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