Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

There are 250 million units of mobilecoin, and majority of them are owned by the founders. Only 37.5 million have been distributed. With current price ($65), they're worth $14B already. This makes the project a scam and impossible for it to work as a reliable money that holds value. Bitcoin had no pre-mine and has been fairly distributed from the start.

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.

> 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.

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.