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This is garbage, and shouldn't be part of Signal. Everything on the internet is being corrupted with adding cryptocurrency scams where they absolutely don't be

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

TheCraiggers 6y ago
Signal is competing against some big players in the messaging space, at least some of which have money transfers. As long as they abide by their principles and none of these features impact privacy, I don't see how it wouldn't be viewed as a win. A case could be made for it being bloat, but most consumers don't care, and for Signal (or any messaging app) to be successful, it needs to appeal to the common denominator. And frankly, if this means I can send money to a friend without Google getting yet more data about me, then even better.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  Signal needs to be reliable, safe and have a low barrier of entry to achieve its goals of allowing widespread private communication. I thought that when I recommended that my peer group use it (at this point, all of my normal contacts use it extensively), I could trust that it would remain clearly focused on its mission- now I'll need to recommend it with a caveat to just click through the scam marketing, ICO offers and "airdrops".
  - kf 6y ago
    You’re being really cynical in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation. This doesn’t entail scam marketing, ICO offers, and airdrops just because that’s something that happens in a lot of the rest of cryptocurrency space.
    - RL_Quine 6y ago
      You missed the point. Even if Signal doesn't do the typical cryptocurrency scam behaviour, I now somehow need to try to explain to people why it is different to every other thing in the space that does act like that. On the face of it, if we assume that the inclusion of MobileCoin in Signal is completely benign, it's something that's never happened before. Smoking causes cancer, but smoking these specific cigarettes won't. Do you see the problem with trying to describe such an absurd situation to somebody?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - hiq 6y ago
        > You missed the point. You're making a different point now though, you're saying that people will associate it with scams which will hurt adoption. You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway. I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough. In terms of reputation, this is a long-term battle. Signal used to be quite unreliable in a lot of aspects, and hurt adoption. Now it's much better, making the migration from other messengers way smoother. If they're able to implement safe, private and convenient payments, that's one feature other messengers won't have to lure users away from signal.
        codethief 6y ago
        > You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway. I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough. I think you're confusing UI and UX. Yes, the UI could be kept light but the user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising. Why would a messaging app come with a payments feature if not to make money and exploit the user? Not saying that this is happening here but this is what people think, i.e. the emotional experience.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  If you're that concerned about third party processors, most banks and credit unions provide their customers a way to send money between people fairly simply. Signal providing this functionality is scope creep.
  - TheCraiggers 6y ago
    Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things. Yet, those features have almost become synonymous with messaging apps. The market and consumers seem to want these services combined, so here we are. My point was that sending money is a feature that more and more messaging services have. Hangouts (or whatever the hell it is called these days), Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. Personally, I would have liked it more if this wasn't tied to some no-name cryptocurrency, but oh well.
    - candiddevmike 6y ago
      > Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things. I think those would all be considered in scope for a chat platform--theyre all various ways to share and communicate.
- Slartie 6y ago
  But they're not adding a "money" transfer option, they're adding a "MobileCoin" transfer option! For the overwhelming part of society, these are not interchangeable terms. When people want to send "money" to other people, they usually imply that they want to send units of the local currency, like USD or EUR. And they usually imply that the value of these units should stay the same during transfer. If I want to pay my share of a restaurant visit to my friend who covered the check, I'd like the 30$ I'm sending to still hold enough value when they arrive in his bank account to actually cover my share. A cryptocurrency intermediate that swings +/- 20% in value within minutes (and that we both have to pay conversion fees in order to acquire/redeem for $) is of exactly no use at all for such a use case.
devwastaken 6y ago
If they didn't use some random 'coin' no one has heard of I'd be on board. They're trying to compete in a bad way. They should simply just use Stripe and be done with it. People want an alternative to facebook messaging and PayPal. They don't want superfluous cryptos.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  Moxie Marlinspike is listed as an advisor of MobileCoin, so there's some obvious financial connections between the two.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    "Moxie, as an individual, is a paid technical advisor to MobileCoin"
- immy 6y ago
  Signal was a random 'messenger' at one point too. They needed a fast (in seconds) private way to send money. There wasn't one. Until now.
- hiq 6y ago
  I think the end-goal is to provide privacy guarantees you will never have with Stripe or other traditional payment processors.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    You can't trust an app that is distributed through the Google Play Store as a wallet with any kind of privacy guarantee.
- EMM_386 6y ago
  > If they didn't use some random 'coin' no one has heard of I'd be on board. The founder of Signal actually created MobileCoin. https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/
centimeter 6y ago
If they weren't using this as an opportunity to pump some shitcoin, this might make sense. Bitcoin Lightning integration would be much less suspect, for example, because A) it's already well established B) they're not going to make a quick buck off it.
- mikeyla85 6y ago
  Lightning doesn't have privacy and Signal needs privacy.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    What in the world do you mean? Lightning has excellent privacy; payments are onion-routed.
josh2600 6y ago
Hi, Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them. Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog). I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  > Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. Signal has obvious financial connections to MobileCoin, something that frankly nobody else has ever heard of before today. I find it really difficult to believe that MobileCoin paying Moxie (which you've acknowledged), and Signal/Moxie happening to choose MobileCoin for inclusion in Signal when nobody wanted it was a coincidence. It's insulting to the intelligence of the reader to even make that claim. > Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. What would that tell me?
  - bdcs 6y ago
    "Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own any MobileCoins." https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messaging-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...
ncmncm 6y ago
Agree. It would be OK to make Signal able to integrate payment systems and make this thing compatible with that or with any other comm that implements the interface. Tying them together is pernicious. Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services, and by being very choosy about who gets ports. I had high hopes for Matrix, once they got E2EE, but they have flubbed that by requiring a very heavyweight bounce server that won't fit on (e.g.) your typical home router or super-cheap cloud VM. Matrix should enable a place to keep your message archive independent of the bounce server, and allow gatewaying a non-public storage service via the lightweight bounce service. But Element.io's business model is tied to heavy-weight bounce service.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  Mastodon, Matrix and others suffer that issue greatly. You can't really run single-user instances without running a gigantic installation, when a minimal implementation of their protocols should have no footprint to speak of.
  - lrvick 6y ago
    Dendrite is that minimal implementation to make single user instances cheap.
    - summm 6y ago
      Yes, at some time in the future, but it is not usable yet.
  - remirk 6y ago
    That was the case a few years ago. Matrix' server software has improved a lot since then. It doesn't use much resources anymore. Though there still is a large CPU spike when I join a really large room (500+ users) for the first time.
- lrvick 6y ago
  Have you seen matrix p2p? Also anyone can run their own servers, and Dendrite can run on very modest hardware like a Raspi.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
With all due respect your comment seems to be coming from an extremely privileged position. In many parts of the world, people do not have the luxury of basic banking, where storing and sending money is fraught with risk due to corruption and a lack of infrastructure. Take a look at M-PESA [1] for a "last-gen" solution using SMS. I think what Signal is doing with MOB is pretty important work for many non-western countries, and I wish them all the best. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Crypto currencies don’t really solve the problems with a lack of banking infrastructure. Usually people need some way to get actual physical cash (remember, we’re talking about places where people don’t really have access to modern banking systems, not places where most people have bank accounts and credit cards) in and out of the system. It’s a nice idea if everything magically happens in your digital system but I don’t think that can happen without a credible way to bootstrap it involving lots of moving physical cash first. I don’t think it’s credible to hope for third party exchanges or tiny local businesses to provide these services, and I also don’t think it is credible to expect people living in these underdeveloped places to take on the risk of price volatility in some random cryptocurrency.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  This is a very privileged position. Cryptocurrencies don't solve third world banking, at all. You still get paid in fiat, which you then have to convert to crypto (using a bank), and you will never be able to have most people get paid in crypto because then the government can't get taxes reliably (thus they will ban it).
dang 6y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

TheCraiggers 6y ago

Signal is competing against some big players in the messaging space, at least some of which have money transfers. As long as they abide by their principles and none of these features impact privacy, I don't see how it wouldn't be viewed as a win. A case could be made for it being bloat, but most consumers don't care, and for Signal (or any messaging app) to be successful, it needs to appeal to the common denominator. And frankly, if this means I can send money to a friend without Google getting yet more data about me, then even better.

RL_Quine 6y ago
Signal needs to be reliable, safe and have a low barrier of entry to achieve its goals of allowing widespread private communication. I thought that when I recommended that my peer group use it (at this point, all of my normal contacts use it extensively), I could trust that it would remain clearly focused on its mission- now I'll need to recommend it with a caveat to just click through the scam marketing, ICO offers and "airdrops".
- kf 6y ago
  You’re being really cynical in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation. This doesn’t entail scam marketing, ICO offers, and airdrops just because that’s something that happens in a lot of the rest of cryptocurrency space.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    You missed the point. Even if Signal doesn't do the typical cryptocurrency scam behaviour, I now somehow need to try to explain to people why it is different to every other thing in the space that does act like that. On the face of it, if we assume that the inclusion of MobileCoin in Signal is completely benign, it's something that's never happened before. Smoking causes cancer, but smoking these specific cigarettes won't. Do you see the problem with trying to describe such an absurd situation to somebody?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hiq 6y ago
      > You missed the point. You're making a different point now though, you're saying that people will associate it with scams which will hurt adoption. You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway. I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough. In terms of reputation, this is a long-term battle. Signal used to be quite unreliable in a lot of aspects, and hurt adoption. Now it's much better, making the migration from other messengers way smoother. If they're able to implement safe, private and convenient payments, that's one feature other messengers won't have to lure users away from signal.
      - codethief 6y ago
        > You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway. I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough. I think you're confusing UI and UX. Yes, the UI could be kept light but the user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising. Why would a messaging app come with a payments feature if not to make money and exploit the user? Not saying that this is happening here but this is what people think, i.e. the emotional experience.
candiddevmike 6y ago
If you're that concerned about third party processors, most banks and credit unions provide their customers a way to send money between people fairly simply. Signal providing this functionality is scope creep.
- TheCraiggers 6y ago
  Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things. Yet, those features have almost become synonymous with messaging apps. The market and consumers seem to want these services combined, so here we are. My point was that sending money is a feature that more and more messaging services have. Hangouts (or whatever the hell it is called these days), Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. Personally, I would have liked it more if this wasn't tied to some no-name cryptocurrency, but oh well.
  - candiddevmike 6y ago
    > Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things. I think those would all be considered in scope for a chat platform--theyre all various ways to share and communicate.
Slartie 6y ago
But they're not adding a "money" transfer option, they're adding a "MobileCoin" transfer option! For the overwhelming part of society, these are not interchangeable terms. When people want to send "money" to other people, they usually imply that they want to send units of the local currency, like USD or EUR. And they usually imply that the value of these units should stay the same during transfer. If I want to pay my share of a restaurant visit to my friend who covered the check, I'd like the 30$ I'm sending to still hold enough value when they arrive in his bank account to actually cover my share. A cryptocurrency intermediate that swings +/- 20% in value within minutes (and that we both have to pay conversion fees in order to acquire/redeem for $) is of exactly no use at all for such a use case.

devwastaken 6y ago

If they didn't use some random 'coin' no one has heard of I'd be on board. They're trying to compete in a bad way. They should simply just use Stripe and be done with it. People want an alternative to facebook messaging and PayPal. They don't want superfluous cryptos.

RL_Quine 6y ago
Moxie Marlinspike is listed as an advisor of MobileCoin, so there's some obvious financial connections between the two.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  "Moxie, as an individual, is a paid technical advisor to MobileCoin"
immy 6y ago
Signal was a random 'messenger' at one point too. They needed a fast (in seconds) private way to send money. There wasn't one. Until now.
hiq 6y ago
I think the end-goal is to provide privacy guarantees you will never have with Stripe or other traditional payment processors.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  You can't trust an app that is distributed through the Google Play Store as a wallet with any kind of privacy guarantee.
EMM_386 6y ago
> If they didn't use some random 'coin' no one has heard of I'd be on board. The founder of Signal actually created MobileCoin. https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/

centimeter 6y ago

If they weren't using this as an opportunity to pump some shitcoin, this might make sense. Bitcoin Lightning integration would be much less suspect, for example, because A) it's already well established B) they're not going to make a quick buck off it.

mikeyla85 6y ago
Lightning doesn't have privacy and Signal needs privacy.
- centimeter 6y ago
  What in the world do you mean? Lightning has excellent privacy; payments are onion-routed.

josh2600 6y ago

Hi, Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them. Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog). I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.

RL_Quine 6y ago
> Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. Signal has obvious financial connections to MobileCoin, something that frankly nobody else has ever heard of before today. I find it really difficult to believe that MobileCoin paying Moxie (which you've acknowledged), and Signal/Moxie happening to choose MobileCoin for inclusion in Signal when nobody wanted it was a coincidence. It's insulting to the intelligence of the reader to even make that claim. > Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. What would that tell me?
- bdcs 6y ago
  "Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own any MobileCoins." https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messaging-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messa...

ncmncm 6y ago

Agree. It would be OK to make Signal able to integrate payment systems and make this thing compatible with that or with any other comm that implements the interface. Tying them together is pernicious. Anyway Signal is itself pernicious by being tied to a phone number and to Google Play services, and by being very choosy about who gets ports. I had high hopes for Matrix, once they got E2EE, but they have flubbed that by requiring a very heavyweight bounce server that won't fit on (e.g.) your typical home router or super-cheap cloud VM. Matrix should enable a place to keep your message archive independent of the bounce server, and allow gatewaying a non-public storage service via the lightweight bounce service. But Element.io's business model is tied to heavy-weight bounce service.

RL_Quine 6y ago
Mastodon, Matrix and others suffer that issue greatly. You can't really run single-user instances without running a gigantic installation, when a minimal implementation of their protocols should have no footprint to speak of.
- lrvick 6y ago
  Dendrite is that minimal implementation to make single user instances cheap.
  - summm 6y ago
    Yes, at some time in the future, but it is not usable yet.
- remirk 6y ago
  That was the case a few years ago. Matrix' server software has improved a lot since then. It doesn't use much resources anymore. Though there still is a large CPU spike when I join a really large room (500+ users) for the first time.
lrvick 6y ago
Have you seen matrix p2p? Also anyone can run their own servers, and Dendrite can run on very modest hardware like a Raspi.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

With all due respect your comment seems to be coming from an extremely privileged position. In many parts of the world, people do not have the luxury of basic banking, where storing and sending money is fraught with risk due to corruption and a lack of infrastructure. Take a look at M-PESA [1] for a "last-gen" solution using SMS. I think what Signal is doing with MOB is pretty important work for many non-western countries, and I wish them all the best. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

dan-robertson 6y ago
Crypto currencies don’t really solve the problems with a lack of banking infrastructure. Usually people need some way to get actual physical cash (remember, we’re talking about places where people don’t really have access to modern banking systems, not places where most people have bank accounts and credit cards) in and out of the system. It’s a nice idea if everything magically happens in your digital system but I don’t think that can happen without a credible way to bootstrap it involving lots of moving physical cash first. I don’t think it’s credible to hope for third party exchanges or tiny local businesses to provide these services, and I also don’t think it is credible to expect people living in these underdeveloped places to take on the risk of price volatility in some random cryptocurrency.
sudosysgen 6y ago
This is a very privileged position. Cryptocurrencies don't solve third world banking, at all. You still get paid in fiat, which you then have to convert to crypto (using a bank), and you will never be able to have most people get paid in crypto because then the government can't get taxes reliably (thus they will ban it).

dang 6y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html