Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

The founding organization owns 85% of the total market cap of a coin? That should be raising red flags for everyone involved.

There is no valid reason for the vast majority of what is supposedly a currency to be owned by the company that created it. Imagine if PayPal launched but required everyone to transact in fractional shares of PayPal to get anything done. Oh and by the way, those shares are majority owned by the founders, but they’ll sell you some so you can send them to your friends.

This is ridiculous.

The majority of the MobileCoins are available for purchase for non-us persons at https://www.buymobilecoin.com right now.

Yes, we’re well aware that you would love to sell us those coins you pre-mined.

That’s the problem.

If Signal was serious about this they would have launched their own fork instead of pitching a pre-mined coin to their users.

The slashdot effect triggered Cloudflare’s DDoS protection and is returning errors for that page.

No, this is just what happens when you try to hit the page from a US IP address.

There is only a "contact us" link on that page.

> If Signal was serious about this they would have launched their own fork instead of pitching a pre-mined coin to their users.

Agreed. They either would have launched their own fork and distributed the vast majority to their users, or at the very least chosen an existing project that was fairly well distributed.

This makes me believe they primarily did this in return for an incentive from Mobilecoin.

What?

Marlinspike's been an advisor to MobileCoin from like... the beginning. The article also notes that neither he nor Signal own any actual MobileCoins.

Signal may not own any MobileCoins, but the CEO of MobileCoin said:

> 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.

Yes, I've read that. I find it a stretch to draw that conclusion though, as if it's some back door deal for funding.

For all the criticisms of cryptocurrency (and I have many...), I don't particularly see anything on MobileCoin's work that indicates the usual shady cryptocurrency stuff. I'm not sure it belongs in Signal, but I do think this stuff can be evaluated without people starting conspiracy theories.

In my view there are worse ways to make money from a chat app. Like selling all your users data. Ir worse yet just selling out to FB. At least a crypto scheme can maybe be the cash cow that helps them keep true to the privacy aspect....

Of course, it's totally centralized. The 'cryptocurrency' marketing just exists as a regulatory dodge.

So far this scheme has worked out fine for the original creators of Ripple-- who've extracted hundreds of million selling their massive premine to an ignorant public, then abandoned the original and did it again. What we're seeing from signal now is just a third generation of the same scheme, preempting the ripple founders from doing it again (or maybe they're involved behind the scenes, who knows?).

So long as there seems to be no consequence except a massive windfall (SEC fines against ICO/premines have tended to be a fraction of 1% of the funds raised), it's unsurprising to see them continue.

The fact that it may kill one of the more useful secure messaging apps as a side effect? Welp. This is why we can't have nice things: Collectively, we're better at funding borderline scams than public goods.

And what is the downside to them if this isn't entirely true? On one hand you have tens of millions of dollars and potentially a lot more, on the other you have a few angry nerds.

Why are you blocking the US?

I'm really tired of every single company going through some abusive scam or data harvesting scheme to avoid simply charging me money.

It's literally a quid pro quo? What conspiracy theory do you need here?

At least it's better than Bitcoin, since in this case it's well known who the whales are.

If one wishes to subject their wealth to the whims of a massively centralized cartel of "rationally self interested" HOLDers, maybe it's better to deal with the devil(s) one knows.

I don't see how it's a quid pro quo for someone like Moxie, with his background, to advise a project for years and then work with them to integrate it given the alignment with regards to privacy initiatives.

I find it conspiracy-theory in nature to assume otherwise; I think it could've been handled better from a server source code side but I don't really see why this has to be an assumed bad faith thing.

The CEO said:

> I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work.

I don't see how it's a conspiracy theory that this is a backdoor way of funding Signal when the CEO literally says that MobileCoin was created as a way to fund Signal.

I'm guessing because they don't want an SEC investigation into whatever they're running.

It's not a conspiracy when it's all out in the open. Calling things you don't like a conspiracy theory to discredit them is a poor form of argument.

A bunch of decently well of people decided to do a few handshake deals to make each other a whole bunch of money. That's how most of the world rolls so this is simply par for course.

Yeah, I don't really see anything particularly wrong with that. I'd be more bothered by it if Signal wasn't a nonprofit.

Is it potentially a bad business model? Yeah. Is it necessarily some backdoor funding deal? I dunno, I don't really buy it.

>It's not a conspiracy when it's all out in the open. Calling things you don't like a conspiracy theory to discredit them is a poor form of argument.

This statement would work better if that's what I was doing, but I'm not.

You (and nobody else) on this thread knows for sure what's going on there, and if Moxie's been advising MobileCoin for years I don't see how it falls under a handshake deal.

There is nothing to indicate that he, or Signal, are directly profiting from this, other than some MobileCoin people saying they want to donate to Signal (which is a good thing - I'm really not bothered by that particular point).

It's quid pro quo to include an obscure scam coin out of the blue into an entirely unrelated product, with a public promise from the scam club owners to donate their money to your business. The fact the the owner of signal had already been associated with MobileCoin for a long time makes it worse, not better.

Or better yet, don't use cryptocurrency at all. Then you can avoid all ethical dilemmas surrounding them.

Problem solved.

Isn't this because most users have decided that charging money is a death sentence? Hell, there's a HN article on this like every month.

...no, the fact that the founder of Signal advised it for years indicates it's not an "obscure scam coin" from out of the blue.

If Signal had built this themselves, in house, nobody would bat an eye.

You're stretching hard here.

But then, you haven't solved the private electronic payment...

Someone should always take the time to point out to such threads that WhatsApp was running very profitable based on that model without eveb trying.

Also feel free to read anything by the Basecamp guys (yep, the guys behind Rails).

It won't get you or the investors (another) yacht, but there exist a number of companies that delight their customers and change history far more than many attempted unicorns.

Most people don't want private electronic payments. In stable countries like the UK - where this is being launched - it's basically only useful for buying drugs and tax evasion.

One can argue than most people don't care about private messaging as well... I find it a bit scary that my bank has all my purchasing data : they basically know everything about me that way, what if they decide to sell this data ?

Signal including a cryptocoin came completely out of the blue (well, apparently there were rumors, but that doesn't mean it was an expected change). MobileCoin is also deeply suspicious in its mining model, and is not some well known coin.

Yet somehow the Wikipedia project has managed to stay afloat during all these years...

I'm pretty sure more than one WikiCoin has been pitched too.

Don’t want to end up in a US prison for the obvious scam they’re running.

You say that like those are bad things.

Can you spell out why is that fundamentally bad? I'm asking in good faith not to be oppositional, apologies if its a stupid question. But if you were buying shares in a company it would not matter if most the shares were held by the company (as long as there is enough liquidity to sell your shares in future). Why is it different with the currency? I get that its making the founders rich so perhaps they have greedy intentions, but why does this inherently undermine the validity of the currency?

Use cash for every day payments - your bank will know nothing.

I can't remember the last time I could use paper cash. Beyond your daily groceries, everything is usually exclusively paid for digitally.

Surveillance on daily spends is not valuable. What's valuable is things connected to your identity, specifically associations with other individuals and companies.

A cryptocurrency is generally more easily spendable in an open market. The sell potential that a founder has with 75% of the supply is massive.

If I created a coin today and sold 1% of the supply to you alone, on what basis would you want to store any value in that currency? Given constant buy demand, The currency's market value is defined by what I do. This is why organic price discovery for a currency is important.

This is the way government wants you to think. They want to know literally every dollar (unit_of_monetary_exchange) that you use and don't care one iota about your privacy. They don't want you to value privacy at all.

If the owners of MobileCoin own 85% of existing coins which at current rates is valued at $14 billion, you actually expect they're not in this to liquidate their coin for that $14 billion if they can snooker people into using it?

because the US has a long reach in the financial world even into Switzerland (these days). The IRS is on a war path against crypto currently and I think they believe 50% of it is something they can be taxing or is fraudulent. The US government doesn't like things that are hard to track.

Until something goes awry in that crypto scheme and some intelligence agency decides to use that as leverage to undermine the security of Signal. Moxie, on his own, may be resistant to pressure, but when there's a secondary company involved that might be pressured by threats of losing several million dollars...

This commingling of business interests means there's more angles of approach, and much more risk exposure.

Will you buy my coins back at a fair price?

What value do you provide? at least when I buy vbucks from Epic I know I'm getting fortnite skins with it.

Why should we run a node free of charge when you extract all the profits of our efforts?

When I see statements like "there's no economic incentive."

I read "I want all the profits, and screw everyone else".

If you genuinely wanted a decentralized network, then you would provide fair compensation for the added value the node provides against attacks on the network.

Here's the reality of the situation.

The vast majority of people simply don't care about this. I mean I have a hard enough of a time to get people to care about privacy-centered messaging apps. Getting them to even begin to comprehend the myriad of cryptocurrencies and the confusing space of DeFi is simply not going to catch on. To them, there's really no benefit outside of "number go up" and so-called store of values, which conveniently have the nasty side effect of requiring users to do their own OpSec. That's actually harder than you think.

And that's not even accounting for how scam-ridden the entire space is to begin with. Who can they even begin to trust? Seems like an oxymoron for a trustless system, when the fact is they aren't even sure if they can trust themselves.

I find it mildly hilarious too, that places like BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are exploring cryptocurrency storage options. Now we are back to "trusting" those darn evil banks everyone gets triggered about.

See how weird this rabbit hole gets?

That's definitely not the direction taken by society... Pandemic, convenience, online businessew ( yeah, I know we could physically mail cash for online purchases but, come on... )