Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't belong, it turns Signal from an obvious recommendation into something that makes me hesitate. There's something to be said for focusing on doing one thing well, and that doesn't mean turning a communication platform into a kitchen sink.
A case could be made for it being bloat, but most consumers don't care, and for Signal (or any messaging app) to be successful, it needs to appeal to the common denominator.
And frankly, if this means I can send money to a friend without Google getting yet more data about me, then even better.
Signal providing this functionality is scope creep.
Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them.
Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog).
I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.
Smoking causes cancer, but smoking these specific cigarettes won't. Do you see the problem with trying to describe such an absurd situation to somebody?
Signal has obvious financial connections to MobileCoin, something that frankly nobody else has ever heard of before today. I find it really difficult to believe that MobileCoin paying Moxie (which you've acknowledged), and Signal/Moxie happening to choose MobileCoin for inclusion in Signal when nobody wanted it was a coincidence. It's insulting to the intelligence of the reader to even make that claim.
> Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github.
What would that tell me?
Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services, and by being very choosy about who gets ports.
I had high hopes for Matrix, once they got E2EE, but they have flubbed that by requiring a very heavyweight bounce server that won't fit on (e.g.) your typical home router or super-cheap cloud VM. Matrix should enable a place to keep your message archive independent of the bounce server, and allow gatewaying a non-public storage service via the lightweight bounce service.
But Element.io's business model is tied to heavy-weight bounce service.
Yet, those features have almost become synonymous with messaging apps. The market and consumers seem to want these services combined, so here we are. My point was that sending money is a feature that more and more messaging services have. Hangouts (or whatever the hell it is called these days), Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.
Personally, I would have liked it more if this wasn't tied to some no-name cryptocurrency, but oh well.
I think those would all be considered in scope for a chat platform--theyre all various ways to share and communicate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715013
This seems incompatible with the spirit of the quote in the article.
I think what Signal is doing with MOB is pretty important work for many non-western countries, and I wish them all the best.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"
The post went off HN's front page because it set off the flamewar detector.
What I would still like to see for more transparency:
- legal commitment from the Signal Foundation that no employee owns any MOB
- disclosure of money transfers between MobileCoin and any Signal Foundation employee
Maybe some of this information could already be extracted given the statuses of the entities involved?
[0]: he benefits indirectly because if MobileCoin stays up, he'll probably stay as a technical advisor
You're making a different point now though, you're saying that people will associate it with scams which will hurt adoption. You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway.
I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough.
In terms of reputation, this is a long-term battle. Signal used to be quite unreliable in a lot of aspects, and hurt adoption. Now it's much better, making the migration from other messengers way smoother. If they're able to implement safe, private and convenient payments, that's one feature other messengers won't have to lure users away from signal.
Cryptocurrencies don't solve third world banking, at all. You still get paid in fiat, which you then have to convert to crypto (using a bank), and you will never be able to have most people get paid in crypto because then the government can't get taxes reliably (thus they will ban it).
And as others have said, Synapse really isn't that heavyweight these days (thanks in part to the performance improvements driven by Element!)
I think you're confusing UI and UX. Yes, the UI could be kept light but the user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising. Why would a messaging app come with a payments feature if not to make money and exploit the user?
Not saying that this is happening here but this is what people think, i.e. the emotional experience.
It's not tied to Google Play Services, you can download a standalone version from signal.org. As for phone numbers, the developers have been working on getting rid of them for a while now – there's already a good amount of code on GitHub.
> just click through the scam marketing, ICO offers and "airdrops"
That's what I meant by UX.
> user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising
Everything new is "surprising", that's a low bar. Chat apps in China have had this feature for years now, and it's also a feature in WhatsApp, a direct Signal competitor.
The problem here is not that people think that MobileCoin is not a useful technology or is not innovative. From what you are describing it actually seems like a good combination of features that are particularly suited for the messaging use-case.
The problem is in the way the coins were pre-mined. It seems (we don't really know from the outside) that the knowledge that Signal would be using MobileCoin has been known early on. With that knowledge it is very easy to make money by pre-mining coins. The proper analogy here is insider trading. It is immoral and that is why people are calling this a scam.
What about the LLC?
The founder of Signal actually created MobileCoin.
https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1379559273504641025
I guess the whitepaper mentions it, but that isn't suprising considering koe wrote it.
When people want to send "money" to other people, they usually imply that they want to send units of the local currency, like USD or EUR. And they usually imply that the value of these units should stay the same during transfer. If I want to pay my share of a restaurant visit to my friend who covered the check, I'd like the 30$ I'm sending to still hold enough value when they arrive in his bank account to actually cover my share. A cryptocurrency intermediate that swings +/- 20% in value within minutes (and that we both have to pay conversion fees in order to acquire/redeem for $) is of exactly no use at all for such a use case.