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Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#311

Post by josh2600 »

chelmzy wrote: post #309
josh2600 wrote: post #275

Good Morning, I am the CEO of MobileCoin. A few points: 1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal…

What percentage of the coins does MobileCoin and its founders/early investors currently hold? Seems your early investors certainly have a large chunk https://threader.app/thread/1335948142022311936

MobileCoin has made over 50% of the coins available for purchase. We are currently figuring out how to give away coins while remaining regulatory compliant.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#312

Post by bdcs »

Igelau wrote: post #298
bdcs wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobilecoin (Foundation) is a technological, ethical, and legal tour de force. I recommend you read their FAQ, but, to me anyway, it is obvious why Signal/Moxie needed to create a new coin (tl;dr: It needed to be a private venmo-like experience). To prevent conflicts of interest, a new org was created. Hence Mobilecoin, not SignalCoin. A few highlights: Technological: * First Oblivious RAM implementation, "fog", so th…

> Moxie and Josh Goldbard hold no MOB, along with the employees Right, the foundation sells the premined crypto-currency at a pumped up price. The foundation pays Goldbard and Moxie for their work. Employees are paid from the VC. No one connected has to hold any of it, nor will they want to after the dump.

Agreed that the foundations and payments need to be transparent. But if they are making, say on the order of a hundred grand a year in payments, wouldn't it behoove them to have a stable or increasing MOB market cap in the long run. IOW, if payments << market cap (currently O(10B)) then pumping and dumping is a disincentived move.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#313

Post by rakoo »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #111
nlitened wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that Skype, before it was bought and ruined by Microsoft, had P2P chat history sync that worked the following way: once two of your devices were online at the same time, they synchronized chat history among the two running instances flawlessly. It was super reliable and predictable. I am sure that Signal could implement the same peer-to-peer sync scheme with full end-to-end encryption without any secrecy c…

This is actually working very bad in most practical situations. The way to go is Telegrams way, where you store all data on the server and happily sync ut easily between devices. Just do it on your own server using xmpp. E2ee helps mostly against server owner, and you eliminate this risk by being your own server owner.

> E2ee helps mostly against server owner, and you eliminate this risk by being your own server owner.

Unfortunately you only eliminate it by being your own server owner _and_ your recipient being their own server owner. Take a look at email: I might not want to use e2ee because I self-host, but the second I send an email to a friend hosted on gmail, Google gets all the content.

I think federation does have its place (for different reasons) but it unfortunately isn't enough for privacy.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#314

Post by luckylion »

screamingninja wrote: post #245
dijit wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegrams stupidity was marketing itself as secure. If it never had, then all arguments and sour intent towards it would be hugely misplaced. As it stands, it’s not E2E by default and it’s E2E scheme is homegrown- which is usually not recommended (though IMO was not a dealbreaker), the big issue there was that there were flaws in the original design of the encryption scheme which makes it harder to look passed the fa…

> As it stands, it’s not E2E by default Yes, and enabling E2E "secret chats" on Telegram actually hurts user experience, so most non-tech-savvy users avoid it. Additionally, your address book is continuously synced to Telegram servers. > there’s little preventing Facebook from pushing an update to your phone which backs up all your chats to their cloud Just to add to your point- WhatsApp currently backs up your chat…

> Additionally, your address book is continuously synced to Telegram servers.

It doesn't even need access to contacts to run, and it happily runs on machines that don't even have address books (and, might I add, has the best UX there as well).

What you do need, at least for initial signup, is the ability to receive SMS, like you do with Signal. I wish all of them would just stop that nonsense.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#315

Post by mklarmann »

josh2600 wrote: post #275

Good Morning, I am the CEO of MobileCoin. A few points: 1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal…

Are there any considerations using signal as an identity verification platform for other services?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#316

Post by jpxw »

josh2600 wrote: post #293
dleslie wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why another altcoin and not simply ETH or BTC? You state privacy and performance: could you be more specific?

A few things: 1) tx settlement time is ~3 seconds on mobilecoin, p99 latency right now with single block finality. Eth and Btc are great but they aren’t that fast (for payments speed really matters). 2) with respect to privacy, the key innovation of MobileCoin is that when all of the systems are operational, there is no transaction graph stored in the ledger. The links between transactions are known only to the count…

Why not use an existing currency which solves the problems you highlight, like Nano?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#317

Post by josh2600 »

mklarmann wrote: post #315
josh2600 wrote: post #275

Good Morning, I am the CEO of MobileCoin. A few points: 1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal…

Are there any considerations using signal as an identity verification platform for other services?

I can’t speak for signal but I don’t expect them to ever scan a driver’s license or passport.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#318

Post by Forbo »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #270
mahogany wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most people who project nefarious intentions on the government have no experience working with or within the government. The government, after all, is a big thing with no unified goals or intentions. But for some reason, for some people, 'government' always means 'bad'.

To be fair it usually is bad when it comes to matters of privacy and being open and honest about said privacy.

Governments gave us things like GDPR and HIPAA.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#319

Post by josh2600 »

sarakayakomzin wrote: post #286
josh2600 wrote: post #275

Good Morning, I am the CEO of MobileCoin. A few points: 1) I started MobileCoin to fund Signal. That’s it. I believe that a world with a well-funded signal is a better place. In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. MobileCoin is the only thing ever built that is both privacy protecting and fast that meets the standards of data retention signal…

>2) MobileCoin Inc. intends to maintain an extreme minority of the coins once the dust settles. In other words, cha-ching! then what?

Then we build services for users to help them use MobileCoin for commerce. The goal is to make a real decentralized payments network.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#320

Post by alexmingoia »

It’s very odd to me that HN has a problem with premined cryptocurrency, considering equity operates the same way. All startups sell “tokens” (shares) they created out of thin air. Startups also eventually sell them to the public, after having sold them to insiders.
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