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.

No “pre-mine” doesn't mean fairly distributed. Bitcoin is a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme as well. Early adopters mine or buy large proportions at negligible prices while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large prices.

By this definition, every company stock is a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme.

In fact, company stock is WAY worse, because the majority of people are legally prohibited from investing in private companies unless they're an accredited investor (already rich). So, only rich people (other than founders and early employees) are allowed to buy in at super low prices before handing off the bag to the public.

This is incorrect. Stock represents actual ownership of a scarce resource (a company). That company would have value whether or not it was explicitly sold as a stock. The value doesn’t come from the stock.

Cryptocurrency removes the underlying asset and simply sells shares of artificial scarcity. It’s only as valuable as what people decide to trade it at, because it doesn’t represent ownership of anything other than itself.

> This is incorrect. Stock represents actual ownership of a scarce resource (a company). That company would have value whether or not it was explicitly sold as a stock. The value doesn’t come from the stock.

Depending on the voting rights embedded in the share, your ownership is likely meaningless. It doesn't guarantee you rights to dividends necessarily and even if it does, the company can just choose to never issue a dividend (like Amazon). It doesn't necessarily grant you voting rights for the Board of Directors either. Worse, you have to go through a 3rd party broker to buy a share or trust a company like Robinhood to hold your shares for you. As we saw with GameStop, they can rug pull on you at any time. With decentralized cryptos like BTC & ETH, that can't happen from your own private wallet. You can always transact.

Cryptos such as BTC & ETH are provably scarce, not artificially scarce. You can validate supply at any time by running your own node and joining the network. You don't need anyone's permission to do that. It's a public blockchain.

>As we saw with GameStop, they can rug pull on you at any time. With decentralized cryptos like BTC & ETH, that can't happen from your own private wallet. You can always transact.

ETH is probably not the best example here because they have rug-pulled people with a hard fork.

> they have rug-pulled people with a hard fork.

"People" here being criminals that exploited a flaw in the DAO, yeah?

At the time of that fork, the Ethereum website literally said "the code is the contract". Then, when someone found a perfectly legitimate use of that code that the creators failed to anticipate, they forcibly altered the contract. There are criminals here, but they're not the ones you think.