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Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

wired.com

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

#551

Post by ironMonkey »

TriNetra wrote: post #475
meowfly wrote: post #195

The comment from the article echos my own sentiments: > Speaking solely as a person who is really into encrypted messaging, it terrifies me that they're going to take this really clean story of an encrypted messenger and mix it up with the nightmare of laws and regulations and vulnerability that is cryptocurrency. Moreover, there are three other points I'd add: 1. I don't like "do everything" apps like WeChat or Line…

I don't know how will it play out for Signal in countries which have banned or are planning to ban crypto as a currency. RBI had issued policy to banks to stop providing banking services to people/organizations holding/trading in crypto. Though the blanket ban was invalidated by the supreme court after two years, but using it as currency is against Indian Law and the government is working on a new law to further rest…

Nothing really stops Signal from shipping a build w/o a crypto wallet to comply.

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

#552

Post by qertoip »

otoburb wrote: post #206
qertoip wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MobileCoin is not a cryptocurrency.

The Wired article that the CEO of Mobilecoin is implicitly endorsing in this thread specifically categorizes Mobilecoin as a cryptocurrency. At least, it doesn’t seem to be a distinction worth splitting hairs about (yet).

I don't give a shit about Wired categorization. MobileCoin is a company. It has a fucking CEO. Cryptocurrency is by definition decentralized.

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

#553

Post by codethief »

cookiengineer wrote: post #550
codethief wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making very strong claims here. Signal regularly goes the extra mile to protect their users from 3rd-party tracking (by Giphy[0, 1] etc.) and, as they noted on GitHub at some point, they also consciously decided against UI/UX tracking and error reporting because they did not want to give off the impression that they themselves are surveilling their users. And now you're telling us that they deliberately includ…

> AFAIK the Signal app doesn't connect to the Google servers directly, so even if it exists, the cookie doesn't get transferred anywhere. The Firebase Cloud Messaging library / Google Play Services on your phone do connect to Google but they carry unique identifiers, anyway. It does connect to google's servers for pretty much everything [1] - you can look for these constants in the codebase and you'll find lots of th…

Thanks for the response! I will have to postpone a detailed response to later. In the meantime:

> Make an Access Point, use smartphone to connect to it. Run Wireshark, and you'll see what's happening.

That won't help when it comes to how stuff is encrypted locally, i.e. the hardware-backed encryption[0].

PS: I think I updated my comment while you were already responding.

[0]: https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2019/08/how-to-extract-and-decryp...

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

#554

Post by lmm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #486
lmm wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Country-specific, but often you don't have to account for them up to a certain limit, and/or you can treat anything you buy in a foreign national currency as having been bought at what you originally paid for that currency.

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

#555

Post by mfsch »

RL_Quine wrote: post #102
bdcs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> "Moxie, as an individual, is a paid technical advisor to MobileCoin" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715013 This seems incompatible with the spirit of the quote in the article.

The article says “Marlinspike has served as a paid technical adviser for the project since its inception” in the same paragraph, so I would say the article is quite clear on the financial relationship.

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

#556

Post by Slartie »

fooqux wrote: post #22
RL_Quine wrote: post #12

This is garbage, and shouldn't be part of Signal. Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't belong, it turns Signal from an obvious recommendation into something that makes me hesitate. There's something to be said for focusing on doing one thing well, and that doesn't mean turning a communication platform into a kitchen sink.

Signal is competing against some big players in the messaging space, at least some of which have money transfers. As long as they abide by their principles and none of these features impact privacy, I don't see how it wouldn't be viewed as a win. A case could be made for it being bloat, but most consumers don't care, and for Signal (or any messaging app) to be successful, it needs to appeal to the common denominator.…

But they're not adding a "money" transfer option, they're adding a "MobileCoin" transfer option! For the overwhelming part of society, these are not interchangeable terms.

When people want to send "money" to other people, they usually imply that they want to send units of the local currency, like USD or EUR. And they usually imply that the value of these units should stay the same during transfer. If I want to pay my share of a restaurant visit to my friend who covered the check, I'd like the 30$ I'm sending to still hold enough value when they arrive in his bank account to actually cover my share. A cryptocurrency intermediate that swings +/- 20% in value within minutes (and that we both have to pay conversion fees in order to acquire/redeem for $) is of exactly no use at all for such a use case.

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

#557

Post by BlueTemplar »

nerdponx wrote: post #440
BlueTemplar wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, any reservations about Matrix ?

Questionable UX in the flagship/reference Element client, and it's laggy/slow no matter where your homeserver is hosted. After so many years, it's still a curiosity and for-hackers-only experience that's pretty much just like IRC but with lots of lag. I'm about ready to to give up on it. I still love the idea of it and I hope it actually gets good/usable one day. Until then, I can recommend it only if you want to be…

> pretty much just like IRC

The media capabilities are nothing like IRC.

In fact I moved to Element because Conversations had trouble with media.

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

#558

Post by approxim8ion »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #520
meowfly wrote: post #195

The comment from the article echos my own sentiments: > Speaking solely as a person who is really into encrypted messaging, it terrifies me that they're going to take this really clean story of an encrypted messenger and mix it up with the nightmare of laws and regulations and vulnerability that is cryptocurrency. Moreover, there are three other points I'd add: 1. I don't like "do everything" apps like WeChat or Line…

What about using Wickr as an alternative to Signal. What all these "tech" companies tend to do is to exploit a captured audience. They are generally not focused on doing one thing well (producing a product or providing a service), they are more focused on building a following and then doing with those users whatever they like. One of the most blatent examples of this line of thinking is Microsoft's acquisitions. They…

Wickr is proprietary.

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

#559

Post by verytrivial »

And I'd just managed to convince a quorum of my friends to move from WhatsApp to Signal. At this rate I'm going to be using Mixmaster remailers and talking to no-one again before the year is out. Remember Keybase ICO? I try not to.

There is a near zero-chance my friends and family would have done this without buy-in from their nerd contact. I sold it hard. And this same nerd has been talking about cryptocurrencies too, almost exclusively that they are at best tulip-craze scams, at worst just a way to bait drug dealers and law enforcement onto your device. Not to mention the hideous environmental impact (and you are about to talk about proof-of-stake, just ... don't.)

I can not stress enough how much I want this experiment to fail.

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

#560

Post by xorcist »

freeone3000 wrote: post #401
ImprovedSilence wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view there are worse ways to make money from a chat app. Like selling all your users data. Ir worse yet just selling out to FB. At least a crypto scheme can maybe be the cash cow that helps them keep true to the privacy aspect....

I'm really tired of every single company going through some abusive scam or data harvesting scheme to avoid simply charging me money.

Yet somehow the Wikipedia project has managed to stay afloat during all these years...

I'm pretty sure more than one WikiCoin has been pitched too.

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