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Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

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544 points josh2600 | 2 comments | 06 Apr 21 16:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.456s | source
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Geee ◴[06 Apr 21 18:14 UTC] No.26715348[source]▶
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.
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MithrilTuxedo ◴[06 Apr 21 21:52 UTC] No.26717846[source]▶
Agreed. I was half expecting this was going to be using Monero, one of the more popular privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies I know of that's already being used.

E.g. the only cryptos I've seen people accepting on dark web markets are Bitcoin and Monero.

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akvadrako ◴[06 Apr 21 22:30 UTC] No.26718198[source]▶
Monero is clearly the most practical secure coin as evidenced by it's popularity on the darknet. But I think what MobileCoin offers is speed.
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hjek ◴[07 Apr 21 03:20 UTC] No.26720245[source]▶
And way less energy consumption, according to their website.
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1. fX0rObfoMN4 ◴[07 Apr 21 13:14 UTC] No.26724400[source]▶
That is because there is no mining. A proof of stake coin would also use electricity but MobileCoin doesn't even do that.
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2. woobilicious ◴[08 Apr 21 04:13 UTC] No.26735012[source]▶
PoS and MobileCoin validator nodes use about the same amount of electricity.

I'm not a fan of PoS because it looks like a ponzie scheme (unless it's done like eth where initial distribution is done via mining)

This is actually worse than PoS, because PoS uses standard public key cryptographic to validate ownership of coin in the chain to stake, it at least in theory can achieve "trustless" validation.

This on the other hand is just a shitty attempt to outsource database maintenance to untrusted 3rd parties, using SGX, while forcing them to pay for S3 hosting because they can't implement a DHT to do proper decentralized file transfers.