Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

How much did MobileCoin pay for inclusion in Signal?

MobileCoin has not yet paid Signal anything for integrating MobileCoin. We intend to donate a great deal of money to Signal over the coming years.

We believe in Signal's mission and we think that the world is a better place with Signal in it.

Moxie Marlinspike is listed as an advisor for MobileCoin, was this not a paid position?

According to coinmarketcap, MobileCoin's "Fully Diluted Market Cap is $15,638,578,369.65". If we take a conservative assumption of a 1% advisor grant (which would be very conservative for a system that has been pitching signal integration as its primary feature for years), then that would put the value of the integration at around $150 million today (or tens of millions a few weeks ago).

https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/ It is Moxie's, the creator of Signal, pet crypto project.

Moxie != Signal.

Moxie, as an individual, is a paid technical advisor to MobileCoin but the reality is that we could never pay Moxie what his time is worth. I am thankful that he has chosen to help make this project a reality.

The revelations from the Platformer article [1] about how Signal works inside make it pretty clear that Moxie ~= Signal.

[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-the-battle-inside-signal

>Moxie creates Signal

>Moxie advises MobileCoin

>MobileCoin gets integrated into Signal

Hm, yes, must just be one large coincidence that this "integration" happened.

Signal is entirely centralized and Moxie runs the organization.

For all intents and purposes Moxie is 100% in control of the Signal network and could shut it down or release a malicious update that plaintexts messages at any time.

And a reason surfaced to continue to connect users to their phone numbers...

>>The UK also has receiver verification. If I try to send to an account and it doesn't match the name I'm sending to, my bank will warn me. How do you stop impersonation?

A: Signal relies on phone numbers for identities. Other apps that integrate MobileCoin may have a higher threshold for identification.

That is just sad.

I've been a longtime signal user (since the textsecure/redphone days). I've always given moxie a pass on his controversial decisions (no federalisation, no 3rd party clients, no fdroid repo, relying on Google play services, being slow to release serverside source code) because the team was small and obviously had to cut corners somewhere.

But learning that they spent their time adding support for a (premined?) cryptocurrency just because it's Moxie's pet project is disheartening. What are the odds that this would've been merged into the project if it had been a merge request opened by someone from the outside?

Unfortunately, Moxie is Signal because he won't let anyone else (open-source clients) connect to the Signal servers OR run their own.

Especially when you consider those decisions in light of this move: they create platform lock in and lockdown.

Want to run signal with no payments integration or with a Bitcoin wallet instead? Too bad.

Cult of personality holds more value than MobileCoin unfortunately.

I wish there was a way to decentralize that value :-P

That's what NFT is.

What are your (you guys) opinions on Session (https://getsession.org/), the Signal clone that uses Tor, and no phone numbers? Any significant downsides? Anybody know the team there and can speak on their trustworthiness, longer term intentions etc? What about the code they've added? Anybody review that? At a quick glance it looks like a decent but less user friendly alternative (no phone numbers - good for privacy, bad for grandma's to be able to adopt it easily). Thanks.

They are also going to integrate a cryptocurrency: https://getsession.org/crypto-craze/

NFTs are very expensive URL-lengtheners (instead of shorteners), and nothing more.