Broadly agree with the article, but I don't understand the Diem comparison. Isn't Diem a stable coin? No premining is possible, right? Am I missing something?
Et Tu, Signal?
191–200 of 459 posts
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#192I was recently pulled onto Signal by a non-techie who values his privacy. I talked to him about Matrix/Element and he had no idea what that was, but was very happy with Siganl. I must admit, the app is very nice. All I had to do was give it access to my contacts and bam, I am now able to chat with all my contacts. By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to…
> less likely to pull something like this
They are less likely to do this kind of secretive development, but they could go that direction. They have considered cryptocurrency in the past, see https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/22/thoughts-on-cryptocurrenc.... They are open, but still driven by a single company which could change direction at any time.
They also surprised their community multiple times with renames of their app and weird redesigns (remember the horizontally-scrollable unordered bubbles for room selection?)
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#193Don't like it? Don't use it.
Afterall, private organizations can do what they want according to the mantra repeated here. At least that was the defense for social media organizations implementing censorship and bans.
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like Element works better as a competitor to Slack or IRC than as a competitor to Signal or Whatsapp. To me it's a competitor to Keybase. "I want to send my co-worker/client an API key that I don't want exposed to the public" is about the only use for Keybase I've had. I have like 5 contacts on there for this reason. Slack/IRC is much more usable for getting shit done, but not being E2E I wouldn't send anyth…
Yep yep, totally think that's reasonable. I know very little about the intricacies of cryptography, but part of me wonders if there's some way of doing a federated "key synchronization" service similar to keybase.
That sounds kinda similar to the problem Matrix solved with cross-signing, how when you login to a new device and verify it with one of your already logged-in devices, it can request your old message keys E2EE so you get all your history.
Maybe a similar thing could be built on top of it?
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#195All the dumping on signal is sad. Here we have an nonprofit app that has succesfully broken into a major consumer market, and because of their ambitions to break up another cartel, and this is bad ? Lets take a stab at understanding the authors complaints. Author states users are smart and "we make the majority of users". Going beyond the entitlement of that statement, author can feel betrayed, but for signal to succ…
It's rolled out in the UK with one if the best banking systems in the world. Plus like hell Signal is anonym, it still relies on an sms capable phone number, which is hard to get in many countries.
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#196edit I should have prefaced my comment with the fact that I find it odd that people got caught by surprise when the inventor of a cryptographically focused mobile messaging app integrated his cryptographically focused payment system which he unambiguously called mobile coin. Mobilecoin has the same design principles as Signal insofar as it uses sgx enclaves to do its crypto work. While I would not want to rely on enc…
> Also, on a speculative basis and assuming no colossal foul-ups, it appears to me that signal+mob want to distribute the mobile coins to artists and community groups. When the company holds 85% of the pre-mined coins, they’re looking for any excuse to distract from that fact. The claim that they might give some token amount to artists and communities in the future is a distraction. The CEO of MobileCoin was in HN th…
I see this more as an interesting test of the "post-2000 wto protest" black-flag anarchist cohort. Will this particular "strange and radiant machine" make the world a better place?
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#197Every time Matrix is brought up here, the federation and open spec is criticised as being too slow moving compared to Signal's BDFL approach. Well, this is what happens when the interests of the BDFL and community diverge. If New Vector decided to fuck up Element on the other hand, you could just move to a new client and not deal with marketing a network move to your social network.
> the federation and open spec is criticised as being too slow To be fair I don't think that the slowness and complexity is being put forward as an example of why Matrix is "bad", but rather as an example of why it can't compete with Signal for "normal" users — and if you want to create something that competes with Messenger, Whatsapp or Snapchat, you need to put "normal" users first, it can't be an afterthought.
What stops a Matrix client producer from putting "normal" users first?
Is it that all such producers plan to do something evil once they have enough users locked in, which an open protocol like Matrix would impede?
Or is it that the protocol is not yet mature enough? In which case, a deliberate approach to evolving the spec may be for the best so long as it eventually gets to where it needs to be?
A couple years ago the Riot client was unusable on Mac. Now Element seems to be fine. Why won't it continue to get better?
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#198> Signal is a still a great piece of software. Just do one thing and do it well, be the trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely with the same guarantees of privacy. Don’t become a dodgy money transmitter business. This is not the way.
Digital currency is just digital communications. Signal allows us to communicate privately. Should people care whether or not this communication is a message that a language we also speak, or a message that contains a digital transaction.
Again...
> trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely
If you care about the privacy of Signal users to communicate freely about anything they chose, don't also hate when these same Signal users want to communicate digital currencies.
... and before you downvote, let me know why I'm wrong (although, they should have chosen a more mainstream privacy coin like ZCash or Monero at least).
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#199Every time Matrix is brought up here, the federation and open spec is criticised as being too slow moving compared to Signal's BDFL approach. Well, this is what happens when the interests of the BDFL and community diverge. If New Vector decided to fuck up Element on the other hand, you could just move to a new client and not deal with marketing a network move to your social network.
> the federation and open spec is criticised as being too slow To be fair I don't think that the slowness and complexity is being put forward as an example of why Matrix is "bad", but rather as an example of why it can't compete with Signal for "normal" users — and if you want to create something that competes with Messenger, Whatsapp or Snapchat, you need to put "normal" users first, it can't be an afterthought.
> you need to put "normal" users first
Normal users primarily want what their peers already use for communication. Hence a power user who is able to use two messengers and switch between them has a disproportionately big market impact. /s
Re: Et Tu, Signal?
#200While I'm generally happy with cryptocurrency for reasons of practicality, privacy, and broader governance, connecting both your private communications and your private purchases to your phone number (and to each other) is exceedingly unwise. Especially as most western countries insist on connecting your phone number with government-issued ID. Anybody with technical knowledge and a modicum of appreciation for privacy…
He's been twitter replying to everybody who @s him on some "Zawinsky's Law" variant with "Staaaahhhhhhhpppppp."