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I think the key to understanding people's dismay is not seeing the Signal team as yet another 'crypto team'. People aren't hoping for Signal to do better than o

by Vinnl 6y ago

I think the key to understanding people's dismay is not seeing the Signal team as yet another 'crypto team'. People aren't hoping for Signal to do better than other cryptocurrencies; they're hoping for them to do better than the other messengers, and are afraid that crypto will jeopardise that. I'm in more of a 'let's wait and see' mode (see: this article), but I understand the worry.

qqii 6y ago
Signal's developers are not MobileCoin's developers though. All Signal's developers have done is integrate the work of MobileCoin into their backend (fog) and client (fog wallet).
- iudqnolq 6y ago
  However, that integration took a year, which we know because they made their development private while they worked on it. I'd call that a non-insignificant impact, both in terms of what else they could have worked on in the portion of their time they spent on it, and because it moviated them to hide their source code.
  - qqii 6y ago
    I get the point but it's misleading to attribute the entire year to integrating payments. The server code base has historically had periods of non public updates and doing a quick grep of the commit log payments first appears in October 2020. It's been clear since 2017 that Moxie has wanted to integrate payments to "stay competitive", so such effort was always on the schedule.
    - iudqnolq 6y ago
      Absolutely. I tried to get that across with "portion of the time", but I realize that wasn't clear. I meant to imply that if it took a year in clock time it took non-insignificant person-hours, which I think is reasonable. I also tried to get across that if payments caused the code to be private for a year, that's also a downside
- Vinnl 6y ago
  They're not, but the integration could attract the wrong sort of attention (both from governments and potential users), and uses engineering effort that could also have spent on whatever someone's favourite missing feature/bug is. Plus, there's just the overall smell of scams that is attached to cryptocurrencies, and people don't want Signal to be (part of) a scam.

by Vinnl 6y ago

qqii 6y ago

Signal's developers are not MobileCoin's developers though. All Signal's developers have done is integrate the work of MobileCoin into their backend (fog) and client (fog wallet).

iudqnolq 6y ago
However, that integration took a year, which we know because they made their development private while they worked on it. I'd call that a non-insignificant impact, both in terms of what else they could have worked on in the portion of their time they spent on it, and because it moviated them to hide their source code.
- qqii 6y ago
  I get the point but it's misleading to attribute the entire year to integrating payments. The server code base has historically had periods of non public updates and doing a quick grep of the commit log payments first appears in October 2020. It's been clear since 2017 that Moxie has wanted to integrate payments to "stay competitive", so such effort was always on the schedule.
  - iudqnolq 6y ago
    Absolutely. I tried to get that across with "portion of the time", but I realize that wasn't clear. I meant to imply that if it took a year in clock time it took non-insignificant person-hours, which I think is reasonable. I also tried to get across that if payments caused the code to be private for a year, that's also a downside
Vinnl 6y ago
They're not, but the integration could attract the wrong sort of attention (both from governments and potential users), and uses engineering effort that could also have spent on whatever someone's favourite missing feature/bug is. Plus, there's just the overall smell of scams that is attached to cryptocurrencies, and people don't want Signal to be (part of) a scam.