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Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

391–400 of 459 posts

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to connect with that person from GitHub" Element is what messaging should have been from the START: a federated service just like email, where you register an account with your provider of choice, just like email, and start adding/chatting other people after getting to know their address, just like email. So, inste…

There's also DeltaChat: It looks more or less like WhatsApp, but it uses email as the transport and storage mechanisms, and it is seamlessly encrypted with AutoCrypt. It supports both one-on-one and group chats. It has apps for mobile and desktop. ⌘ https://delta.chat/

That seems awesome, thanks for sharing! What an awesome approach.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#392

Why is this post being downranked? 753 points in 3h and it's near the bottom of the 2nd page.

Previous posts apparently triggered some type of flamewar filter, so that's probably what happened here.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#393

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…

Have other existing privacy cryptocurrencies been considered? Grin is a lightweight privacy cryptocurrency using MimbleWimble. It uses a fair distribution (no pre-mine), with an emission of 1 GRIN per second: https://grin.mw/

Yes the problem with Grin is that it allows perfect input/output linkage (see: https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/Grin-Privacy-Prime... under information leakage).

Grin also doesn't meet our standard of <5 second blocktime.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consensu…

Monero isn't fast enough and doesn't support transaction recovery (it also has probabilistic linkage which MobileCoin doesn't due to our use of secure enclaves). We spent almost 18 months building MobileCoin Fog to solve the second problem (https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog). It's a non-trivial stack of code to allow users to recover strings from servers they don't control without the operators of those servers being able to learn what strings are being recovered.

Don't get me wrong, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but there's a lot of new tech here.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#395
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but consider the use case where you lose your phone in an accident or someone steals it. You can recover your sim card, you know your recovery password. But you'll be SoL and you won't be able to recover the history of all of your group and individual chats. This sucks.

There's a backup function. Maybe they should add some cloud drive integration to that feature.

Signal for Android allows backup. Signal for iOS doesn't.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#396
post #389
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone needed to be factory reset, where was my backup to restore from without purchasing a second phone?

I only just got this set up, but you can point the automatic backups to your SD card on Android. I guess some cloud sync app could pick it up from there or internal storage.

Signal for iOS disables backup.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#397
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking more along the lines of storage requirements. How much space would be consumed on a full node by a network running at constant 1000 tx/sec?

We designed it to scale to 1B users. I can grab someone from eng to give the exact numbers but it'll be a long time before we have issues with storage.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I meant an anonymous identity system linked to blockchain technology.

Do you have a design proposal for such a system?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#399
post #291
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…

> I'm willing to give the Signal devs the benefit of the doubt How many "benefit of the doubt" cards do they have left by now?

Zero. This was an obvious get rich quick scheme. They intentionally fragmented the space of privacy coins to profit off of a frankly disgusting pump and dump.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#400

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…

So instead of contributing to the Monero project to improve the space for everyone, you decide to fragment the privacy coin space instead with a sketchy premined coin.
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