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MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

429 points by golangnews 9y ago

darawk 9y ago
Anyone got a link to the project's website? I'd like to read an actual technical description. Anything MM is involved in is gold in my book.
- superquest 9y ago
  site: https://www.mobilecoin.com/ https://www.mobilecoin.com/ whitepaper: https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf
  - darawk 9y ago
    Thanks, strange Google didn't bring that up.
    - superquest 9y ago
      Yea I saw that. I think they just put the site up and hasn't been indexed yet.
superquest 9y ago
> "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." Amen. Too few projects have this focus.
- icelancer 9y ago
  > "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." This is being solved by Shapeshift.io and XMR.to. I transact in cryptocurrency all the time using these intermediary services with BTC as the usual medium of exchange. It's opened my skeptical eyes about the future of how things will work.
  - superquest 9y ago
    https://xmr.to/ https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person. And it still processes a Bitcoin transaction, correct? So it will be no faster than Bitcoin?
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >https://xmr.to/ https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person. OK, that's fine, but services like that could - and will - get much friendlier. I'm just rebutting the quote which is the blanket "no one transacts in cryptocurrency" which is certainly not true for me, even though I felt that way just 2 months ago. Now that I am an active miner of various currencies, I find myself using it quite frequently for random goods/services, even though the plan was really just to convert it quickly into USD fiat to continue reinvesting into the mining operations or to pocket it.
      - superquest 9y ago
        Fair point. I think "no one" here is a rhetorical exaggeration meaning "not very many," which might resolve our disagreement ...
- wmf 9y ago
  Because you can't get rich building it and you can't get rich hodling it and the press won't create much buzz.
  - superquest 9y ago
    Why can't you get rich building it? I doubt one would get rich as Bitcoin creators, but one could still make a killing .... Edit: And this stands to reason. We're relatively later in the game, and so new contributions are less fundamental by definition.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - lumberjack 9y ago
      > Why can't you get rich building it? Because it defeats the point. There is no "coin" that will exponentially appreciate in value, making you a billionaire. There is also no centralisation, so you cannot be the owner of the payment system in the same way that Paypal or Visa are. At best you can be the Linus Torvalds of your payment system non-profit. Which would be a good gig in itself. But that comes with lots of hard work, not the easy riches that you can do from some hype-pump-dump scam in less than 6 months.
      - snowwrestler 9y ago
        To build on this comment, the purpose of a currency is to facilitate the transaction of value, not to store value. If an instrument stores value, it's an asset, not currency. One can of course transact business with assets, but it's a lot more complicated because you have to agree to a valuation. And without a currency, how do you measure that? Plus, the incentives for assets and currencies are opposed. Currency exists to be spent, but if an asset is appreciating, you'll want to hold it, not trade it. Bitcoin was advertised as a currency but it's acting like an asset. (And it's regulated like an asset.) If you create a new class of asset, you can buy in early, hold on, and get rich on appreciation. But if you invent a new currency? It's like inventing the inch. Even if everyone uses it, that doesn't give you any more length of your own.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Doesn't lightning network fix this problem?
  - Cyberdog 9y ago
    Tell us all about all the problems Lightning Network fixes once it is actually implemented.
    - prophesi 9y ago
      Doesn't solve usability, but it solves the slow transaction speeds.
      - superquest 9y ago
        Note: transaction speed is a component of usability
      - icelancer 9y ago
        That's possible, but the commenter above you isn't talking about that. He is talking about the fact that it is yet to launch and solve all of the problems it purports to.
    - jerdfelt 9y ago
      I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that Lightning Network is vaporware, but there are currently three implementations that pass the integration tests: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/ https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/
      - Cyberdog 9y ago
        Oh, please. You and the other replier knew what I meant by "implemented."
- highd 9y ago
  This is secondary to there being no benefit to the average user for transacting in crypto vs Visa. What incentive is there for an end user to use even a hypothetically optimal crypto system? Then is that incentive sufficient to overcome network effects? The appropriate and interesting applications of crypto seem to be totally leaving p2p cash behind - it just doesn't seem like a good fit.
  - superquest 9y ago
    The hypothetically optimal crypto system would be cheaper for merchants, correct? So it would have wider adoption than Visa, at the very least. I do agree that crypto keeps drifting away from p2p cash ... that's a good observation. But I hope people keep shooting at that target.
    - kang 9y ago
      > The hypothetically optimal crypto system would be cheaper for merchants Incorrect. Decentralization is always more expensive and slower than centralized system(both hypothetically optimal) due to extra sync cost.
      - wmf 9y ago
        You're mixing cost and price. Let's say the cost of a Visa transaction is 0.1% and the price is 2.5% while the cost and price of a MobileCoin transaction are 0.2%. It costs more but it's still cheaper for merchants.
        highd 9y ago
        Cash is cheaper for merchants, but people have only continued to use credit cards more. Further, if crypto becomes attractive from a cost perspective Visa will just be forced to bring down fees and stay competitive. It's pretty near impossible to imagine crypto with costs less than Visa's database.
        9y ago
- DennisP 9y ago
  On reason, in the U.S. at least, is that you're supposed to pay capital gains on every little bit you spend. There's a bill in Congress right now to exclude crypto transactions under $600 from capital gains, which would be a big help. Even if you do want to hold long term, you could just replenish what you spend along the way, if it weren't a tax reporting nightmare.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    You also do so in the UK and virtually every other country I can think off.
    - celticninja 9y ago
      Nope. You only have to report capital gains in excess of your annual allowance, which is £11,300 at the moment.
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        You still have to record them. Also don’t forget that if you have an ISA, other savings and investments that allowance isn’t that big. As an individual if you mine you have to record the value as it was at the time of mining if you buy you record it at the time of purchase and you pay capital gains if you exchange the crypto for fiat currency or goods or services directly on the difference between the values. It gets more complicated since you can’t select an individual currency unit form your wallet but atm you are allowed to use creative accounting for that. The fact that you have an allowance doesn’t mean it’s not taxed and if you have any substantial amount you’ll blow throgh that allowance pretty darn fast.
        psergeant 9y ago
        I don’t believe any assets held in an ISA have any bearing at all on your capital gains allowance.
        9y ago
pilingual 9y ago
Here is a year old paper from Imperial College and Cornell where they implemented trustless transactions using Intel SGX. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/teechan.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/teechan.pdf
- grandmczeb 9y ago
  “SGX” and “trustless” aren’t two things that really go together.
- alexnewman 9y ago
  This is significantly stronger and harder than what that paper suggested
  - anonymousDan 9y ago
    In what way? I mean this (Mobile Coin) is almost the very definition of vapourware. A 4 page whitepaper, come on.
    - kossTKR 9y ago
      Yes i also find this high school level white paper pretty weird. Also no roadmap, no github, only 3 person team. But Moxie Marlinspike though...
ajennings 9y ago
Wow. MM is really going all-in on for Software Guard Extensions (secure enclave) on the server. What does HN say? Do we trust Intel (motivation and implementation) that much?
- 21 9y ago
  This is the best way to test SGX, there will be huge incentives to find a vulnerability of any kind (including hardware).
- chatmasta 9y ago
  In multiple verticals of the industry, there exists a clear trend of utilizing hardware security modules for cryptographic operations. Almost all mobile phones have them, cloud providers offer HSM services, and Trezor wallets generate bitcoin private keys. It makes sense to build a service that relies heavily on HSM. Adapt or die
- mtgx 9y ago
  No, but probably worth a shot. I think AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) sounded better, though. But it's a shame AMD only offers it on the EPYC server chips. they ought to make it a mainstream feature in Zen 2 chips if they want it to gain popularity and use. That said, that's probably not an obstacle for a company that plans on using server chips anyway. https://developer.amd.com/amd-secure-memory-encryption-sme-amd-secure-encrypted-virtualization-sev/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-secure-memory-encryption-sme-a...
- kyledrake 9y ago
  At the end of the day, trust is still required. For example, if you use Bitcoin, you're trusting the people that wrote the code and the libraries it linked to and the people that ran the server you downloaded it from, and you're trusting that Koblitz didn't put a backdoor into the ECC somehow. I could go on for a while here but I think this describes the basic idea. You can change the level of trust required or who you're trusting but not the mere requirement of it. I've met some of the people working on this at Intel and I do have confidence that this isn't some conspiracy, I do think they have the intention of improving the crypto space with projects like this.
TD-Linux 9y ago
This coin uses Stellar, which is not a decentralized consensus like Bitcoin, but rather federated. It's not really surprising that it has performance advantages. Also not sure how I feel trusting the fate of a cryptocurrency to the strength of Intel's SGX.
- kossTKR 9y ago
  "MobileCoin does not rely solely on SGX for maintaining transaction privacy. Transactions are designed to employ CryptoNote1 one-time addresses and onetime ring signatures, so MobileCoin will still maintain transaction privacy through unlinkable addresses if an attacker is able to defeat SGX and view transactions on the network." https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf Other than that, i very much share your concern..
  - TD-Linux 9y ago
    It also says that the clients transmit private keys and PINs to the SGX nodes, which presumably allow spending of their coins. Maybe it's designed in a way that they lose their money, but maintain the privacy of their previous and other transactions going through the node.
    - hoschicz 9y ago
      Users have to transmit the private keys to their nodes, but not the PIN. This tradeoff was taken to prevent people from losing their money by losing their phone. If the secure enclave were broken, nodes could, theoretically, be able to brute-force the private keys. I think that in reality, there will really be just a few nodes: Signal, WhatsApp and some bots/banks/businesses. The trust system in place is ideal for this.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        This is what the whitepaper says: > At install time, Alice's client performs remote attestation with its Mobile-Coin node, establishes a secure communication channel into the remote enclave, and transmits its keypair along with its recovery PIN.
ikeboy 9y ago
So, it's using DRM to hide the blockchain, is that right?
- kbwt 9y ago
  So if the coin's market cap were higher than Intel's, you could buy Intel and use the SGX master keys to establish rogue nodes and take over the network. In fact this is no better at all than if Intel were simply running the MobileCoin service as a centralized provider/bank.
  - ikeboy 9y ago
    Buying Intel is not that simple and would be disclosed far in advance of the actual purchase.
berberous 9y ago
1) Both Kin and MobileCoin have moved to Stellar as their back end this week. I haven't paid Stellar much attention before. Anyone have any good links that explains Stellar and/or discusses the technical pros/cons? Trying to avoid any shill/pump or baseless FUD. 2) Am I correct that if any vulnerability were found in the SGX, an attacker would gain access to the encrypted private keys that are stored on a server node and would just need to brute force the PIN?
- joyce 9y ago
  Here is a link to the blog post when the Stellar Consensus Protocol was released. It includes a summary in Stellar's own words and a link to the white paper: https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- eridius 9y ago
  I don't have a good link for Stellar but it's been around for a while, and the Rust creator even worked for them for some time. Regarding the second point, since it's on the server, wouldn't a vulnerability just mean the server operator might potentially be able to get at the keys, not any random attacker?
- zulucrypto 9y ago
  I've done some work with Stellar and the implementation in the whitepaper sounds very different than how Stellar currently works. For example, users control their own private keys and they're never exposed to a node, so I'm not sure why the whitepaper mentions storing private keys in the SGX. Perhaps they're going to host wallets for a user and store all keys in the SGX? I'll be very interested in more details about this project since it doesn't appear to use the Stellar network, only the consensus protocol.
tuccinator 9y ago
I feel like the real appeal of Bitcoin is the decentralized aspect. I am not totally intrigued at the idea of having a controlled system, even if it offers complete privacy and faster transaction speed.
- superquest 9y ago
  Something like this could make sense for "petty cash spending"
  - icelancer 9y ago
    I believe that was the intent of Stellar.
- eridius 9y ago
  If it works like Stellar (which it sounds like it does), it's still a decentralized network of nodes, but each individual user isn't a node. They pick a node to work with, and that node is then connected to a set of other nodes. Anyone can run a node, but there's just not any point to it for most users.
  - babaganoosh89 9y ago
    Kinda like bitcoin thin clients?
  - nileshtrivedi 9y ago
    How is that better or different from Bitcoin users trusting CoinBase?
    - eridius 9y ago
      You can't just spin up your own CoinBase if you don't trust coinbase.com. I mean, it's BitCoin, so you can run your own transactions, but you can't do any of the other stuff CoinBase does. But with Stellar or something based on its consensus protocol, you can run your own node if you want, or more likely, a bunch of public nodes can exist and you can pick the one you trust to work with. For example, if banks decide to start working with MobileCoin, then Chase could offer a node and, as a Chase customer, you could decide to trust their node (since you already trust them to manage your money) and use that one.
zokeia 9y ago
Where can I invest in this?
Confiks 9y ago
To repeat an earlier comment, this scheme encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers. You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] who can wield their power over you. A manufacturer may 'legitimately' establish an enclave in your most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if that security model becomes commonplace, for example when only allowing Widevine DRM inside SGX, you eventually cannot use your self-chosen hardware, but will have to pick a feudal lord from a limited set of 'ecosystem choices'. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feudal.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...
- senand 9y ago
  Complete reference link: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feudal.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...
- darawk 9y ago
  That was my first impression as well. That being said, I have a lot of respect for Moxie and his work, so i'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and am curious to see his response to this point.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- nebulous1 9y ago
  Yes, the features of the SGX means that we can no longer even see what are computer is doing. > This means that the ledger is "public" and distributed to all MobileCoin nodes, but will also simultaneously never be accessible or viewable by humans (even the operators of the MobileCoin nodes) so long as SGX and the MobileCoin software remains secure. It seems unlikely to me that these two things things will remain the case. > A client can perform remote attestation to its MobileCoin node before transmitting its keys into the remote enclave along with a short recovery PIN. And it seems if SGX gets popped the whole thing comes crumbling down. Quotes from https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf
Nrbelex 9y ago
> "9. Bob's MobileCoin node sends Bob's client a message, which can then calculate the private key that corresponds to the generated one-time public key." >" 10. Bob has now successfully received a payment." If I'm reading this correctly, Bob's client (e.g. mobile app) must be in contact with the node for his address to receive the payment. This is pretty different from what I think will be Mobilecoin's closest competitors (at least from a UX standpoint), Venmo, Google Wallet, etc. DDOSing Bob's mobile device or otherwise preventing access to the node would, at least temporarily, prevent the transaction from going through. Are the funds in purgatory during that period? If that client never gets in contact with the node, does the transaction ever get reversed, allowing the sender to regain control of the funds? There are probably a host of other repercussions I haven't thought through yet. The idea of a cryptocoin as easy to use as Venmo/Signal is definitely intriguing.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  how is the need to be in contact with the node different than the need to be in contact with venmo’s servers?
  - nunyabuizness 9y ago
    It's different because regardless if your node is online or not, venmo's servers can still accept payments on your behalf, and it's presumed that taking venmo's servers offline would be considerably harder than taking yours offline.
- hoschicz 9y ago
  I think that in practice, every operator of a messaging app will have their own node. There will be Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. nodes and some small nodes for businesses, bots and similar. Yes, theoretically, if you DDoSed Signal, then Bob wouldn't be able to get the coins.
icelancer 9y ago
MobileCoin is backed by XLM/Stellar, which is not decentralized, and so I feel I should note here that I signed up during Stripe's giveaway of Stellar Lumens years ago - and I did indeed get my wallet credited. https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was: "I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information. You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQYOHJNFW42YZ55MPQKPQ5BGI2ZPD72G3H3/operations https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ... Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point. Apologies we cannot be of further help." I have pretty damn good security of my various accounts using hardware 2FA and such, and I also transact in cryptocurrency and have wallets with far more fiat value in them than 6000 XLM had at the time ($120-150 USD if I recall), with absolutely no issue - and I hadn't even logged into their official wallet. The developers were 100% quick to blame this merge on me. I replied with a flat: "I highly doubt you are correct that it is my fault" email and it went back and forth with them asking the basic "well, did you get spearphished somehow" as if anyone even knew what XLM were or cared. The process dragged on for a month while I bothered people in their Slack channel since email communication dropped out and they finally came back with: "Our team has investigated and checked for multiple different types of issues and have not found anything on our end that shows any type of security compromise in our system. Unfortunately this means at this moment I do not have a concrete answer to how your account was compromised. I’ll follow up again to check if there is anything on your end they would recommend you do." I investigated on my own and found a number of accounts who were "hacked" and sent XLM coins to the wallet that I had merged with, all that just kind of sat there, indicating a software error on their end of a bunch of accounts that were randomly emptied. I provided all documentation to their team and spent a solid 15-20 hours doing so. Their response to all of this bug bounty-type work? "They have identified one potential issue in the past that affected only a small number of accounts, possibly yours. This bug was fixed once discovered back in 2014, but users who may have been vulnerable to the bug were still impacted during the upgrade process to the new network even after it was resolved. Although we think this was the cause of what happened, we cannot be 100% sure if this was what impacted your account considering you had a strong password and none of your other accounts were compromised." And: "Although we cannot recover you original lumens from your account, we’d like to award you 3000 lumens as part of our Bug Bounty Program because you have helped us in identifying a possible issue that happened in the past." So they basically gave me half the XLM back instead of the full amount despite it being entirely their fault and them having no idea how to investigate while I exposed a serious flaw in how XLM were assigned and paid to their wallets, all while blaming me the entire time and with atrociously slow customer response times. Forgive me if I'm not the biggest XLM/Stellar Lumens fan; their team is both terrible at support and suggests that at least their frontline investigators are technically incompetent since they couldn't figure out the merge situation before I did with simple API poking around and enumerating.
Canada 9y ago
It's cryptocurrency secured by DRM.
superquest 9y ago
How might this project grow out of its dependence on Intel hardware over time?
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  Like most other tulip breeds, the craze over their creation will turn to sudden death before the practical concerns they raise need to be considered.
muricula 9y ago
A bit ironic that MobileCoin is targeting x86_64 and SGX seeing that the vast majority of mobile devices run ARM. I wonder how easy this would be to port to the ARM trustzone?
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
  ARM Trustzone doesn't do anything related to remote attestation, which I'm guessing this thing is all about (even if the article doesn't seem to mention it). So I'll claim it is impossible. Edit: You could still check the signatures signed by the trusted Intel CPUs on your ARM device of course, but any mining would have to happen on a SGX-enabled Intel CPU. (Or anything else with Intel's private key.)
rjromero 9y ago
Anyone have any links to read more about SGX? What's stopping someone from intercepting everything going down their and just doing the operations on their own while watching?
- qznc 9y ago
  Essentially, the CPU has a private key. Using the corresponding public key you can send code to the CPU to execute and the CPU prevents even the OS from looking at the decrypted code. You can also check the signature of the CPU against a public Intel key to verify it is indeed an Intel CPU you are sending code to.
  - rjromero 9y ago
    Ah I see. I'm seeing that you have 2 128-bit private keys on the enclave, one known to Intel and what that is not. Can you not use the one not known to intel to do your own code signing against another client with ECDH? Why does it seem like they are pushing this "Intel Attestation" service? Wouldn't that cause Intel servers to be a single POF incase they aren't around to give a proper reply for the attestation request? (Imagine 100,000 nodes on the network all running smart contracts, or perhaps 10 years down the line they discontinue the service.)
    - mike_hearn 9y ago
      IAS isn't technically a requirement of SGX. But if you want the ability to revoke hardware that is found to be compromised, someone needs to have that list and check against it. I believe the plan is for IAS to be optional in future. It might already be, but then you have to implement the signature checking logic yourself. EPID is quite a complex signature scheme and you'd also need to find out from Intel which microcode/platform versions are revoked, etc. So IAS is more of a convenience than anything else.
- frabbit 9y ago
  There is a series here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-guard-extensions-tutorial-part-1-foundation https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-gua... Also, Intel have been pushing something called Sawtooth for about a year now: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/intel-develops-sawtooth-lake-distributed-ledger-technology-for-the-hyperledger-project-1460397461/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/intel-develops-sawtooth...
espadrine 9y ago
Using Stellar’s Federated Byzantine Agreement as a basis for consensus is a solid foundation. David Mazières’ paper[0] displays strong insights and proofs into the structure of byzantine systems with open membership. [0]: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd... I wonder where the code for MobileCoin is, or when it will get open-sourced. All GitHub yields currently is this clearly non-affiliated project: https://github.com/mobilecoind/mobilecoin https://github.com/mobilecoind/mobilecoin.
- lumberjack 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand correctly, but from what I got, Stellar is a distributed ledger, but not a currency. There are no coins as such. But the upside is that the consensus is reached without a taxing algorithm. Everyone can run a node, but the whole system is not itself decentralised, because you need "anchors", which are banks or payment processors, to get your money in and out of the system. So then, what is the point of the decentralised ledger? GNU Taler seems like a more simple solution.
  - wmf 9y ago
    you need "anchors", which are banks or payment processors, to get your money in and out of the system. You also need exchanges for cryptocurrency[1], so why not admit it from day one and build that concept into the system? And maybe it's possible to graft a cryptocurrency onto SCP by using consensus to choose nodes which receive freshly "mined" currency. [1] The mythical closed-loop Bitcoin economy ain't going to happen.
    - Vadoff 9y ago
      Then why have a decentralized solution at all? Why not just make it like Paypal?
  - lacker 9y ago
    Anchors are not inherent to the Stellar consensus protocol - that is part of how the Stellar coin works, but the consensus protocol doesn't include that, it is just the mechanism for the various nodes coming to a consensus on the blocks.
russelldc 9y ago
Would someone close to this project be able to explain why the node operator wouldn't have direct access to user's keys in the event of an SGX exploit? The whitepaper only briefly delves into transaction privacy protections, but not key management.
bkolobara 9y ago
Great to see more cryptocurrency adopting Stellar's Consensus Protocol. Decentralisation and scalability without the environmental impact of proof of work.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  Stellar is not decentralized. It is federated, meaning a number of trusted third parties act as the intermediary, and eventually, will become the gatekeepers as governments deputize them to enforce their respective laws (e.g. capital controls in China).
  - bkolobara 9y ago
    Like if 90% of mining power owned by 2 companies makes something more decentralised. I would argue that the Stellar Consensus Protocol is more resilient to centralisation than any proof of work one.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      Manufacturing GPUs doesn't give a company control over how the buyers use the GPUs. GPUs are by market necessity general-purpose. And all of the full nodes in a decentralized cryptocurrency network like Ethereum will validate the blocks generated by the miners.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CryptoPunk 9y ago
Stellar is run by a set of trusted third parties, which makes it permissioned. If it gains any sort of traction, it will undoubtedly come under the control of any number of governments, thus negating the "peer-to-peer" part of cryptocurrency, and making usage conditioned on approval from some set of intermediaries.
- corford 9y ago
  But isn't Mobilecoin just borrowing stellar's approach to consensus? And what stops anyone from setting up a full node?
- pollen23 9y ago
  It's not run by "a set of trusted third parties". It's run by SETS of trusted third parties, where each individual node specifies what set of nodes it trusts to not collude against it. You don't need any ones permission to run a node, but it is up to other nodes if they want to trust you
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    If your set is not the same as everyone else's set, you risk being forked off. Trusted third party based schemes have a tendency toward centralization, making them less resilient than ones based on cryptoeconomic incentives. Inevitability it will mean TTP based ledgers will be permissioned, with the TTPs acting as gatekeepers, rather than p2p. This isn't just theoretical either. Stellar has co-authored a paper arguing for regulations against anonymous cryptocurrencies: http://www.lhoft.com/assets/uploads/images/WhitePaper_LHoFT_Stellar_2017_A_04.10.compressed.pdf#asset:216 http://www.lhoft.com/assets/uploads/images/WhitePaper_LHoFT_... It's clear that it's positioning itself as a gatekeeper-based ledger that stays on the good side of regulatory agencies.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
With Moxie, I have to wonder what the endgame is for this? After reading this, currency doesn't seem to jive with his persona: https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/ https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/
qwerty456127 9y ago
What degree of privacy can it actually offer?
Globz 9y ago
How is the value of a coin created if there’s no miner or exchange, does it have a fix fiat price? Would you buy the coins with real cash?
dustdrops 9y ago
The title here says "A new Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike." But the article describes his involvement as "Marlinspike has been working on as a technical advisor." Those two descriptions sound different.
- wmf 9y ago
  That's just "meritocracy" in action. The founder of a project gets all the credit for it, and when there are multiple founders the most famous one gets all the credit.
  - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
    He is not even a cofounder according to their website. They just picked out whoever is most famous.
- philipwhiuk 9y ago
  The cryptographer is an advisor and there's no mention of any financial experience / economics experience. I assume this is another early adopter, mining platform.... Nobody's decided to solve that rather fatal flaw.
JepZ 9y ago
Wow, what an impressive move. I don't trust Moxie ever since he argued that Signal will not be a decentralized network due to the technological complexity (just BS as Matrix, XMPP and other have shown). While I suspected that he had other plans in mind, I didn't see that coming. Using your wide spread chat app to deploy a global payment system. Just wow. If he will pull that off, Elon Musk gets competition for the title 'Innovator of the Century'.
dha10_11 9y ago
https://us.teamblind.com/article/ama-round-2-i-manage-a-multi-million-crypto-portfolio-vQBqRpmR https://us.teamblind.com/article/ama-round-2-i-manage-a-mult... I think this post about managing a multi-million crypto portfolio can really relate. I think it still is difficult for the average person to understand, but this is a really great discussion going on.
jmtame 9y ago
I have a few questions: (1) When can we start using this? (2) How will you acquire the currency? I think #2 is the pain point, and I didn't see this addressed in the whitepaper. Most people talk about Bitcoin's transaction speeds, but Litecoin works incredibly well for doing transactions. The difficulty for a normal person is acquiring it. You need something like GDAX.
- babaganoosh89 9y ago
  Litecoin is maybe 2-4x better, but still far from Visa’s transaction capacity unless the lightning network does fantastically well.
Asdfbla 9y ago
While yet another cryptocurrency doesn't sound so good, I think Moxie has at least proven himself enough with Signal (in terms of being pragmatic about usability while trying to get the maximum amount of security and privacy for users) that this sounds promising. I'm also happy to see a currency with Byzantine agreement without proof-of-work being explored. While this may not satisfy the extreme threat model of Bitcoin etc., I'm not really convinced that this is even needed at all. (Not to mention that Bitcoin has failed as a currency anyway.)
orblivion 9y ago
Surely I'm reading this wrong. Does the whole thing depend on users trusting that the nodes run the correct software, which uses these "enclaves" to hide private data from itself?
- wmf 9y ago
  The nodes can prove that they are running the correct software using SGX.
  - kbwt 9y ago
    If you trust Intel. In that case, why not use a centralized ledger operated by Intel? It would certainly be more efficient, and no less trust-worthy. You even eliminate a whole bunch of side-channel attack vectors on the MobileCoin software such as memory access patterns, heat dissipation patterns, timing analysis, and failure modes such as total compromise of SGX.
    - orblivion 9y ago
      Well it's a little different in that in your scenario Intel would be able to decide after the fact to do something bad.
      - kbwt 9y ago
        Intel can at any time decide to publish false SGX attestations. You won't know until it's too late.
  - orblivion 9y ago
    I'm not sure what this means. Supposing I'm a node that runs the correct software as well as some incorrect software. I prove (however this works) using SGX that I'm running the correct software. You send me the data and I run it through the incorrect software. I imagine my ignorance of SGX has something to do with this. Is there a 101 link somewhere?
wyldfire 9y ago
> The currency is designed to utilize an Intel processor component known as Software Guard Extensions, or a "secure enclave." Binding yourself to an implementation like this seems like mega big centralization. There's several decentralized coins that could solve some of these same problems.
homakov 9y ago
An no word about price volatility? Even if btc were scalable it is unusable for commerce. Pegging to fiat should be #1 goal of a new blockchain that wants to solve problem. All others arejust sophisticated gambling platforms.
pmatos 9y ago
Can you already mine this?
pellucide 9y ago
Isn't SGX not so secure ? [1] Specifically this claim "In a semi-synchronous attack, we extract 96% of an RSA private key from a single trace. We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces within 5 minutes." [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/using_intels_sg.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/using_intels_...
- anonymousDan 9y ago
  It's vulnerable to side-channel attacks, like a lot of trusted hardware. The challenge with trusted hardware is you have a much stronger threat model than a lot of previous work on side-channel attacks, in that instead of having to protect against remote or local unprivileged software attacks, you now have to guard against a local privileged attacker (e.g. a malicious OS or hypervisor), or potentially even someone with physical access. Having said that it is possible to design software in such a way as to be resistant to many side-channel attacks (albeit with a lot of effort and a performance hit) and I imagine future generations of SGX could add hardware protection against the most egregious channels. Of course if you have enough money/time it will always be possible, the question is whether an SGX based blockchain can be designed in such a way as to make it not worth the effort.
pwaai 9y ago
I'm not sure using Stellar is wise as the majority is owned by a small group of people, much smaller than Bitcoin, which creates conflict of interest and not future SEC proof. on a side rant: So...many...coins...I too have something called BrowserCoin.com but still haven't figured out what problems to solve. Too many people just go implement a pseudo-academic blockchain tech with fancy dials without vetting the problem....virtually zero adoption other than from pumpers and owner...that is something I'd like to avoid altogether, for once some cryptocurrency based business that delivers and benefits people who don't need to expensive rigs to mine or jack resources (browser based blockchains etc).
- mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  Exactly how I feel.
- dchest 9y ago
  AFAIK, they are using Stellar Consensus Protocol, not Stellar itself. Nobody uses MobileCoin yet.
- dude01 9y ago
  I don't know you, but... I have an idea for BrowserCoin.com -- a marketplace for ads where users are paid to try a product. They receive a coin payment when they use a product for a certain period of time. Don't bother decentralizing -- keep tabs on who is paid, to avoid bots stealing payments with fake usage. Let me know if you like that, my email is in my profile.
Uptrenda 9y ago
I think this is going in the right direction. You take a bunch of tamper-proof hardware devices from different manufacturers and then model attack costs to compromise them as part of a proof-of-stake scheme. Now you can build consensus algorithms on top of them that are highly secure and scalable compared to anything that exists today. I'm not convinced that Stellar consensus here is the right algorithm for doing this, but I think SGX is promising technology that has been somewhat overlooked in the blockchain space (not by everyone.) SGX has a lot of potential. You can use SGX as a way to expand the consensus rules of any blockchain by using it as a blackbox obfuscation construct. Everything and more that Vitalik wrote in his article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation is possible with SGX today. Want to create a specialized oracle that only signs certain transaction formats, even on untrusted hosts? Yep - use SGX. Now you can have agents that run in a cluster that will only move assets between blockchains based on a user's prior agreements, allowing for more complex cross-blockchain smart contracts to be written in high-level languages. What about having a nice way to do transaction commitments to scale any blockchain without having GB zero-knowledge proofs? SGX again. It could be used for privacy preserving protocols... It could be used for solving data availability problems in sharding / decentralized storage systems. The list goes on. Some of the biggest trust problems are solvable with this technology - but like others have already said - you still have to trust the hardware manufacturer. In this case, my thoughts are that you already have to trust the hardware manufacturer anyway (nobody is going to inspect every chip with an electron microscope...) My bet is that a non-trivial portion of full nodes today are already running chips with backdoors like the Intel Management Engine anyway... The point here is that you can't fully remove trust from any system without introducing vast inefficiencies, but you can at least formalize the risks in a system and design so that a compromise is too expensive to be worthwhile, and for me I think that's where the potential lies with this tech. Cryptoeconomic systems based on tamper-proof hardware where individually a component may be compromised, but where it is simply infeasible to compromise each and every device. You build a network out of these components and you have yourself the first on-chain scalable blockchain bound by physical hardware encumberments instead of computational difficulty.
- cyphunk 9y ago
  You know it was hard enough for PayTV smart card developers to keep transistor level reverse engineers from getting inside their chips, and all that was at stake then was $35 content subscriptions. I can't imagine how putting personal banking inside SGX will fare. Or, I acknowledge I am probably missing something. Am i?
laretluval 9y ago
Will I have to give a mobile phone number to use this cryptocurrency?
m3kw9 9y ago
This hardware requirement will slow adoption
harry8 9y ago
I'm probably going to pay this a lot more attention now than I would have purely because I find Moxie really quite impressive all the way up to his patient, reasoned interactions with people around here.
- 99812381 9y ago
  Most people with reasoned interactions around here want to sell something...
flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
Sounds pretty similar to Dash with the nodes, doesn't it? Dash has been doing quite well recently... so it mustn't be a terrible idea.
- Casseres 9y ago
  It's a great idea for making money. It's a terrible idea for a currency.
neuralzen 9y ago
The Request Network may beat them to it, in terms of making crypto accessible, since it aims to provide a paypal-like, currency agnostic portal for payments. But I still like the project, and will follow it closely.
coderdude 9y ago
Hold on, let me promote it in troll chat for a bit. Okay, now I'm fully invested in your scamcoin. When does it moon and when do I buy my Lambos? Ah shoot. I thought we were all doing the thing where we get rich
tmp123tmp123 9y ago
The age of Tantric bullshit all over again. Science and finance became a contest of idiotic sophisticated models, similar to ancient cosmology and pseudo-philosophy. Piling bullshit upon bullshit and trying to overshout everyone else. All model-based science is such contest of tantras made out of math and probability. Now everyone is inventing a new breed of digital turnips (not forgetting to secure a middle man position for themselves) as if this is anything but hype. My block-chain based turnips are better than yours. Laws of economics are bound by the laws of physics. It is merely the principle of energy efficiency at work and related medium of exchange and social constructs. If something grows out of nothing it is not economics anymore. It is something else. Mass hysteria. Social momentum. Lifecicle of a meme. Whatever it is. Crypto currencies to finance are what cat pictures are to the internet. One could monetize can I haz hamburger meme, but there is nothing substantial behind it. So are crypto currencies.
coderdude 9y ago
Hi, I'm like a 10-year-in loser who wants to strike it rich with bitcoin. Please describe in detail how I and only I can become a new-money juggernaut in finance. Ty
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
> Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second weird I assumed it was more. It's still 300M a day or 100bn/yr but still.
TeeWEE 9y ago
The private key is stored on the node. Haha big fail. That's not what decentralized blockchains are about.
mbid 9y ago
A decentralized currency brought to you by Moxie "Signal doesn't federate or allow third-party clients" Marlinspike. OK.
- verbify 9y ago
  He used to federate, he said he reckons he lost a year of development in the attempt. His argument is federation makes change difficult - and a private company can centralise the protocol (like Slack or WhatsApp) leading to a better user experience because they're not tied to getting everyone to agree to a change. You can read his arguments here: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ and here: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217231557 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
bandrami 9y ago
I was just thinking we need a few more of these.
baybal2 9y ago
Stupidly bad design - storing other people's private keys in a protected memory region. This is as good as entrusting a safe with your money to a thief, thinking that the guy will be unable to open it. Marlinspike, yet again, flops face down with his credibility as a crypto researcher. Remember his his angry letter about silent key renegotiation hole in Facebook messenger
juicyfroot 9y ago
Quote: "Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second; the best bitcoin network might be able to process seven per second." Bitcoin Cash can do 25 tx/second. With 8GB blocks that is 25k/sec

429 points by golangnews 9y ago

Anyone got a link to the project's website? I'd like to read an actual technical description. Anything MM is involved in is gold in my book.

superquest 9y ago
site: https://www.mobilecoin.com/ https://www.mobilecoin.com/ whitepaper: https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf
- darawk 9y ago
  Thanks, strange Google didn't bring that up.
  - superquest 9y ago
    Yea I saw that. I think they just put the site up and hasn't been indexed yet.

superquest 9y ago

> "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." Amen. Too few projects have this focus.

icelancer 9y ago
> "Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions." This is being solved by Shapeshift.io and XMR.to. I transact in cryptocurrency all the time using these intermediary services with BTC as the usual medium of exchange. It's opened my skeptical eyes about the future of how things will work.
- superquest 9y ago
  https://xmr.to/ https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person. And it still processes a Bitcoin transaction, correct? So it will be no faster than Bitcoin?
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >https://xmr.to/ https://xmr.to/ looks waaaay too complicated for the average person to use, which is a nonstarter for the average person. OK, that's fine, but services like that could - and will - get much friendlier. I'm just rebutting the quote which is the blanket "no one transacts in cryptocurrency" which is certainly not true for me, even though I felt that way just 2 months ago. Now that I am an active miner of various currencies, I find myself using it quite frequently for random goods/services, even though the plan was really just to convert it quickly into USD fiat to continue reinvesting into the mining operations or to pocket it.
    - superquest 9y ago
      Fair point. I think "no one" here is a rhetorical exaggeration meaning "not very many," which might resolve our disagreement ...
wmf 9y ago
Because you can't get rich building it and you can't get rich hodling it and the press won't create much buzz.
- superquest 9y ago
  Why can't you get rich building it? I doubt one would get rich as Bitcoin creators, but one could still make a killing .... Edit: And this stands to reason. We're relatively later in the game, and so new contributions are less fundamental by definition.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lumberjack 9y ago
    > Why can't you get rich building it? Because it defeats the point. There is no "coin" that will exponentially appreciate in value, making you a billionaire. There is also no centralisation, so you cannot be the owner of the payment system in the same way that Paypal or Visa are. At best you can be the Linus Torvalds of your payment system non-profit. Which would be a good gig in itself. But that comes with lots of hard work, not the easy riches that you can do from some hype-pump-dump scam in less than 6 months.
    - snowwrestler 9y ago
      To build on this comment, the purpose of a currency is to facilitate the transaction of value, not to store value. If an instrument stores value, it's an asset, not currency. One can of course transact business with assets, but it's a lot more complicated because you have to agree to a valuation. And without a currency, how do you measure that? Plus, the incentives for assets and currencies are opposed. Currency exists to be spent, but if an asset is appreciating, you'll want to hold it, not trade it. Bitcoin was advertised as a currency but it's acting like an asset. (And it's regulated like an asset.) If you create a new class of asset, you can buy in early, hold on, and get rich on appreciation. But if you invent a new currency? It's like inventing the inch. Even if everyone uses it, that doesn't give you any more length of your own.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Doesn't lightning network fix this problem?
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  Tell us all about all the problems Lightning Network fixes once it is actually implemented.
  - prophesi 9y ago
    Doesn't solve usability, but it solves the slow transaction speeds.
    - superquest 9y ago
      Note: transaction speed is a component of usability
    - icelancer 9y ago
      That's possible, but the commenter above you isn't talking about that. He is talking about the fact that it is yet to launch and solve all of the problems it purports to.
  - jerdfelt 9y ago
    I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that Lightning Network is vaporware, but there are currently three implementations that pass the integration tests: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/ https://cdecker.github.io/lightning-integration/
    - Cyberdog 9y ago
      Oh, please. You and the other replier knew what I meant by "implemented."
highd 9y ago
This is secondary to there being no benefit to the average user for transacting in crypto vs Visa. What incentive is there for an end user to use even a hypothetically optimal crypto system? Then is that incentive sufficient to overcome network effects? The appropriate and interesting applications of crypto seem to be totally leaving p2p cash behind - it just doesn't seem like a good fit.
- superquest 9y ago
  The hypothetically optimal crypto system would be cheaper for merchants, correct? So it would have wider adoption than Visa, at the very least. I do agree that crypto keeps drifting away from p2p cash ... that's a good observation. But I hope people keep shooting at that target.
  - kang 9y ago
    > The hypothetically optimal crypto system would be cheaper for merchants Incorrect. Decentralization is always more expensive and slower than centralized system(both hypothetically optimal) due to extra sync cost.
    - wmf 9y ago
      You're mixing cost and price. Let's say the cost of a Visa transaction is 0.1% and the price is 2.5% while the cost and price of a MobileCoin transaction are 0.2%. It costs more but it's still cheaper for merchants.
      - highd 9y ago
        Cash is cheaper for merchants, but people have only continued to use credit cards more. Further, if crypto becomes attractive from a cost perspective Visa will just be forced to bring down fees and stay competitive. It's pretty near impossible to imagine crypto with costs less than Visa's database.
        9y ago
DennisP 9y ago
On reason, in the U.S. at least, is that you're supposed to pay capital gains on every little bit you spend. There's a bill in Congress right now to exclude crypto transactions under $600 from capital gains, which would be a big help. Even if you do want to hold long term, you could just replenish what you spend along the way, if it weren't a tax reporting nightmare.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  You also do so in the UK and virtually every other country I can think off.
  - celticninja 9y ago
    Nope. You only have to report capital gains in excess of your annual allowance, which is £11,300 at the moment.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      You still have to record them. Also don’t forget that if you have an ISA, other savings and investments that allowance isn’t that big. As an individual if you mine you have to record the value as it was at the time of mining if you buy you record it at the time of purchase and you pay capital gains if you exchange the crypto for fiat currency or goods or services directly on the difference between the values. It gets more complicated since you can’t select an individual currency unit form your wallet but atm you are allowed to use creative accounting for that. The fact that you have an allowance doesn’t mean it’s not taxed and if you have any substantial amount you’ll blow throgh that allowance pretty darn fast.
      - psergeant 9y ago
        I don’t believe any assets held in an ISA have any bearing at all on your capital gains allowance.
        9y ago

pilingual 9y ago

Here is a year old paper from Imperial College and Cornell where they implemented trustless transactions using Intel SGX. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/teechan.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/teechan.pdf

grandmczeb 9y ago
“SGX” and “trustless” aren’t two things that really go together.
alexnewman 9y ago
This is significantly stronger and harder than what that paper suggested
- anonymousDan 9y ago
  In what way? I mean this (Mobile Coin) is almost the very definition of vapourware. A 4 page whitepaper, come on.
  - kossTKR 9y ago
    Yes i also find this high school level white paper pretty weird. Also no roadmap, no github, only 3 person team. But Moxie Marlinspike though...

ajennings 9y ago

Wow. MM is really going all-in on for Software Guard Extensions (secure enclave) on the server. What does HN say? Do we trust Intel (motivation and implementation) that much?

21 9y ago
This is the best way to test SGX, there will be huge incentives to find a vulnerability of any kind (including hardware).
chatmasta 9y ago
In multiple verticals of the industry, there exists a clear trend of utilizing hardware security modules for cryptographic operations. Almost all mobile phones have them, cloud providers offer HSM services, and Trezor wallets generate bitcoin private keys. It makes sense to build a service that relies heavily on HSM. Adapt or die
mtgx 9y ago
No, but probably worth a shot. I think AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) sounded better, though. But it's a shame AMD only offers it on the EPYC server chips. they ought to make it a mainstream feature in Zen 2 chips if they want it to gain popularity and use. That said, that's probably not an obstacle for a company that plans on using server chips anyway. https://developer.amd.com/amd-secure-memory-encryption-sme-amd-secure-encrypted-virtualization-sev/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-secure-memory-encryption-sme-a...
kyledrake 9y ago
At the end of the day, trust is still required. For example, if you use Bitcoin, you're trusting the people that wrote the code and the libraries it linked to and the people that ran the server you downloaded it from, and you're trusting that Koblitz didn't put a backdoor into the ECC somehow. I could go on for a while here but I think this describes the basic idea. You can change the level of trust required or who you're trusting but not the mere requirement of it. I've met some of the people working on this at Intel and I do have confidence that this isn't some conspiracy, I do think they have the intention of improving the crypto space with projects like this.

TD-Linux 9y ago

This coin uses Stellar, which is not a decentralized consensus like Bitcoin, but rather federated. It's not really surprising that it has performance advantages. Also not sure how I feel trusting the fate of a cryptocurrency to the strength of Intel's SGX.

kossTKR 9y ago
"MobileCoin does not rely solely on SGX for maintaining transaction privacy. Transactions are designed to employ CryptoNote1 one-time addresses and onetime ring signatures, so MobileCoin will still maintain transaction privacy through unlinkable addresses if an attacker is able to defeat SGX and view transactions on the network." https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf Other than that, i very much share your concern..
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  It also says that the clients transmit private keys and PINs to the SGX nodes, which presumably allow spending of their coins. Maybe it's designed in a way that they lose their money, but maintain the privacy of their previous and other transactions going through the node.
  - hoschicz 9y ago
    Users have to transmit the private keys to their nodes, but not the PIN. This tradeoff was taken to prevent people from losing their money by losing their phone. If the secure enclave were broken, nodes could, theoretically, be able to brute-force the private keys. I think that in reality, there will really be just a few nodes: Signal, WhatsApp and some bots/banks/businesses. The trust system in place is ideal for this.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      This is what the whitepaper says: > At install time, Alice's client performs remote attestation with its Mobile-Coin node, establishes a secure communication channel into the remote enclave, and transmits its keypair along with its recovery PIN.

ikeboy 9y ago

So, it's using DRM to hide the blockchain, is that right?

kbwt 9y ago
So if the coin's market cap were higher than Intel's, you could buy Intel and use the SGX master keys to establish rogue nodes and take over the network. In fact this is no better at all than if Intel were simply running the MobileCoin service as a centralized provider/bank.
- ikeboy 9y ago
  Buying Intel is not that simple and would be disclosed far in advance of the actual purchase.

berberous 9y ago

1) Both Kin and MobileCoin have moved to Stellar as their back end this week. I haven't paid Stellar much attention before. Anyone have any good links that explains Stellar and/or discusses the technical pros/cons? Trying to avoid any shill/pump or baseless FUD. 2) Am I correct that if any vulnerability were found in the SGX, an attacker would gain access to the encrypted private keys that are stored on a server node and would just need to brute force the PIN?

joyce 9y ago
Here is a link to the blog post when the Stellar Consensus Protocol was released. It includes a summary in Stellar's own words and a link to the white paper: https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
eridius 9y ago
I don't have a good link for Stellar but it's been around for a while, and the Rust creator even worked for them for some time. Regarding the second point, since it's on the server, wouldn't a vulnerability just mean the server operator might potentially be able to get at the keys, not any random attacker?
zulucrypto 9y ago
I've done some work with Stellar and the implementation in the whitepaper sounds very different than how Stellar currently works. For example, users control their own private keys and they're never exposed to a node, so I'm not sure why the whitepaper mentions storing private keys in the SGX. Perhaps they're going to host wallets for a user and store all keys in the SGX? I'll be very interested in more details about this project since it doesn't appear to use the Stellar network, only the consensus protocol.

tuccinator 9y ago

I feel like the real appeal of Bitcoin is the decentralized aspect. I am not totally intrigued at the idea of having a controlled system, even if it offers complete privacy and faster transaction speed.

superquest 9y ago
Something like this could make sense for "petty cash spending"
- icelancer 9y ago
  I believe that was the intent of Stellar.
eridius 9y ago
If it works like Stellar (which it sounds like it does), it's still a decentralized network of nodes, but each individual user isn't a node. They pick a node to work with, and that node is then connected to a set of other nodes. Anyone can run a node, but there's just not any point to it for most users.
- babaganoosh89 9y ago
  Kinda like bitcoin thin clients?
- nileshtrivedi 9y ago
  How is that better or different from Bitcoin users trusting CoinBase?
  - eridius 9y ago
    You can't just spin up your own CoinBase if you don't trust coinbase.com. I mean, it's BitCoin, so you can run your own transactions, but you can't do any of the other stuff CoinBase does. But with Stellar or something based on its consensus protocol, you can run your own node if you want, or more likely, a bunch of public nodes can exist and you can pick the one you trust to work with. For example, if banks decide to start working with MobileCoin, then Chase could offer a node and, as a Chase customer, you could decide to trust their node (since you already trust them to manage your money) and use that one.

zokeia 9y ago

Where can I invest in this?

Confiks 9y ago

To repeat an earlier comment, this scheme encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers. You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] who can wield their power over you. A manufacturer may 'legitimately' establish an enclave in your most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if that security model becomes commonplace, for example when only allowing Widevine DRM inside SGX, you eventually cannot use your self-chosen hardware, but will have to pick a feudal lord from a limited set of 'ecosystem choices'. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feudal.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...

senand 9y ago
Complete reference link: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feudal.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...
darawk 9y ago
That was my first impression as well. That being said, I have a lot of respect for Moxie and his work, so i'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and am curious to see his response to this point.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
nebulous1 9y ago
Yes, the features of the SGX means that we can no longer even see what are computer is doing. > This means that the ledger is "public" and distributed to all MobileCoin nodes, but will also simultaneously never be accessible or viewable by humans (even the operators of the MobileCoin nodes) so long as SGX and the MobileCoin software remains secure. It seems unlikely to me that these two things things will remain the case. > A client can perform remote attestation to its MobileCoin node before transmitting its keys into the remote enclave along with a short recovery PIN. And it seems if SGX gets popped the whole thing comes crumbling down. Quotes from https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf

Nrbelex 9y ago

> "9. Bob's MobileCoin node sends Bob's client a message, which can then calculate the private key that corresponds to the generated one-time public key." >" 10. Bob has now successfully received a payment." If I'm reading this correctly, Bob's client (e.g. mobile app) must be in contact with the node for his address to receive the payment. This is pretty different from what I think will be Mobilecoin's closest competitors (at least from a UX standpoint), Venmo, Google Wallet, etc. DDOSing Bob's mobile device or otherwise preventing access to the node would, at least temporarily, prevent the transaction from going through. Are the funds in purgatory during that period? If that client never gets in contact with the node, does the transaction ever get reversed, allowing the sender to regain control of the funds? There are probably a host of other repercussions I haven't thought through yet. The idea of a cryptocoin as easy to use as Venmo/Signal is definitely intriguing.

oculusthrift 9y ago
how is the need to be in contact with the node different than the need to be in contact with venmo’s servers?
- nunyabuizness 9y ago
  It's different because regardless if your node is online or not, venmo's servers can still accept payments on your behalf, and it's presumed that taking venmo's servers offline would be considerably harder than taking yours offline.
hoschicz 9y ago
I think that in practice, every operator of a messaging app will have their own node. There will be Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. nodes and some small nodes for businesses, bots and similar. Yes, theoretically, if you DDoSed Signal, then Bob wouldn't be able to get the coins.

icelancer 9y ago

MobileCoin is backed by XLM/Stellar, which is not decentralized, and so I feel I should note here that I signed up during Stripe's giveaway of Stellar Lumens years ago - and I did indeed get my wallet credited. https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet, was empty. I did not receive a reply for 2 months, at which point I followed up and received a reply within a day, which was: "I have investigated your account and it looks like an account merge operation occurred some time ago merging your lumens with another account. If you did not commit this action, it could be possible that someone was able to obtain your account information. You can see the merge operation here: https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQYOHJNFW42YZ55MPQKPQ5BGI2ZPD72G3H3/operations https://horizon.stellar.org/accounts/GD2CPSK2E3TUNC2N5NGGQJQ... Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to retrieve your lumens at this point. Apologies we cannot be of further help." I have pretty damn good security of my various accounts using hardware 2FA and such, and I also transact in cryptocurrency and have wallets with far more fiat value in them than 6000 XLM had at the time ($120-150 USD if I recall), with absolutely no issue - and I hadn't even logged into their official wallet. The developers were 100% quick to blame this merge on me. I replied with a flat: "I highly doubt you are correct that it is my fault" email and it went back and forth with them asking the basic "well, did you get spearphished somehow" as if anyone even knew what XLM were or cared. The process dragged on for a month while I bothered people in their Slack channel since email communication dropped out and they finally came back with: "Our team has investigated and checked for multiple different types of issues and have not found anything on our end that shows any type of security compromise in our system. Unfortunately this means at this moment I do not have a concrete answer to how your account was compromised. I’ll follow up again to check if there is anything on your end they would recommend you do." I investigated on my own and found a number of accounts who were "hacked" and sent XLM coins to the wallet that I had merged with, all that just kind of sat there, indicating a software error on their end of a bunch of accounts that were randomly emptied. I provided all documentation to their team and spent a solid 15-20 hours doing so. Their response to all of this bug bounty-type work? "They have identified one potential issue in the past that affected only a small number of accounts, possibly yours. This bug was fixed once discovered back in 2014, but users who may have been vulnerable to the bug were still impacted during the upgrade process to the new network even after it was resolved. Although we think this was the cause of what happened, we cannot be 100% sure if this was what impacted your account considering you had a strong password and none of your other accounts were compromised." And: "Although we cannot recover you original lumens from your account, we’d like to award you 3000 lumens as part of our Bug Bounty Program because you have helped us in identifying a possible issue that happened in the past." So they basically gave me half the XLM back instead of the full amount despite it being entirely their fault and them having no idea how to investigate while I exposed a serious flaw in how XLM were assigned and paid to their wallets, all while blaming me the entire time and with atrociously slow customer response times. Forgive me if I'm not the biggest XLM/Stellar Lumens fan; their team is both terrible at support and suggests that at least their frontline investigators are technically incompetent since they couldn't figure out the merge situation before I did with simple API poking around and enumerating.

Canada 9y ago

It's cryptocurrency secured by DRM.

superquest 9y ago

How might this project grow out of its dependence on Intel hardware over time?

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
Like most other tulip breeds, the craze over their creation will turn to sudden death before the practical concerns they raise need to be considered.

muricula 9y ago

A bit ironic that MobileCoin is targeting x86_64 and SGX seeing that the vast majority of mobile devices run ARM. I wonder how easy this would be to port to the ARM trustzone?

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
ARM Trustzone doesn't do anything related to remote attestation, which I'm guessing this thing is all about (even if the article doesn't seem to mention it). So I'll claim it is impossible. Edit: You could still check the signatures signed by the trusted Intel CPUs on your ARM device of course, but any mining would have to happen on a SGX-enabled Intel CPU. (Or anything else with Intel's private key.)

rjromero 9y ago

Anyone have any links to read more about SGX? What's stopping someone from intercepting everything going down their and just doing the operations on their own while watching?

qznc 9y ago
Essentially, the CPU has a private key. Using the corresponding public key you can send code to the CPU to execute and the CPU prevents even the OS from looking at the decrypted code. You can also check the signature of the CPU against a public Intel key to verify it is indeed an Intel CPU you are sending code to.
- rjromero 9y ago
  Ah I see. I'm seeing that you have 2 128-bit private keys on the enclave, one known to Intel and what that is not. Can you not use the one not known to intel to do your own code signing against another client with ECDH? Why does it seem like they are pushing this "Intel Attestation" service? Wouldn't that cause Intel servers to be a single POF incase they aren't around to give a proper reply for the attestation request? (Imagine 100,000 nodes on the network all running smart contracts, or perhaps 10 years down the line they discontinue the service.)
  - mike_hearn 9y ago
    IAS isn't technically a requirement of SGX. But if you want the ability to revoke hardware that is found to be compromised, someone needs to have that list and check against it. I believe the plan is for IAS to be optional in future. It might already be, but then you have to implement the signature checking logic yourself. EPID is quite a complex signature scheme and you'd also need to find out from Intel which microcode/platform versions are revoked, etc. So IAS is more of a convenience than anything else.
frabbit 9y ago
There is a series here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-guard-extensions-tutorial-part-1-foundation https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-gua... Also, Intel have been pushing something called Sawtooth for about a year now: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/intel-develops-sawtooth-lake-distributed-ledger-technology-for-the-hyperledger-project-1460397461/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/intel-develops-sawtooth...

espadrine 9y ago

Using Stellar’s Federated Byzantine Agreement as a basis for consensus is a solid foundation. David Mazières’ paper[0] displays strong insights and proofs into the structure of byzantine systems with open membership. [0]: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd... I wonder where the code for MobileCoin is, or when it will get open-sourced. All GitHub yields currently is this clearly non-affiliated project: https://github.com/mobilecoind/mobilecoin https://github.com/mobilecoind/mobilecoin.

lumberjack 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand correctly, but from what I got, Stellar is a distributed ledger, but not a currency. There are no coins as such. But the upside is that the consensus is reached without a taxing algorithm. Everyone can run a node, but the whole system is not itself decentralised, because you need "anchors", which are banks or payment processors, to get your money in and out of the system. So then, what is the point of the decentralised ledger? GNU Taler seems like a more simple solution.
- wmf 9y ago
  you need "anchors", which are banks or payment processors, to get your money in and out of the system. You also need exchanges for cryptocurrency[1], so why not admit it from day one and build that concept into the system? And maybe it's possible to graft a cryptocurrency onto SCP by using consensus to choose nodes which receive freshly "mined" currency. [1] The mythical closed-loop Bitcoin economy ain't going to happen.
  - Vadoff 9y ago
    Then why have a decentralized solution at all? Why not just make it like Paypal?
- lacker 9y ago
  Anchors are not inherent to the Stellar consensus protocol - that is part of how the Stellar coin works, but the consensus protocol doesn't include that, it is just the mechanism for the various nodes coming to a consensus on the blocks.

russelldc 9y ago

Would someone close to this project be able to explain why the node operator wouldn't have direct access to user's keys in the event of an SGX exploit? The whitepaper only briefly delves into transaction privacy protections, but not key management.

bkolobara 9y ago

Great to see more cryptocurrency adopting Stellar's Consensus Protocol. Decentralisation and scalability without the environmental impact of proof of work.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
Stellar is not decentralized. It is federated, meaning a number of trusted third parties act as the intermediary, and eventually, will become the gatekeepers as governments deputize them to enforce their respective laws (e.g. capital controls in China).
- bkolobara 9y ago
  Like if 90% of mining power owned by 2 companies makes something more decentralised. I would argue that the Stellar Consensus Protocol is more resilient to centralisation than any proof of work one.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    Manufacturing GPUs doesn't give a company control over how the buyers use the GPUs. GPUs are by market necessity general-purpose. And all of the full nodes in a decentralized cryptocurrency network like Ethereum will validate the blocks generated by the miners.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CryptoPunk 9y ago

Stellar is run by a set of trusted third parties, which makes it permissioned. If it gains any sort of traction, it will undoubtedly come under the control of any number of governments, thus negating the "peer-to-peer" part of cryptocurrency, and making usage conditioned on approval from some set of intermediaries.

corford 9y ago
But isn't Mobilecoin just borrowing stellar's approach to consensus? And what stops anyone from setting up a full node?
pollen23 9y ago
It's not run by "a set of trusted third parties". It's run by SETS of trusted third parties, where each individual node specifies what set of nodes it trusts to not collude against it. You don't need any ones permission to run a node, but it is up to other nodes if they want to trust you
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  If your set is not the same as everyone else's set, you risk being forked off. Trusted third party based schemes have a tendency toward centralization, making them less resilient than ones based on cryptoeconomic incentives. Inevitability it will mean TTP based ledgers will be permissioned, with the TTPs acting as gatekeepers, rather than p2p. This isn't just theoretical either. Stellar has co-authored a paper arguing for regulations against anonymous cryptocurrencies: http://www.lhoft.com/assets/uploads/images/WhitePaper_LHoFT_Stellar_2017_A_04.10.compressed.pdf#asset:216 http://www.lhoft.com/assets/uploads/images/WhitePaper_LHoFT_... It's clear that it's positioning itself as a gatekeeper-based ledger that stays on the good side of regulatory agencies.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

With Moxie, I have to wonder what the endgame is for this? After reading this, currency doesn't seem to jive with his persona: https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/ https://moxie.org/stories/money-machine/

qwerty456127 9y ago

What degree of privacy can it actually offer?

Globz 9y ago

How is the value of a coin created if there’s no miner or exchange, does it have a fix fiat price? Would you buy the coins with real cash?

dustdrops 9y ago

The title here says "A new Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike." But the article describes his involvement as "Marlinspike has been working on as a technical advisor." Those two descriptions sound different.

wmf 9y ago
That's just "meritocracy" in action. The founder of a project gets all the credit for it, and when there are multiple founders the most famous one gets all the credit.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  He is not even a cofounder according to their website. They just picked out whoever is most famous.
philipwhiuk 9y ago
The cryptographer is an advisor and there's no mention of any financial experience / economics experience. I assume this is another early adopter, mining platform.... Nobody's decided to solve that rather fatal flaw.

JepZ 9y ago

Wow, what an impressive move. I don't trust Moxie ever since he argued that Signal will not be a decentralized network due to the technological complexity (just BS as Matrix, XMPP and other have shown). While I suspected that he had other plans in mind, I didn't see that coming. Using your wide spread chat app to deploy a global payment system. Just wow. If he will pull that off, Elon Musk gets competition for the title 'Innovator of the Century'.

dha10_11 9y ago

https://us.teamblind.com/article/ama-round-2-i-manage-a-multi-million-crypto-portfolio-vQBqRpmR https://us.teamblind.com/article/ama-round-2-i-manage-a-mult... I think this post about managing a multi-million crypto portfolio can really relate. I think it still is difficult for the average person to understand, but this is a really great discussion going on.

jmtame 9y ago

I have a few questions: (1) When can we start using this? (2) How will you acquire the currency? I think #2 is the pain point, and I didn't see this addressed in the whitepaper. Most people talk about Bitcoin's transaction speeds, but Litecoin works incredibly well for doing transactions. The difficulty for a normal person is acquiring it. You need something like GDAX.

babaganoosh89 9y ago
Litecoin is maybe 2-4x better, but still far from Visa’s transaction capacity unless the lightning network does fantastically well.

Asdfbla 9y ago

While yet another cryptocurrency doesn't sound so good, I think Moxie has at least proven himself enough with Signal (in terms of being pragmatic about usability while trying to get the maximum amount of security and privacy for users) that this sounds promising. I'm also happy to see a currency with Byzantine agreement without proof-of-work being explored. While this may not satisfy the extreme threat model of Bitcoin etc., I'm not really convinced that this is even needed at all. (Not to mention that Bitcoin has failed as a currency anyway.)

orblivion 9y ago

Surely I'm reading this wrong. Does the whole thing depend on users trusting that the nodes run the correct software, which uses these "enclaves" to hide private data from itself?

wmf 9y ago
The nodes can prove that they are running the correct software using SGX.
- kbwt 9y ago
  If you trust Intel. In that case, why not use a centralized ledger operated by Intel? It would certainly be more efficient, and no less trust-worthy. You even eliminate a whole bunch of side-channel attack vectors on the MobileCoin software such as memory access patterns, heat dissipation patterns, timing analysis, and failure modes such as total compromise of SGX.
  - orblivion 9y ago
    Well it's a little different in that in your scenario Intel would be able to decide after the fact to do something bad.
    - kbwt 9y ago
      Intel can at any time decide to publish false SGX attestations. You won't know until it's too late.
- orblivion 9y ago
  I'm not sure what this means. Supposing I'm a node that runs the correct software as well as some incorrect software. I prove (however this works) using SGX that I'm running the correct software. You send me the data and I run it through the incorrect software. I imagine my ignorance of SGX has something to do with this. Is there a 101 link somewhere?

wyldfire 9y ago

> The currency is designed to utilize an Intel processor component known as Software Guard Extensions, or a "secure enclave." Binding yourself to an implementation like this seems like mega big centralization. There's several decentralized coins that could solve some of these same problems.

homakov 9y ago

An no word about price volatility? Even if btc were scalable it is unusable for commerce. Pegging to fiat should be #1 goal of a new blockchain that wants to solve problem. All others arejust sophisticated gambling platforms.

pmatos 9y ago

Can you already mine this?

pellucide 9y ago

Isn't SGX not so secure ? [1] Specifically this claim "In a semi-synchronous attack, we extract 96% of an RSA private key from a single trace. We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces within 5 minutes." [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/using_intels_sg.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/using_intels_...

anonymousDan 9y ago
It's vulnerable to side-channel attacks, like a lot of trusted hardware. The challenge with trusted hardware is you have a much stronger threat model than a lot of previous work on side-channel attacks, in that instead of having to protect against remote or local unprivileged software attacks, you now have to guard against a local privileged attacker (e.g. a malicious OS or hypervisor), or potentially even someone with physical access. Having said that it is possible to design software in such a way as to be resistant to many side-channel attacks (albeit with a lot of effort and a performance hit) and I imagine future generations of SGX could add hardware protection against the most egregious channels. Of course if you have enough money/time it will always be possible, the question is whether an SGX based blockchain can be designed in such a way as to make it not worth the effort.

pwaai 9y ago

I'm not sure using Stellar is wise as the majority is owned by a small group of people, much smaller than Bitcoin, which creates conflict of interest and not future SEC proof. on a side rant: So...many...coins...I too have something called BrowserCoin.com but still haven't figured out what problems to solve. Too many people just go implement a pseudo-academic blockchain tech with fancy dials without vetting the problem....virtually zero adoption other than from pumpers and owner...that is something I'd like to avoid altogether, for once some cryptocurrency based business that delivers and benefits people who don't need to expensive rigs to mine or jack resources (browser based blockchains etc).

mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
Exactly how I feel.
dchest 9y ago
AFAIK, they are using Stellar Consensus Protocol, not Stellar itself. Nobody uses MobileCoin yet.
dude01 9y ago
I don't know you, but... I have an idea for BrowserCoin.com -- a marketplace for ads where users are paid to try a product. They receive a coin payment when they use a product for a certain period of time. Don't bother decentralizing -- keep tabs on who is paid, to avoid bots stealing payments with fake usage. Let me know if you like that, my email is in my profile.

Uptrenda 9y ago

I think this is going in the right direction. You take a bunch of tamper-proof hardware devices from different manufacturers and then model attack costs to compromise them as part of a proof-of-stake scheme. Now you can build consensus algorithms on top of them that are highly secure and scalable compared to anything that exists today. I'm not convinced that Stellar consensus here is the right algorithm for doing this, but I think SGX is promising technology that has been somewhat overlooked in the blockchain space (not by everyone.) SGX has a lot of potential. You can use SGX as a way to expand the consensus rules of any blockchain by using it as a blackbox obfuscation construct. Everything and more that Vitalik wrote in his article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation is possible with SGX today. Want to create a specialized oracle that only signs certain transaction formats, even on untrusted hosts? Yep - use SGX. Now you can have agents that run in a cluster that will only move assets between blockchains based on a user's prior agreements, allowing for more complex cross-blockchain smart contracts to be written in high-level languages. What about having a nice way to do transaction commitments to scale any blockchain without having GB zero-knowledge proofs? SGX again. It could be used for privacy preserving protocols... It could be used for solving data availability problems in sharding / decentralized storage systems. The list goes on. Some of the biggest trust problems are solvable with this technology - but like others have already said - you still have to trust the hardware manufacturer. In this case, my thoughts are that you already have to trust the hardware manufacturer anyway (nobody is going to inspect every chip with an electron microscope...) My bet is that a non-trivial portion of full nodes today are already running chips with backdoors like the Intel Management Engine anyway... The point here is that you can't fully remove trust from any system without introducing vast inefficiencies, but you can at least formalize the risks in a system and design so that a compromise is too expensive to be worthwhile, and for me I think that's where the potential lies with this tech. Cryptoeconomic systems based on tamper-proof hardware where individually a component may be compromised, but where it is simply infeasible to compromise each and every device. You build a network out of these components and you have yourself the first on-chain scalable blockchain bound by physical hardware encumberments instead of computational difficulty.

cyphunk 9y ago
You know it was hard enough for PayTV smart card developers to keep transistor level reverse engineers from getting inside their chips, and all that was at stake then was $35 content subscriptions. I can't imagine how putting personal banking inside SGX will fare. Or, I acknowledge I am probably missing something. Am i?

laretluval 9y ago

Will I have to give a mobile phone number to use this cryptocurrency?

m3kw9 9y ago

This hardware requirement will slow adoption

harry8 9y ago

I'm probably going to pay this a lot more attention now than I would have purely because I find Moxie really quite impressive all the way up to his patient, reasoned interactions with people around here.

99812381 9y ago
Most people with reasoned interactions around here want to sell something...

flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago

Sounds pretty similar to Dash with the nodes, doesn't it? Dash has been doing quite well recently... so it mustn't be a terrible idea.

Casseres 9y ago
It's a great idea for making money. It's a terrible idea for a currency.

neuralzen 9y ago

The Request Network may beat them to it, in terms of making crypto accessible, since it aims to provide a paypal-like, currency agnostic portal for payments. But I still like the project, and will follow it closely.

coderdude 9y ago

Hold on, let me promote it in troll chat for a bit. Okay, now I'm fully invested in your scamcoin. When does it moon and when do I buy my Lambos? Ah shoot. I thought we were all doing the thing where we get rich

tmp123tmp123 9y ago

The age of Tantric bullshit all over again. Science and finance became a contest of idiotic sophisticated models, similar to ancient cosmology and pseudo-philosophy. Piling bullshit upon bullshit and trying to overshout everyone else. All model-based science is such contest of tantras made out of math and probability. Now everyone is inventing a new breed of digital turnips (not forgetting to secure a middle man position for themselves) as if this is anything but hype. My block-chain based turnips are better than yours. Laws of economics are bound by the laws of physics. It is merely the principle of energy efficiency at work and related medium of exchange and social constructs. If something grows out of nothing it is not economics anymore. It is something else. Mass hysteria. Social momentum. Lifecicle of a meme. Whatever it is. Crypto currencies to finance are what cat pictures are to the internet. One could monetize can I haz hamburger meme, but there is nothing substantial behind it. So are crypto currencies.

coderdude 9y ago

Hi, I'm like a 10-year-in loser who wants to strike it rich with bitcoin. Please describe in detail how I and only I can become a new-money juggernaut in finance. Ty

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

> Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second weird I assumed it was more. It's still 300M a day or 100bn/yr but still.

TeeWEE 9y ago

The private key is stored on the node. Haha big fail. That's not what decentralized blockchains are about.

mbid 9y ago

A decentralized currency brought to you by Moxie "Signal doesn't federate or allow third-party clients" Marlinspike. OK.

verbify 9y ago
He used to federate, he said he reckons he lost a year of development in the attempt. His argument is federation makes change difficult - and a private company can centralise the protocol (like Slack or WhatsApp) leading to a better user experience because they're not tied to getting everyone to agree to a change. You can read his arguments here: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ and here: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217231557 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

bandrami 9y ago

I was just thinking we need a few more of these.

baybal2 9y ago

Stupidly bad design - storing other people's private keys in a protected memory region. This is as good as entrusting a safe with your money to a thief, thinking that the guy will be unable to open it. Marlinspike, yet again, flops face down with his credibility as a crypto researcher. Remember his his angry letter about silent key renegotiation hole in Facebook messenger

juicyfroot 9y ago

Quote: "Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second; the best bitcoin network might be able to process seven per second." Bitcoin Cash can do 25 tx/second. With 8GB blocks that is 25k/sec