241–250 of 263 posts
Discussion from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713827 Consensus - WTF?
This obsession with crypto killed Keybase for many of it's users and honestly this could be a bad news for Signal.
For my friendship groups, the worst thing by far about keybase is that it was acquired by Zoom.
I'm a big cryptocurrency skeptic, but if they had used a more reputable coin instead of a pre-mined coin distributed in such a fashion as to enrich the founders, they could have avoided most of this backlash. People who aren't enthusiasts already understand that the raison d'etre of the cryptocurrency landscape is to get rich quick, but these guys got so greedy they've even pissed off the enthusiast community. Unfort…
Signal has always been a decent privacy/convenience tradeoff and MobileCoin is no different. Features like phone numbers and contact uploading were always a user friendly tradeoff. They also seem to trust SGX.
Monero's isn't slow by any means but isn't fast either. UI changes can alleviate the issue but being unable to spend your entire balance until the next block is a step back in UX.
ZCash's lack of privacy by default doesn't fit with Signal's E2E by default ethos.
Using most privacy coins on a mobile device with limited storage is a privacy tradeoff no matter how you cut it.
The reality is that integrating a cryptocurrency for payments into Signal was probably the actual misstep rather than their selection of which token to use.
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Agreed. Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, but it wouldn’t have enriched the founders. Pre-mined altcoin scams have been around so long that everyone in the crypto world knows to avoid them. Building up a dedicated following of people using an encrypted messenger app was a genius way of submarining a pre-mined crypto scam into an unsuspecting userbase. I suspect a lot of us are going back to all of the p…
> Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, These take minutes to send (very stressful!) preventing a nice venmo-like experience. They also pollute the planet
What takes a maximum of 2 minutes on monero is waiting for your received balance to become available.
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Agreed. Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, but it wouldn’t have enriched the founders. Pre-mined altcoin scams have been around so long that everyone in the crypto world knows to avoid them. Building up a dedicated following of people using an encrypted messenger app was a genius way of submarining a pre-mined crypto scam into an unsuspecting userbase. I suspect a lot of us are going back to all of the p…
I honestly don’t see the issue. They picked a crypto coin with a much faster transaction settling time than the alternatives you mentioned, and they’re explicitly discouraging people from using it to store wealth.
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Ideally they don’t, but they have - go live in Asia or South America for a bit and you’ll find spots where this is the model, and Signal can’t easily (or at all) reach those users without competing.
Are you saying people in those regions only able to use one app on their device / phone?
Why oh why was it not the first priority to move from phone numbers to random user IDs (like Threema) for identification? And instead come up with a crypto currency integration? This whole crypto coin focus, the BS about the server code and the total inability to address criticism or be transparent about development made me lose hope in the project.
> It’s that adding a cryptocurrency to an end-to-end encrypted app muddies the morality of the product, and invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling: by the IRS, the SEC, FinCEN, and probably the FBI. We need to fight against the idea that private payments are any less moral than private conversations. We also need to actively reject the status quo in the USA of a complete and total lack…
"private payment" ≠ "payment using an ID that can be trivially linked to your phone number on an indelible public record"
What makes you make that assumption? They have a perfectly good e2e messaging channel to use; the only party seeing the payment address would be the one paying.
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Keybase was a passion project that always had very limited development time. They churned out a lot of proof-of-concept grade features, but never really polished any of them. And then some of the features only would be really useful if they either were backed by a proper commitment or had a selfhostable plan B. The wallet is just one of many parts of keybases focus thrashing.
I just remembered that Keybase sent me random Lumens a while ago that I never touched, and when I just checked back right now, they're actually worth a significant amount? I am sort of shocked. How do I spend this?
You could get an account on an exchange, send the XLM there and then withdraw it to your bank account.
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Agreed. Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, but it wouldn’t have enriched the founders. Pre-mined altcoin scams have been around so long that everyone in the crypto world knows to avoid them. Building up a dedicated following of people using an encrypted messenger app was a genius way of submarining a pre-mined crypto scam into an unsuspecting userbase. I suspect a lot of us are going back to all of the p…
> Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, These take minutes to send (very stressful!) preventing a nice venmo-like experience. They also pollute the planet
MobileCoin is a farcical alternative to Monero, where a few “trusted” corporate nodes are run and 80% of the coin is premined.