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Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

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Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#481

Post by ncmncm »

Arathorn wrote: post #180
ncmncm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It would be OK to make Signal able to integrate payment systems and make this thing compatible with that or with any other comm that implements the interface. Tying them together is pernicious. Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services, and by being very choosy about who gets ports. I had high hopes for Matrix, once they got E2EE, but they have flubbed that…

speaking as CEO of Element, our business model is really not tied to Synapse being heavyweight at all - just the opposite. We provide Synapse hosting starting at $2/user/month, and so it's critical that running a server (including sysadmin) costs us as little as possible in order to be above water. We're not competing against self-hosters, but catering to folks who aren't sysadmins and so want us to host for them. An…

Anything that needs a database is by definition a heavy-weight server.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#482

Post by mtsr »

jakecopp wrote: post #443
JeremyNT wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of anti-feature is not what I signed up for. I just wanted a secure messenger normal users could understand! It seems like a simple enough problem that Signal solved well (apart from the phone number requirement). Sadly, now it feels like Signal was just a long game trojan for Marlinspike to onboard users to a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme. This has nothing to do with its core functionality and it makes me…

> The state of secure messaging is really bleak. I wish Matrix had an IM-style client that was decent enough for non-technical users to adopt. See Element [1] which uses Matrix [2]. It feels like IM, and is super simple to onboard new users. I'm not involved with it, but I'm a huge fan of the Matrix ecosystem. If you want group chats to be mixed in with 1-1 chats, try SchildiChat [3], a fork of Element. [1]: https://…

Even with a fast home server Element is quite slow. Slow enough that even I, trying to get my circle to use it, feel some reluctance to open the app. Hopefully the upcoming Hydrogen client can solve this.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#483

Post by godelski »

reader_mode wrote: post #477
godelski wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except it's not... my sister ... I don't see how these relate. Signal isn't explicitly aimed at high security targets, although it works for them (seeing the Snowden endorsement). Signal is about bringing encryption to the masses. Making E2EE the default choice for everyone. Is is much more about mass surveillance. Your sister has a different threat model, one where they are also concerned about the physical device…

I'm just giving real world scenarios where people might have two phones, plenty of people have them for different reasons, it's useful to sync between them - I should have worded that differently.

Oh, I understand now. Though I would argue in your sister's case she would explicitly not want to sync. But other people might. I'm actually highly in favor of Signal allowing multiple devices and their platform to be expanded (it'd be nice for IOT bots). Or even allowing for decentralization while maintaining the core official node.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#484

Post by comex »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #135
josh2600 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stellar actually does nothing to prevent double-spends as it is the consensus layer and not the ledger. The ledger prevents double spends in mobilecoin by using a proof called a "key image" which is part of CryptoNote ( https://bytecoin.org/old/whitepaper.pdf ). Essentially, a ring signature is produced by the user which says "one of these N transactions belong to me" and the key image proves that one of the members…

I don't understand the "key image" cryptography, but I can't fathom how any cryptography, no matter how smart it is, could prevent the user from: 1) Creating a backup of their wallet on disk. 2) Sending their coins somewhere, but not broadcasting the transaction to the network, instead storing it in a file. 3) Restoring from the backup 4) Sending the coins to a different address = double spending them. 5) Broadcastin…

The client trusts a list of centralized validator servers, albeit protected by SGX, to resolve conflicts. At least according to:

https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/mobilecoin/tree/mast...

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#485

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #398
CynicusRex wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No “pre-mine” doesn't mean fairly distributed. Bitcoin is a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme as well. Early adopters mine or buy large proportions at negligible prices while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large prices.

By that definition, any stock or collectible is a "multi-level marketing pyramid scheme". A multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme is not defined as anything where early adopters might have purchased it at a lower price than later adopters.

Which is interesting. Unlike virtually every stock on the stock market, I see Bitcoin-stans constantly harp about the "USD price" of Bitcoin on places like Twitter, Youtube, any social media with a large enough megaphone, just so they can stir up loads of FOMO and get people to make a financial decision that is likely not led with wisdom and prudence in mind. Especially with how high BTC is priced at now, you'd be lucky to have massive multipliers on your initial buy in as you might have in the earlier days. The diminishing point of returns is rearing its ugly head, so more pumping must happen to keep this all in the public zeitgeist.

That kinda smells pump and dump like to me. Lest we forget, the end of the previous bull runs in 2013 and 2017 wiped out some people that made bad investment decisions (and there's no guarantee another black swan event won't happen again in the future). Not to mention, whenever there is news of someone losing their wallet keys, Bitcoiners breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that that's one more person that has to permanently HODL. Gross.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#486

Post by thaumasiotes »

lmm wrote: post #360
thaumasiotes wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most countries have unfriendly tax treatment (capital gains on your coffee purchase). That's definitely unfriendly tax treatment. Is it different from the tax treatment that applies to national currencies?

Yes. It's the same tax treatment that applies to gold bullion or barrels of oil - volatile commodities that are at least partly speculative investments rather than stable mediums of exchange.

What is the tax treatment that applies to national currencies?

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#487

Post by fastball »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #447
whimsicalism wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have rug-pulled people with a hard fork. "People" here being criminals that exploited a flaw in the DAO, yeah?

At the time of that fork, the Ethereum website literally said "the code is the contract". Then, when someone found a perfectly legitimate use of that code that the creators failed to anticipate, they forcibly altered the contract. There are criminals here, but they're not the ones you think.

The issue with this narrative is that the "they" isn't the creators, it's the network. The Ethereum core devs can do whatever they want, but if nodes don't migrate across the hard fork then nothing happens.

The code is the contract, enforced by a decentralized network of actors. Of course that network can at any point change the contract if the majority of them agree to do so – how else would it work? The key is that there is no way for individual actors to modify contracts at will – you need consensus. It's the difference between oligarchy and democracy.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#488

Post by comex »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #120
josh2600 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stellar is essentially a liquid democracy system similar to DNS. The core proof at the heart of David Mazieres paper is that in a densely interwoven graph, any set of nodes in a quorum slice reaching consensus is graph consensus. Regarding Sybil, nodes define their own trust relationships, so membership is open but not automatic.

> Regarding Sybil, nodes define their own trust relationships, so membership is open but not automatic. Thanks for clarifying! So you're expecting people to - manually add peers to be able to use the network. - manually monitor the said peers for if they do malicious transactions, and manually ban them if yes. Right? How is this supposed to work considering that: - most users won't care about manually adding peers. T…

As far as I can tell, "nodes define their own trust relationships" is true only when considering the protocol at an abstract level, or if you're building the code yourself. As a concrete end user using the Signal client, you don't actually get to define your own trust relationships; the app is just hardcoded to trust a specific list of servers, albeit somewhat protected by SGX. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#489

Post by fastball »

cookiengineer wrote: post #470
cdogl wrote: post #302

Long-time Signal user here, with a number of technical and non-technical friends, colleagues and acquaintances who also use it. I don't know who was asking for this. And I think it really dilutes Signal's message. I believe that everyone has a fundamental right to secure, private communication. Some people may hold the same belief for the right to transfer funds. I don't agree and I suspect many others feel the same.…

I'm curious: why did you choose Signal when you care about privacy?

Probably because all conversations (1-to-1 and group chats) are E2EE.

Re: Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

#490

Post by ascorbic »

bdcs wrote: post #99
RL_Quine wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. Signal has obvious financial connections to MobileCoin, something that frankly nobody else has ever heard of before today. I find it really difficult to believe that MobileCoin paying Moxie (which you've acknowledged), and Signal/Moxie happening to choose MobileCoin for inclusion in Signal when nobody wanted it was a coinciden…

"Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own any MobileCoins." https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...

But does he own any shares or options in MobileCoin Inc?
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