Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 459 posts

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#341

Post by dunefox »

driverdan wrote: post #327
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…

> In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. What is a "payment story" and why do messaging apps need it? Signal should be secure SMS with a better UI, nothing more.

I don't understand this either. Does Signal need to compete with streaming services like Netflix next? What about Steam? I didn't choose Signal as a platform, I chose it because it is (supposedly) a secure and privacy focused messenger app.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#342

Post by josh2600 »

deft wrote: post #329
josh2600 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, we want to get the coins into the hands of users so they can buy things with them. Doing so in a legally compliant fashion is non-trivial. Looking at what happened with key base and stellar, a simple airdrop to users of the system doesn’t necessarily result in utilization or economic development. There are multiple different things to consider here: 1) regulatory, 2) economic system design, 3) usability,…

This isn't addressing the parent comment at all. Does the trust plan to market dump coins on their users?

I'm not sure what you mean by dump. MobileCoin plans to reinvest coin proceeds into the ecosystem to help foster economic development. We also plan to give away coins once we figure out how to do so in a regulatory-compliant fashion.

MobileCoin also needs some amount of money to operate, some of which will come from the sale of coins, but our balance sheet of coins is quite limited. We would prefer to minimize those sales as much as possible.

Does that answer your question?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#343

Post by josh2600 »

dbrgn wrote: post #331
josh2600 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have not yet read in detail how you use SGX. But setting up SGX requires complicated processes and signing contracts and other paperwork with Intel. (Correct me if this is wrong.) Given that setting up the "systems" requires a huge effort, I assume that the architecture assumes a single central entity is running all these core systems, right? If yes, does the system rely on these core components to be up? If yes, h…

https://github.com/UkoeHB/Mechanics-of-MobileCoin/blob/maste... << This document has an extensive explanation of the consensus mechanisms and the attestation/enclave mechanisms in their respective chapters.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#344

Post by dunefox »

as1mov wrote: post #140

But I thought moving from the walled garden owned by Facebook to another walled garden owned by a Non Profit Organisation whose main maintainer controls the entirety of the platform and discourages any forks/federation would solve all our problems. Surely they would never dare to push shady shit in their application since they are the good guys™. I am shocked.

Yeah, I am a bit annoyed that I got several people to switch or at least use Signal, with the whole WhatsApp thing. Now I can't really recommend it and I feel like I have used up my influence on people when it comes to recommendations for apps.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#345

Post by mbar84 »

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…

Can you talk about scaling issues. What are your projections for the size of the MobileCoin blockchain, assuming it is successful and people want to do >1000 transactions/second.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#346

Post by tom_mellior »

marcinzm wrote: post #42
tom_mellior wrote: post #21

> of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply. [citation needed] > This token then floats on a shady offshore cryptocurrency exchange hiding in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, where users can buy and exchange the token. The token is wash traded back and forth by insiders [citation needed] > insiders are free to silently use information asymmetry to cash out on the influx of pumped hype-driven buys…

> of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply. > [citation needed] This is based on the original whitepaper which says they pre-sold 15% of the tokens (to investors) and still own the rest. They claim to have not followed that whitepaper but the new one only says they start with 100% ownership and will not answer questions of how much they still own. So all we can go on is their original plan which w…

Thanks to you and the others who responded with information. Looks like some of the claims I highlighted above cannot be sourced at all, and others can only be sourced to a whitepaper that the developers are distancing themselves from.

So... Yeah, being downvoted and flagged really showed me, I guess.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#347

Post by josh2600 »

mbar84 wrote: post #345
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…

Can you talk about scaling issues. What are your projections for the size of the MobileCoin blockchain, assuming it is successful and people want to do >1000 transactions/second.

We've tested MobileCoin at ~100 transactions per second right now using low core count boxes. We suspect we can scale to 10,000/second on the existing tech stack by throwing bigger boxes at it AND doing some performance tuning. SCP has been shown to hit very large tx/s numbers so it's just a matter of tweaking it until we get those numbers out. 100 tx/s is more than adequate for quite some time for our use case.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#348

Post by marcinzm »

tom_mellior wrote: post #346
marcinzm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply. > [citation needed] This is based on the original whitepaper which says they pre-sold 15% of the tokens (to investors) and still own the rest. They claim to have not followed that whitepaper but the new one only says they start with 100% ownership and will not answer questions of how much they still own. So all we can go on is their original plan which w…

Thanks to you and the others who responded with information. Looks like some of the claims I highlighted above cannot be sourced at all, and others can only be sourced to a whitepaper that the developers are distancing themselves from. So... Yeah, being downvoted and flagged really showed me, I guess.

When massive amounts of money are involved than a cynical take is the right take. The burden on proof is on the company to show that they are working in good faith not for everyone to assume they are working in good faith. Hiding things, denying association with things and avoiding questions should not be taken as a good faith effort but rather as proof of bad faith. I think we've had enough crypto scams by now to no longer be naively optimistic about them.

edit: You can see in this very thread the CEO use every weasel words way of avoiding directly answering how many coins they currently hold. A very simple question which is always answered in a way which doesn't answer it.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#349

Post by marcinzm »

josh2600 wrote: post #311
chelmzy wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That does not answer the question. You answered the question of "how many coins do you intend to sell" not "how many coins do you currently hold." Based on your answer I can only assume that you hold >50% of the coins and intend to sell 50% of them in the near future.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#350

Post by schmorptron »

dunefox wrote: post #341
driverdan wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order for signal to compete in the 21st century with messaging apps around the world they need a payment story. What is a "payment story" and why do messaging apps need it? Signal should be secure SMS with a better UI, nothing more.

I don't understand this either. Does Signal need to compete with streaming services like Netflix next? What about Steam? I didn't choose Signal as a platform, I chose it because it is (supposedly) a secure and privacy focused messenger app.

I guess there are some users who expect something in this vein after seeing it in whatsapp or imessage? Still, bundling some unstable opaque cryptocurrency to it instead of just normal money seems a bit disingenuous.

Or they want to become WeChat.

Post reply on HN