301–310 of 665 posts
If even Signal is compromised, I'm debating just going back to WhatsApp for convenience and assuming that every message I send and every contact I have is fully public information that can be used by advertisers and governments to profile me.
I believe that everyone has a fundamental right to secure, private communication. Some people may hold the same belief for the right to transfer funds. I don't agree and I suspect many others feel the same. That tension alone makes this look like a bad decision to me.
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.
> Bitcoin had no pre-mine and has been fairly distributed from the start. Except for that small initial 1 million that stayed with Adam
With Signal not releasing their server code and now this, I regret using and asking a good chunk of my base to move to Signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, we’re well aware that you would love to sell us those coins you pre-mined. 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.
> 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.
The comment from the article echos my own sentiments: > Speaking solely as a person who is really into encrypted messaging, it terrifies me that they're going to take this really clean story of an encrypted messenger and mix it up with the nightmare of laws and regulations and vulnerability that is cryptocurrency. Moreover, there are three other points I'd add: 1. I don't like "do everything" apps like WeChat or Line…
In a lot of ways, the transfer of cryptocurrency is the same as the transfer of generic messages. It's only when you're transferring them back to dollars/yuan/yen/etc. that it's suddenly currency from a government.
Technically, yes. Legally and sociopolitically, no.
And if you intentionally muddle the data streams, that brings the full force of anti-money laundering, tax evasion and terrorist financing law against you. It gives almost any government a free pass to do what it wants.
Freedom to speak privately is, in most democracies, popularly recognised as a right. Freedom to pay using dark money is not. Attaching the second to the first weakens both.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is incorrect. Stock represents actual ownership of a scarce resource (a company). That company would have value whether or not it was explicitly sold as a stock. The value doesn’t come from the stock. Cryptocurrency removes the underlying asset and simply sells shares of artificial scarcity. It’s only as valuable as what people decide to trade it at, because it doesn’t represent ownership of anything other than…
> This is incorrect. Stock represents actual ownership of a scarce resource (a company). That company would have value whether or not it was explicitly sold as a stock. The value doesn’t come from the stock. Depending on the voting rights embedded in the share, your ownership is likely meaningless. It doesn't guarantee you rights to dividends necessarily and even if it does, the company can just choose to never issue…
ETH is probably not the best example here because they have rug-pulled people with a hard fork.
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.
> Bitcoin had no pre-mine /me glances at the great big pile of Satoshi coins...
Signal is still centrally controlled and compiled by a single entity and distributed only in an unsigned insecure form or in a signed/verified manner only if you give up your privacy to install with Google Play or the Apple store. Those that only run open source software like myself have no secure way to run Signal short of compiling every release by hand which is impractical. Moxie has stated he will not support any…
> Not to mention you need to show government ID to get a SIM to use the Signal wallet for said private currency/messenger in 200 countries. There are less than 200 countries in total, unless you get very creative with states that are arent recognized more more than a handful of other countries, like Abkhazia or Transnistria. You also dont need ID to buy SIM cards in the US, so I'm curious on how valid this assertion…