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Et Tu, Signal?

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#431

Post by tempodox »

ohyeshedid wrote: post #407
josh2600 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of an abundance of caution and advice from our counsel. The regulatory landscape in the United States is complicated. It is hard to predict what is and what is not ok. We tend to be far more conservative than other players in the space.

I find it strange that you bundle your currency ecosystem into a product that is widely used in the US and you haven't ironed out how to sell it directly to them. Also, it's a strange choice geoblocking the traffic rather than serving a static lander explaining the issues. This entire situation is rife with strange choices. I see risk exposure increasing greatly across the board, for Signal operations, users, and eve…

Translation of GP: “What we're doing has been illegal in the US for decades.”

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#432

Post by dvdplm »

mbar84 wrote: post #426
josh2600 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pointing to the foundational problem that led to the Big vs Small block debate in the context of Bitcoin and which is the argument for second layer networks. Presumably you've come across this question in your four years of development and would have exact numbers (perhaps not for my chosen value of tx/sec) already at hand. The fact that we're three comments deep into this, leads me to believe you are dancing aro…

There’s no dancing going on. He said he doesn’t know the exact numbers but is asking the engineers to dig it up for you. Please don’t be rude and please don’t put words in other people’s mouth.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#433

Post by dvdplm »

selsta wrote: post #217
timbit42 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MobileCoin uses a combination of two other private coins, Monero and Zcash. There are no addresses on the MobileCoins's blockchain to be correlated. Didn't it cross your mind that a private messenger would probably use a private cryptocurrency?

MobileCoin does not use any Zcash technology. It is Monero + stellar consensus protocol.

...and SGX, which is very interesting and a choice worthy of scrutiny imo.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#434

Post by mbar84 »

dvdplm wrote: post #432
mbar84 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pointing to the foundational problem that led to the Big vs Small block debate in the context of Bitcoin and which is the argument for second layer networks. Presumably you've come across this question in your four years of development and would have exact numbers (perhaps not for my chosen value of tx/sec) already at hand. The fact that we're three comments deep into this, leads me to believe you are dancing aro…

There’s no dancing going on. He said he doesn’t know the exact numbers but is asking the engineers to dig it up for you. Please don’t be rude and please don’t put words in other people’s mouth.

As I say, this is a foundational issue that every blockchain project should address. Before I asked my initial question, I searched the documentation to see if it had been addressed. Such answers might be a second layer story, or some form of transaction aggregation on the base layer blockchain. I could not find anything that obviously looked like that.

At this point I think it's perfectly fair to start with the assumption that a new Crypto is a scam and it needs to do the legwork to show that it isn't. To claim that a blockchain (the most ludicrously inefficient data-structure ever devised) can scale to a billion users is an outrageous claim. The technical means they found overcome this problem should be front and center in their documentation.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#435

Post by josh2600 »

mbar84 wrote: post #434
dvdplm wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no dancing going on. He said he doesn’t know the exact numbers but is asking the engineers to dig it up for you. Please don’t be rude and please don’t put words in other people’s mouth.

As I say, this is a foundational issue that every blockchain project should address. Before I asked my initial question, I searched the documentation to see if it had been addressed. Such answers might be a second layer story, or some form of transaction aggregation on the base layer blockchain. I could not find anything that obviously looked like that. At this point I think it's perfectly fair to start with the assu…

I am going to do an AMA over at r/signal on Tuesday at 10am; please save questions for over there as I have to get back to work. I'll say this: the punchline here, as I'm sure you're aware, is that there are limitations to layer 1 scaling. We haven't discovered those limits at MobileCoin, but they surely exist.

The question becomes: what is tx throughput at N billion users? What are the scaling strategies that will get us there? It is zk-rollups (or zk-zk rollups)? Is it sharding? Is it moving to custom hardware circuits? I suspect it will be some combination of all of the above.

We don't know what the answer is yet and we will devote tremendous resources to figuring it out. I don't want to give the impression that MobileCoin as it is written today will scale to Alipay levels of tx throughput, but I do believe there is a path to get there that requires a ton of work.

Does that answer your question?

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#436

Post by mbar84 »

josh2600 wrote: post #435
mbar84 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I say, this is a foundational issue that every blockchain project should address. Before I asked my initial question, I searched the documentation to see if it had been addressed. Such answers might be a second layer story, or some form of transaction aggregation on the base layer blockchain. I could not find anything that obviously looked like that. At this point I think it's perfectly fair to start with the assu…

I am going to do an AMA over at r/signal on Tuesday at 10am; please save questions for over there as I have to get back to work. I'll say this: the punchline here, as I'm sure you're aware, is that there are limitations to layer 1 scaling. We haven't discovered those limits at MobileCoin, but they surely exist. The question becomes: what is tx throughput at N billion users? What are the scaling strategies that will g…

It answers it, in the sense that it acknowledges that the question remains to be answered.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#437

Post by Siira »

cshg wrote: post #240
skrowl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Signal's by default e2e encrypted chats can be used across platforms, e.g. synced across desktop and mobile. Telegram's secret chats are only available on the device where you initiated them. That's a major disadvantage.

Signal is single-device. The crappy web app that reads stuff from your phone is not a real client.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#438

Post by ebrenes »

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…

I also remember a period in time when I could use Trillian to connect to ICQ, MSM, AIM and have it all in one convenient chat client without having to fire up all the individual ones. Granted it sometimes broke when the protocols updated, but for a moment it was pretty cool.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#439

Post by gmitscha »

Siira wrote: post #437
cshg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal's by default e2e encrypted chats can be used across platforms, e.g. synced across desktop and mobile. Telegram's secret chats are only available on the device where you initiated them. That's a major disadvantage.

Signal is single-device. The crappy web app that reads stuff from your phone is not a real client.

I just have to reply here because it's so wrong.

Signal doesn't even have a web app. They have a desktop app that works great and that I use every day, all day long for all kinds of communication. On my desktop and laptop.

Re: Et Tu, Signal?

#440

Post by mobilecoinshill »

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…

You mentioned exchanges own ~50% of the mobilecoin supply, how did they come to posses that amount of coins? Did you give them away for free? Or did they pay some price for each of the coins they have? If it's the latter can you disclose at what price you sold the coins for? This would give mobilecoin users a good baseline price for what the creators of the coin believe it's worth. Thank you.
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