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Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

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Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#111

Post by josh2600 »

Forbo wrote: post #90
josh2600 wrote: post #2

Hi! I'm the CEO of MobileCoin. If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask here. We've been working on this project for four years and it has been a labor of love. There's a lot of new technology here. We exist in a highly regulated space so it's possible some questions will require reaching out to lawyers to make sure we answer them in a way that's compliant so please don't feel offended if a response takes…

I tried going to https://buymobilecoin.com/ as referenced in https://www.mobilecoin.com/terms-of-sale.html but get a Cloudflare "Error 1020" page. What's up with that?

This occurs when you try to access it from a US-IP.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#113

Post by tych0 »

rvz wrote: post #97

So when Keybase added Stellar support for payments, this was met with lots of hostility and disappointment, such as 'cryptocoin bullshit' [0] or 'Yeah, I am not going to use any product associated with anything cryptocurrency. Just smells bad. [1] Now the same thing has happened on Signal; HN's favourite messaging app. So why is this met with warm welcoming arms especially when they are also going into cryptocurrenci…

> So why is this met with warm welcoming arms especially when they are also going into cryptocurrencies?

In the other thread it was not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713953

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#114

Post by dang »

RL_Quine wrote: post #12

This is garbage, and shouldn't be part of Signal. Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't belong, it turns Signal from an obvious recommendation into something that makes me hesitate. There's something to be said for focusing on doing one thing well, and that doesn't mean turning a communication platform into a kitchen sink.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#115

Post by dang »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #89
josh2600 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many crypt…

Yow, the damage control is quick on this one. Off the front page, too? I don't care about your cryptocurrency. I don't care about your cryptocurrency being offered in my messenger. Let me put it plain and simple. You bring nothing to the table for me but liability. Nothing. But. Liability. Signal's one and only feature is security. This feature is a joke, and devalues Signal.

Your comment breaks several of the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

The post went off HN's front page because it set off the flamewar detector.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#116

Post by dan-robertson »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #108
RL_Quine wrote: post #12

This is garbage, and shouldn't be part of Signal. Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't belong, it turns Signal from an obvious recommendation into something that makes me hesitate. There's something to be said for focusing on doing one thing well, and that doesn't mean turning a communication platform into a kitchen sink.

With all due respect your comment seems to be coming from an extremely privileged position. In many parts of the world, people do not have the luxury of basic banking, where storing and sending money is fraught with risk due to corruption and a lack of infrastructure. Take a look at M-PESA [1] for a "last-gen" solution using SMS. I think what Signal is doing with MOB is pretty important work for many non-western coun…

Crypto currencies don’t really solve the problems with a lack of banking infrastructure. Usually people need some way to get actual physical cash (remember, we’re talking about places where people don’t really have access to modern banking systems, not places where most people have bank accounts and credit cards) in and out of the system. It’s a nice idea if everything magically happens in your digital system but I don’t think that can happen without a credible way to bootstrap it involving lots of moving physical cash first. I don’t think it’s credible to hope for third party exchanges or tiny local businesses to provide these services, and I also don’t think it is credible to expect people living in these underdeveloped places to take on the risk of price volatility in some random cryptocurrency.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#117

Post by [deleted] »

josh2600 wrote: post #77
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this does seem to use some voting mechanism instead of scarcity through PoW. How do you prevent the sybil attack then if there is no scarcity? I.e. what prevents an individual from spinning up 10 million nodes to get more voting power?

Stellar is essentially a liquid democracy system similar to DNS. The core proof at the heart of David Mazieres paper is that in a densely interwoven graph, any set of nodes in a quorum slice reaching consensus is graph consensus. Regarding Sybil, nodes define their own trust relationships, so membership is open but not automatic.

[deleted]

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#119

Post by immy »

devwastaken wrote: post #29
RL_Quine wrote: post #12

This is garbage, and shouldn't be part of Signal. Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't belong, it turns Signal from an obvious recommendation into something that makes me hesitate. There's something to be said for focusing on doing one thing well, and that doesn't mean turning a communication platform into a kitchen sink.

If they didn't use some random 'coin' no one has heard of I'd be on board. They're trying to compete in a bad way. They should simply just use Stripe and be done with it. People want an alternative to facebook messaging and PayPal. They don't want superfluous cryptos.

Signal was a random 'messenger' at one point too. They needed a fast (in seconds) private way to send money. There wasn't one. Until now.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#120

Post by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 »

josh2600 wrote: post #77
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this does seem to use some voting mechanism instead of scarcity through PoW. How do you prevent the sybil attack then if there is no scarcity? I.e. what prevents an individual from spinning up 10 million nodes to get more voting power?

Stellar is essentially a liquid democracy system similar to DNS. The core proof at the heart of David Mazieres paper is that in a densely interwoven graph, any set of nodes in a quorum slice reaching consensus is graph consensus. Regarding Sybil, nodes define their own trust relationships, so membership is open but not automatic.

> Regarding Sybil, nodes define their own trust relationships, so membership is open but not automatic.

Thanks for clarifying!

So you're expecting people to

- manually add peers to be able to use the network.

- manually monitor the said peers for if they do malicious transactions, and manually ban them if yes.

Right?

How is this supposed to work considering that:

- most users won't care about manually adding peers. They'll just add EVERYONE who offers to be added so they can be done with it and use the system.

- most users probably won't even understand what a malicious transaction is in the first place.

- the few who do will for sure not have the time to monitor a network which does dozens or in the future even thousands of transactions per second.

This seems just humanly impossible, there's by no means sufficient human time available to manually monitor a P2P network's content if the said content is super boring and complex.

If it were a distributed social network you could expect people to e.g. manually flag spam because using a social network implies reading the posts contained in it.

But manually reviewing money which strangers send to each other is boring as hell, who will do this?

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