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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

#651

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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 lu…

>>That kinda smells pump and dump like to me.

Yes agreed. Though I would add that this is a paradigm shifting technology, so there may be something substantive underlying all of this Bitcoin hype.

As for crypto as a whole, Ethereum has real world use cases, like stablecoins and NFTs, and an extensive multi-pronged development effort to expand its capabilities, in particular scalability, that cannot be dismissed as mere hype.

Just on the basis of fee revenue alone, and the assumption that this turns into income for ETH holders once the platform switches to Proof-of-Stake, Ethereum's current valuation can be justified with only the assumption that its price-earnings multiple will match that of relatively mature and low-growth industries like electronics.

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

#652

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The "scam" is using payment systems that allow their owners, controllers, or just hackers to spy on every single transaction on earth, accessing all your past present and future economical activity on demand. Not even the worst dictatorships of centuries past ever dreamt of such awareness and control. The promotion of pseudonymous and anonymous digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies is vital to a healthy an…

I can't really see how a craptocurrency attached to a messenger provides any sort of pseudonymity. If I can send money to you, I can later identify you in a ledger, which simply means I need to find some reason to converse with you and it's game over. If the ledger isn't public, you're back under corporate or Government control.

Signal does not require KYC, so there is no direct link there. As far as public ledgers are concerned, pseudonymous activity offers reasonable privacy controls as long as you know what you are doing.

There are also entirely anonymous cryptocurrencies with no readable public ledgers. Everything is still decentralised, no centralised control of any kind, but you can't see what people are doing (Monero and Zcash being good examples. Signal uses Mobilecoin, which still needs to stand the test of time).

There is still a long road to go before there is a fool proof anonymous, liquid, consumer friendly, usable cryptocurrency, but it is the last bastion of defense against complete total state and corporate surveillance. - One of the greatest threats to human life, on par with climate change.

Your use of the word "craptocurrency" is rather childish and naive. Eventually you will take a closer look at the situation and reconsider. Good luck

I will leave this https://www.theengineroom.org/dangerous-data-the-role-of-dat...

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lu…

>>That kinda smells pump and dump like to me. Yes agreed. Though I would add that this is a paradigm shifting technology, so there may be something substantive underlying all of this Bitcoin hype. As for crypto as a whole, Ethereum has real world use cases, like stablecoins and NFTs, and an extensive multi-pronged development effort to expand its capabilities, in particular scalability, that cannot be dismissed as me…

Personally, I'm still incredibly skeptical about Ethereum and its ilk, but certainly a far less energy wasteful PoS methodology in the next version (when it finally goes full throttle) I suppose would be a good start.

Adding to this, unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, which I believe to be the alias for a team and not a single person, Vitalik Buterin at least is not shrouded in mystery and is out in the open. I'll give credit where credit's due. He's pretty upfront about his pet projects.

I don't share your enthusiasm for stablecoins and especially NFTs, though that's an entirely different can of worms.

For now, I'm happy to see where this all goes as I watch from the sidelines and not capitulate to FOMO. Yet so far, I can't help but feel that the market effects surrounding the ETH network is nothing but grifts and rich-on-paper showboating. Plus, my God those gas fees...

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

#654
post #144

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That is just sad. I've been a longtime signal user (since the textsecure/redphone days). I've always given moxie a pass on his controversial decisions (no federalisation, no 3rd party clients, no fdroid repo, relying on Google play services, being slow to release serverside source code) because the team was small and obviously had to cut corners somewhere. But learning that they spent their time adding support for a…

What are your (you guys) opinions on Session ( https://getsession.org/ ), the Signal clone that uses Tor, and no phone numbers? Any significant downsides? Anybody know the team there and can speak on their trustworthiness, longer term intentions etc? What about the code they've added? Anybody review that? At a quick glance it looks like a decent but less user friendly alternative (no phone numbers - good for privacy,…

They are also going to integrate a cryptocurrency: https://getsession.org/crypto-craze/

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

#655
post #542

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One can argue than most people don't care about private messaging as well... I find it a bit scary that my bank has all my purchasing data : they basically know everything about me that way, what if they decide to sell this data ?

Use cash for every day payments - your bank will know nothing.

That's definitely not the direction taken by society... Pandemic, convenience, online businessew ( yeah, I know we could physically mail cash for online purchases but, come on... )

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

#656
HN crowd is too "first-world" centric : to me this is an attempt at taking over digital micropayment that ubiquitous now in third world economies where the informal economy is strong, and not everyone has access to banks, payment cards/terminal for your "side of the road" business, but now (cheap) smartphones are everywhere. At least that's how I would market the stuff if I were signal

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

#657
post #390

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Cult of personality holds more value than MobileCoin unfortunately. I wish there was a way to decentralize that value :-P

That's what NFT is.

NFTs are very expensive URL-lengtheners (instead of shorteners), and nothing more.

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

#658

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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.

That's fair. I guess maybe it's different when you have a group of people who actively use it.

It's certainly not the IRC/Discord/Slack replacement that I was hoping it'd be, where lots of "randoms" can join and a community develops.

The UX is still going to be unacceptable for most non-technical people, so I definitely can't convince my friends to switch from Discord, even for our private group.

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

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty much just like IRC The media capabilities are nothing like IRC. In fact I moved to Element because Conversations had trouble with media.

That's fair. I guess maybe it's different when you have a group of people who actively use it. It's certainly not the IRC/Discord/Slack replacement that I was hoping it'd be, where lots of "randoms" can join and a community develops. The UX is still going to be unacceptable for most non-technical people, so I definitely can't convince my friends to switch from Discord, even for our private group.

This is probably more about them being used to it ?

What is preventing "randoms" from joining ?

What are those "unacceptable UX issues" ?

BTW, if you really care about it you could insist like I generally do that it's either you or Discord/Slack.

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

#660
post #164

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Hi, I still have to read the docs more thoroughly, but given that these HN threads die out quickly, I'd rather ask now that I have the chance, so forgive me if some of these are answered in the docs: 1. how does MobileCoin make money? 2. how many coins do you / does MobileCoin own? 3. related to that, are there mechanisms in place to prove that this is not a pump and dump? Or simply, how do I know it's not one and it…

> 1. how does MobileCoin make money? MobileCoin pre-mined the coins and is selling them to users. According to other comments, they hold 85% of the coins. The CEO is commenting in this thread with a link to buy the coins. They make money by selling these coins.

I think the more pertinent question is how much of a stake Signal has in MobileCoin and why the details of this relationship are not being disclosed.

MobileCoin isn't even on the list of cryptocurrencies you can make a donation in.. which makes this seem more like a cash grab rather than something that was thought out.

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