Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 665 posts

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

#641

Post by ohyeshedid »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #347
hn8788 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal may not own any MobileCoins, but the CEO of MobileCoin said: > MobileCoin has not yet paid Signal anything for integrating MobileCoin. We intend to donate a great deal of money to Signal over the coming years.

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....

Until something goes awry in that crypto scheme and some intelligence agency decides to use that as leverage to undermine the security of Signal. Moxie, on his own, may be resistant to pressure, but when there's a secondary company involved that might be pressured by threats of losing several million dollars...

This commingling of business interests means there's more angles of approach, and much more risk exposure.

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

#642

Post by climb_stealth »

glenneroo wrote: post #637
po wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it was a disaster for Keybase IMO. My messaging tools are already valuable enough to me, the last thing I wanted was a reward on hacking it. When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. I don't like using SMS for 2FA because it encourages people to social engineer the phone company to port the victim's phone numbers. I wouldn't want crypto in my m…

> When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. Just FYI but those Stellar drops are worth over 500 USD right now.

Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?

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

#643

Post by glenneroo »

climb_stealth wrote: post #642
glenneroo wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. Just FYI but those Stellar drops are worth over 500 USD right now.

Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?

Most of the big exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Kraken and even Coinbase support it now.

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

#644

Post by woobilicious »

josh2600 wrote: post #174
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founding organization owns 85% of the total market cap of a coin? That should be raising red flags for everyone involved. There is no valid reason for the vast majority of what is supposedly a currency to be owned by the company that created it. Imagine if PayPal launched but required everyone to transact in fractional shares of PayPal to get anything done. Oh and by the way, those shares are majority owned by th…

The majority of the MobileCoins are available for purchase for non-us persons at https://www.buymobilecoin.com right now.

Will you buy my coins back at a fair price?

What value do you provide? at least when I buy vbucks from Epic I know I'm getting fortnite skins with it.

Why should we run a node free of charge when you extract all the profits of our efforts?

When I see statements like "there's no economic incentive."

I read "I want all the profits, and screw everyone else".

If you genuinely wanted a decentralized network, then you would provide fair compensation for the added value the node provides against attacks on the network.

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

#645

Post by climb_stealth »

glenneroo wrote: post #643
climb_stealth wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?

Most of the big exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Kraken and even Coinbase support it now.

Ooo, you are right. Thanks for the tips!

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

#646

Post by dogecoinbase »

fastball wrote: post #487
dogecoinbase wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the code is the contract, each of those actors is individually liable as a tortfeasor.

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

#647

Post by woobilicious »

fX0rObfoMN4 wrote: post #586
hjek wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And way less energy consumption, according to their website.

That is because there is no mining. A proof of stake coin would also use electricity but MobileCoin doesn't even do that.

PoS and MobileCoin validator nodes use about the same amount of electricity.

I'm not a fan of PoS because it looks like a ponzie scheme (unless it's done like eth where initial distribution is done via mining)

This is actually worse than PoS, because PoS uses standard public key cryptographic to validate ownership of coin in the chain to stake, it at least in theory can achieve "trustless" validation.

This on the other hand is just a shitty attempt to outsource database maintenance to untrusted 3rd parties, using SGX, while forcing them to pay for S3 hosting because they can't implement a DHT to do proper decentralized file transfers.

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

#648

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #619
IshKebab wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't want private electronic payments. In stable countries like the UK - where this is being launched - it's basically only useful for buying drugs and tax evasion.

This is the way government wants you to think. They want to know literally every dollar (unit_of_monetary_exchange) that you use and don't care one iota about your privacy. They don't want you to value privacy at all.

Here's the reality of the situation.

The vast majority of people simply don't care about this. I mean I have a hard enough of a time to get people to care about privacy-centered messaging apps. Getting them to even begin to comprehend the myriad of cryptocurrencies and the confusing space of DeFi is simply not going to catch on. To them, there's really no benefit outside of "number go up" and so-called store of values, which conveniently have the nasty side effect of requiring users to do their own OpSec. That's actually harder than you think.

And that's not even accounting for how scam-ridden the entire space is to begin with. Who can they even begin to trust? Seems like an oxymoron for a trustless system, when the fact is they aren't even sure if they can trust themselves.

I find it mildly hilarious too, that places like BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are exploring cryptocurrency storage options. Now we are back to "trusting" those darn evil banks everyone gets triggered about.

See how weird this rabbit hole gets?

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

#649

Post by lnl »

ac29 wrote: post #200
lrvick wrote: post #84

Signal is still centrally controlled and compiled by a single entity and distributed only in an unsigned insecure form or in a signed/verified manner only if you give up your privacy to install with Google Play or the Apple store. Those that only run open source software like myself have no secure way to run Signal short of compiling every release by hand which is impractical. Moxie has stated he will not support any…

> Not to mention you need to show government ID to get a SIM to use the Signal wallet for said private currency/messenger in 200 countries. There are less than 200 countries in total, unless you get very creative with states that are arent recognized more more than a handful of other countries, like Abkhazia or Transnistria. You also dont need ID to buy SIM cards in the US, so I'm curious on how valid this assertion…

See the map on page 7 (PDF page 9) of the GSMA report "Access to Mobile Services and Proof of Identity 2020": https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads...

To get counts, I also analyzed the table in the annex; it lists exactly 200 countries (checking each of them, that's because in addition to 193 UN members, it includes two non-member countries: Kosovo and Taiwan, and five other non-countries: French Guiana, Greenland, Hong Kong, Macao, Svalbard).

Of these, 34 are listed as "SIM registration not mandated" and further 7 are listed as "SIM registration under consideration", the rest are "SIM registration mandated", i.e. 159 countries.

Basically the whole world requires it except for North America/UK and a few smaller countries mostly in Europe. Also notable that countries without ID requirement mostly happen to be the ones with very low prepaid SIM penetration (see the map on page 6 [page 8 of the PDF]) so their unidentified SIM usage is presumably low anyway, though it remains a possibility in those countries.

Edit: Sorry, 6 are listed as "State of SIM registration inconclusive" which I have missed, so "SIM registration mandated" count should be 153.

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

#650

Post by dlubarov »

josh2600 wrote: post #79
fourstar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So essentially, this is a mashup between XMR (ring sigs) and XLM (consensus protocol)? Why not use zk-proofs?

If you can find a way to do ZK-proofs that work in the time constraints that we have (1-3 seconds end to end transaction completion and finality), then we'll switch to them. Right now this is the only way we could get the performance we wanted.

As someone who works on ZKPs, that's very doable :)

In a Zcash-style spend circuit, the bottleneck is typically the Merkle inclusion proof, which takes say 32 hashes (assuming a limit of 2^32 note commitments). If we're comfortable with using one of the newer arithmetic hashes like Poseidon, that's about 10k constraints. Any of the modern argument systems (Groth16, Plonk, STARKs, etc.) can give proof times well under a second with a circuit of that size. If we want to optimize further, we can get proof times down to around 10-20ms (single-threaded) by using an arithmetization that's carefully tailored to our circuit's bottlenecks.

If we stick with traditional primitives like SHA-256, the circuit becomes substantially larger, but with modern techniques we can at least get proof times under a second. Happy to talk through the options if it would be useful.

Post reply on HN