles! The senate is aware of these things, the consul sees them, and yet this man lives."
(I like the gentle reprimand of the 'and yet this man lives' line)
But Signal is still centralized. So there’s no reason for the sh*tcoin other than to make some people rich.
Nowadays it seems adding cryptocurrencies took place of fancy skins management.
As usual, Stephen's correct about the 42% and so mad about it that he's missing the 58%.
Stephen's understanding of blockchain is only skin-deep. If we keep lionizing his articles by upvoting them to #1, then HN's understanding of blockchain is only going to be skin-deep, too.
Here are some of the problems with Stephen's objections to Signal's use of cryptocurrency:
- in prior essays, Stephen's majority objection to blockchain has been proof of work and the environmental impact, but the blockchain chosen by Signal is not proof of work
- Signal would love to use US dollar payments instead of a new and volatile token. But, Signal was sprinting towards private payments. On Signal's timeline, there was no technology option for the payments to be USD-denominated because the blockchain they chose is optimized for semi-centralized private payments, not decentralization or programmability, and it takes extra work to peg a token's value to USD
I find it concerning that HN looks for blockchain wisdom from, eg., Stephen and Schneier (I love Bruce), because they honestly don't know what they are talking about, and I know that because I've been full-time on ethereum for three years.
Mobilecoin has the same design principles as Signal insofar as it uses sgx enclaves to do its crypto work. While I would not want to rely on enclaves to do crypto work, it seems to fit in Signal's wheelhouse.
Also, on a speculative basis and assuming no colossal foul-ups, it appears to me that signal+mob want to distribute the mobile coins to artists and community groups. So, the marketing for mob will probably include their honest mission of having a green crypto that does good for the community.
When the company holds 85% of the pre-mined coins, they’re looking for any excuse to distract from that fact. The claim that they might give some token amount to artists and communities in the future is a distraction. The CEO of MobileCoin was in HN threads yesterday spamming the link the site where you could buy MobileCoins directly from them.
This is a clear as day pump and dump scheme. Don’t let yourself be distracted by hints of potential future charity. They could give those tokens to charities right now, but they won’t because they would just be sold off and push the price down. Instead they’re spreading claims of future donations so they can cash in on price appreciation without downward selling pressure.
They only want people buying MobileCoin, not selling it. That’s the only way the founders get rich.
If signal is your wallet and you are sending signal coins everybody who has signal will be able to receive a payment from you without worrying about installing a wallet separately and connecting it to their account.
This is smart from a usability perspective and maybe wallet integration and other currencies will come later.
Another reason this makes sense is by controlling the cryptocurrency signal has control over the protocol to ensure it's privacy and anonymity.
I don't understand security/crypto stuff so much, but the new version of the server seems to use the same secret token for crypto transactions as it does for backup https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/search?q=userAuth... , which offers some evidence that this be the case.
Most people are not aware of what project they use and that they're not for-profit.
I used to work for an ISP, and people could pay for the WiFi hotspot feature (on phones they owned). People paid when they needed it.
Signal is pretty big, I think, so why couldn't it ask for donations? And possibly get some extra love from eg. The Linux foundation..?
> So many of us have spent significant time and social capital moving our friends and family away from the exploitative data siphon platforms that Facebook et al offer, and on to Signal
And then he says:
> Signal users are overwhelmingly tech savvy consumers
I find it hard to believe that both of these can be true at once. If the second statement is true, then the time spent moving friends and family was wasted. If the second statement is true, people won't actually use MobileCoin currency if they are skeptical.
I would like to see the decentralized crypto space tackle payments: https://community.intercoin.org/t/signal-another-centralized...
Also - the free XLM Keybase distributed are now worth hundreds! It’s the only app that has ever paid me to use it. I have obvious complaints but I do like the app.
How can we expect a company to provide us what we want for free? Robots running on solar power will build them?
How about this: stop approaching a monetization problem as if it's a choice being evil vs. not evil.
"At MobileCoin, we believe governments have a legitimate interest in regulating the economic lives of their citizens."
The scam is to create a new altcoin, give most of the altcoin supply to the founders, then try to force as many people as possible to use the altcoin by deploying it as part of something popular like Signal.
Now if anyone wants to use Signal’s money transfer feature, they have to buy MOB. The CEO of MobileCoin was in the threads yesterday pushing the website where they were selling MOB.
They don’t really care about transferring money. They just want to sell MobileCoin and pump up the price by making it look useful.
Afterall, private organizations can do what they want according to the mantra repeated here. At least that was the defense for social media organizations implementing censorship and bans.
If not, it's poor form to say that people shouldn't be able use something that works for them.
> "Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates."
>He is one of the most ethical people in the information security industry.
Connecting your communications history, your transaction history and your offline ID through phone number is an explicitly pro-establishment move. Something must have changed along the way about his originally cypherpunk positions.
>Does it compromise Signals security as a messenger client?
Not that we know. The problem is much more pernicious: through centralization, it makes the user less secure. In case of a privacy breach or court ordered document reveal or seizure, the scope will be much broader: communication history AND transaction history. Given that it will also list the transaction counter-parties, this opens up others to the privacy risks just as well.
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.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... etc..
As for Moxie.. he has indeed done great work, but a lot of people, ethical or otherwise, get to a point in their life where they just want to get paid and move on.
I'm not saying that's the case here, I have no insider info, but it has certainly happened before.
All I hope is that this is an opt-in feature that you can easily ignore or disable, and it's not constantly being pushed on us and getting in the way of just sending messages.
What does this statement actually mean? To my mind both cryptocurrency and cypherpunk culture have set some fairly low bars for ethical and moral conduct.
There appears to be a bit of a pattern of idolisation in crypto and cypher areas. A developer who fits the media mould of the 1995 Hackers film is spotlighted as saving the world. The spotlight brings attention and drives a project forward. Eventually the spotlight reveals these people have the same motivations as most people. Onlookers are disappointed.
What's the fundamental difference between private payments and private communication. Why support the latter but not the former?
Services should be paid for. If signal were what you want, exactly, why not pay an app fee or a small yearly fee?
"Signal announces cryptocurrency: opinion"
Expecting it to achieve world domination for journalists and grandmas alike is just misplaced expectations.
2. https://signal.org/donate/ wasn't that difficult to find.
3. Brian Acton (WhatsApp co-founder) "donated" a hundred million to it. In theory, that alone should keep them running for at least a decade, but the "donation" was more of a loan with 0% interest, meaning that Signal will have to re-pay it back at some point. Also, just to make it shadier, he happens to be the chairman of the Signal Foundation. So he loaned the money to the org he's in charge of.
Unlike Signal, sigh.
Digital currency is just digital communications. Signal allows us to communicate privately. Should people care whether or not this communication is a message that a language we also speak, or a message that contains a digital transaction.
Again...
> trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely
If you care about the privacy of Signal users to communicate freely about anything they chose, don't also hate when these same Signal users want to communicate digital currencies.
... and before you downvote, let me know why I'm wrong (although, they should have chosen a more mainstream privacy coin like ZCash or Monero at least).
Yet it insists on it being a pump and dump scam, without evidence. :(
None of this bodes well for the future of Signal, either the app, the service, or the company.
Signal did a bad move here, but they will learn their mistake eventually: once they remove shitcoin support and add bitcoin support.
Here we have an nonprofit app that has succesfully broken into a major consumer market, and because of their ambitions to break up another cartel, and this is bad ?
Lets take a stab at understanding the authors complaints.
Author states users are smart and "we make the majority of users". Going beyond the entitlement of that statement, author can feel betrayed, but for signal to succeed it needs to keep iterating and address the consumer market.
Author may not need fast/cheap payments. But what about the rest of the world including the underbanked?
Author may fret about asymetry of info around transactions. However, will author think about the users of cash app and the million others that democratized stock trading ? Users have spoken and they prefer something, over nothing.
The article is unfortunately reeking of elitism. Sour grapes because a 3rd party will make money off an excellent application. I say keep an open mind.
This is the best thing that could happen to the world. Someone has the guts to finally take on currency, and has the potential to succeed. Yes it not perfect. Yes some will make money and signal may be able cover for their forever loan. Thats good.
The project has been a great endeavor since the days of redphone / textsecure. Project is still open sourced and nonprofit.
Signal is the future of privacy and security of the masses. As recently as 2019 that was still not clear.
Its time to cheer, not to dump.
It can be painful when a belief system runs into reality.
"Just do one thing and do it well, be the trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely with the same guarantees of privacy. Don’t become a dodgy money transmitter business."
Lol. Because that usually goes over well. Hey, just do what we tell you! We don't care what's involved, just get it done! Says the user of the free service.
