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Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#351

Post by robotbikes »

jerry1979 wrote: post #56
robotbikes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie seems to think that they need to do this to keep up with the Joneses, as they try to build some kind of decentralized alternative to WeChat. I guess we should have seen this coming when he got involved with MobileCoin. I'm not a psychic and it might turn out okay but it still seems like a bad idea to me.

Do you have any examples of Moxie talking about needing to keep up with the Joneses?

Yes in the other article in Wired that was on here he said they felt like it was important to add this feature because other messenger clients we're adding it. That was one of his primary justifications for it along with the promise of adding privacy to payments and making that mainstream, like they've attempted to do with encryption.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#352

Post by schmorptron »

Sebb767 wrote: post #152
firebaze wrote: post #60

Another option: https://threema.ch (no phone number required, fully anonymous, fully open source)

I really like the direction Threema is going to. I admit I was pretty skeptic back when they were closed-source and just starting out, but their recent actions (like open-sourcing most of the code) look very promising. Their client is also pretty good and the reactions (agree/disagree) are pretty innovative and useful. I'm somewhat surprised that feature has not popped up in other messengers yet.

Slack and then discord are just miles ahead of any other chat platform and they'll probably be playing catch up in terms of features for a looong time

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#353

Post by vocatus_gate »

josh2600 wrote: post #324
jpxw wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nano doesn’t solve privacy to the degree we were excited about. Again, fast + privacy protecting is really hard to achieve, particularly if you care about fast tx recovery on a mobile device.

If you actually cared about privacy, you'd have just used Monero, and saved yourself 4 years effort building YAS (Yet Another Shitcoin).

And no, speed is not the most important. As long as the user can see the payment incoming, it's trivial UX to say "Payment received. Will be confirmed and available for use in 3 minutes."

edit: it appears MobileCoin is (allegedly) built on a combination of XMR + the Stellar consensus protocol? If true that's a slightly better scenario than I previously thought

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#354

Post by thomashop »

josh2600 wrote: post #342
deft wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you need to lay out the plans much more concretely and have a proper plan for transparency.

The crypto world is full of scams and misinformation. Technical people are unlikely to trust the coin if transparency and oversight stay so vague.

Scanning through this discussion, quite a few red flags have been raised by users. I assume your intentions are good at the outset. But when the money comes rolling in, even the most pure plans can be corrupted.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#355

Post by tom_mellior »

marcinzm wrote: post #348
tom_mellior wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't mean to suggest that everything is fine with MobileCoin! Quite the contrary, it appears to be a complete shitshow. But in ways that are different from what the featured article claimed.

I'm very much opposed to Stephen Diehl's default approach of "everything to do with cryptocurrency is a scam, because I say so". Many things (probably including MobileCoin) are scams, but proper sources are still needed, and it's good to keep factual criticism separate from vague allusions to unnamed exchanges in some Caribbean country or another.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#356

Post by MereInterest »

pmlnr wrote: post #244
MereInterest wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget about when IM networks actually used open standards instead of closed proprietary protocols. Managing all of my accounts through pidgin was a breeze, and didn't leave me swapping between half a dozen different programs trying to remember which networks somebody would typically use.

That was never a thing: Pidgin & the rest had to write their own implementation for many of those protocols, starting with AIM. There was a tiny period, somewhere in 2006, when many services were XMPP, maybe even federated, but due to the lack of good clients - compared to skype -, it never manifested as good as it should have. There are now many nice XMPP clients, but the big players now all moved into proprietary t…

Good point, I am misremembering.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#357

Post by tom_mellior »

bdcs wrote: post #290
simias wrote: post #20

I definitely agree with the article that it felt a bit like a betrayal. I've pushed some friends and family to use it over Telegram despite significant usability issue, and now I see that instead of implementing some IMO basic features like proper message sync and easy backup when you get a new phone, they prefer to implement a... micropayment system? Based on some niche altcoin which doesn't even exist on mainstream…

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…

> I recommend you read their FAQ

Could you provide a concrete link please? There's a bewildering array of officials looking websites with zero information. And a widely shared white paper (among others linked from Wikipedia) that Josh claims isn't the whitepaper he originally wrote. It's hard to know what's what.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#358

Post by marcinzm »

tom_mellior wrote: post #355
marcinzm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't mean to suggest that everything is fine with MobileCoin! Quite the contrary, it appears to be a complete shitshow. But in ways that are different from what the featured article claimed. I'm very much opposed to Stephen Diehl's default approach of "everything to do with cryptocurrency is a scam, because I say so". Many things (probably including MobileCoin) are scams, but proper sources are still needed, and…

The issue is that by the time you have found enough proper sources, especially with the scammers actively making it harder, the scam will have been done with and paid out to the scammers. So the only logical approach I feel is to assume it's a scam unless those involved put the effort into proving otherwise.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#359

Post by qqii »

cyberpunk wrote: post #214

Did anyone ever consider that this is actually on purpose to deter people from using Signal by it's authors? Lets imagine, theoretically, some three letter agency in the US has forced signal to backdoor their platform somehow, and so signal stops posting source code to the clients, and everyone just keeps on using it for a year even though the authors thought that maybe this would be a big red "DANGER" signal to the…

The problem with this theory is that this is four years in the making[0], aka since the last cryptocurrency bubble.

https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#360

Post by sdfzug »

skrowl wrote: post #104
simias wrote: post #20

I definitely agree with the article that it felt a bit like a betrayal. I've pushed some friends and family to use it over Telegram despite significant usability issue, and now I see that instead of implementing some IMO basic features like proper message sync and easy backup when you get a new phone, they prefer to implement a... micropayment system? Based on some niche altcoin which doesn't even exist on mainstream…

Telegram is just so much more usable than Signal. The perceived advantage of Signal over Telegram is LITERALLY not having an option for a cloud-synced chat and ONLY having end to end encrypted chats. That's all. You give up of usability to get that advantage. Explain to your mom why she has to give up Telegram to get basically the same functionality as Telegram secret chats. Signals crypto is used by Facebook and was…

Matrix has E2EE cloud chats
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