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Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#411

Post by eleventeenth »

josh2600 wrote: post #385
matkoniecz wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what you mean by dump. Sell your token at overinflated prices (in a similar way as other ICO scams) and funnel money into pockets of whoever is running this specific scam, with some minor amounts put toward claimed goals.

This is hard because we don't have any control over the price of the coin whatsoever :(. We don't sign any listing agreements or do market making or pay exchanges anything to list. We literally haven't done anything except publish the code and make the coin available to the public. Thank you for helping me to understand what you're looking for; we will go back to our counsel and ask them for more advice with this in…

All of your answers are so obviously not answering directly. You were simply asked if you would be selling the coins to retail investors on exchanges and gave a bunch of blabber when the answer is clearly yes.

Form your post above RE selling coins at inflated prices to the public, you said “This is hard because we don’t control the price” Umm, you could give away the coins. You claimed that Stellar gave away coins but the coins didn’t end up being used by end users. How does selling the coins at hyper-inflated prices to end-users change this? Why will they use the coins if they are sold them vs given they?

It would be great to know the timing, amounts and prices of coins that have been sold to either investors or the public.

Your reputation and Signals are hanging on a thread here. We’d all appreciate some transparency.

How many coins will Mobilecoin sell and over what time period? You and Mobilecoin currently control about 212.5M coins which is $8.5 Billion created out of thin air. The price was recently inflated with a suspiciously perfect timed short squeeze, likely orchestrated by one of your investors looking to pump their bags.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#412

Post by eleventeenth »

josh2600 wrote: post #404
ascorbic wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What financial interest does Moxie have in MobileCoin Inc, MobileCoin TS Ltd or any connected business? Does he stand to gain from the success of MobileCoin? You could have avoided most of the criticisms if you had a clear explanation of why you pre-mined. Saying that you intend to sell it is not as reassuring as you seem to think it is.

The pre-mine has to do with using stellar consensus protocol. Basically if you don't have staking or mining (which I personally believe are detrimental to the longevity of these networks) then you end up with a pre-mine. Essentially all of the game theoretical systems for rewarding operations of the network pit the interests of the miners/stakers against the interests of the users of the network.

Again, why do avoid answering the question? When you avoid answering the question, it comes off as more and more sleazy.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#413

Post by wolverine876 »

arsome wrote: post #161
tonyjstark wrote: post #62

This article mirrors my feelings toward this announcement well. I spent a significant amount of time trying out different messaging apps and convincing my friends and family to move over from Telegram and WhatsApp. I used my reputation and their trust in my expertise. The whole blockchain industry is just too mixed with scams that I feel comfortable to have my non-tech relatives dealing with it. It's enough that I ha…

I've always hesitated to recommend Signal to people due to Moxie's attitude towards the more traditional security and privacy community where things like federation and open source are respected concepts. Tack this on the list and Signal just seems like a crazy thing to recommend now. If they can get the onboarding process on Element to be just a little bit easier, maybe a phone number based default, I'll be dumping…

> I've always hesitated to recommend Signal to people due to Moxie's attitude towards the more traditional security and privacy community where things like federation and open source are respected concepts.

My understanding is that is a part of the amateur 'security' community, not the professional or expert one?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#414

Post by apotheon »

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'm pretty sure that's just a buzzword for "revenue model", which is to say a plan for how it will make money. The charitable interpretation in this case would be "how to keep devs on the job and not homeless", and the uncharitable case would be "how to make Moxie Marlinspike and his buddies obscenely rich".

It looks to me like either there's a lot of selling out going on here or there's a lot of great examples of how not to market a good thing to reasonable, aware, suspicious people (which is, in short, pretty much the core market demographic of privacy software users).

As for me, I'm starting to wonder whether Session is much better than Signal, and I think that if you want privacy in a cryptocurrency you're probably better off with Monero.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#415

Post by apotheon »

xvector wrote: post #400
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…

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.

From some of the discussions I've seen, it looks like part of the MobileCoin strategy is to shit-talk Monero as a way to build hype for MobileCoin, and claim all prior art came directly from CryptoNote while ignoring the fact it's implementing stuff pioneered in implementation by Monero. I've seen some pretty friendly discussion history with Monero in the first days of the nascent MobileCoin project turn into MobileCoin people being absolutely, obnoxiously awful later on.

If there's some way this can be explained away by MobileCoin people, I think it'll make a great story, because there seems to be a lot of stuff there that doesn't look explainable.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#416

Post by randomswede »

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…

This makes me sad. I have, up until now, been happy with Signal, but with this foray into cryptocoins, I now put it in the general "why do you hate the planet" bucket that all other cryptoshills are in.

It works (FSVO "works") for small levels of transaction, but does not scale to "a substantial fraction of humanity uses it for payment" (low-end, imagine 2.5 billion people trying to make on average 3 economic transactions per day, you'd need to be able to sustain about 80k transactions per second; now note that I low-balled bot the number of economic transactions AND the global population).

Moxie, this is seriously disappointing.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#417

Post by mklarmann »

josh2600 wrote: post #398
mklarmann wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant an anonymous identity system linked to blockchain technology.

Do you have a design proposal for such a system?

No, but: https://democracy.earth uses a couple of systems to connect to it (https://fortmatic.com,https://www.portis.io, https://walletconnect.org) - I don't know why they ditched https://metamask.io.

Overall the adoption of these systems is too difficult. Something that could be overcome with signal/mobilecoin.

Democracy earth is just an example application. Overall I would appreciate to own my data and have it secure (like signal provides), when it comes to the whole ecosystem of the future for: social media, voting, contracts, etc.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#418

Post by slimshady727 »

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…

Hi,Josh: If MOb can be used by Signal user, there must be a stablecoins. You said your team has plans around stablecoins in short order, can you tell the relationship between mob and stablecoins ?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#419

Post by antondimak »

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…

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.

So I think that's the base of what people are upset with. Signal suddenly essentially became a for-profit (it decided to prop up a for-profit company which would in turn fund it as a revenue model). Now a lot of people that donated to and promoted what they considered to be a non-profit project feel cheated.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#420

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

lxgr wrote: post #378
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ejabberd can host ~2k active connections on $2/month server.

Where can I get this $2/month server? The nice thing about client-side/end-to-end security is that the service provider matters less. Also, $2/month is $2 more than many people would be willing to pay for private messaging, and I can't message people on a network they're not on, no matter how much I pay.

Ionos.com

And if you're privacy is worth less than $2/month, just use Telegram. It works way better than these messenges obsessed with privacy, precisely because it does not have encryption for most messages

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