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.
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.
The post went off HN's front page because it set off the flamewar detector.