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> It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway

> It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer? The best part about this is that besides all the obvious criticism for hooking up your chat app to a pump&dump cryptocurrency scam, the cryptocurrency is also just a legitimately terrible way to implement this feature. Manual wire transfers? 50p per transaction? Fucking price volatility?

vinay427 6y ago
> Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer? You may have misunderstood what they're saying. The full sentence from which you quoted: > It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out of cryptocurrency exchanges that support MobileCoin, which costs money. They're saying that you need a wire transfer to buy and sell MobileCoin using the currently-available exchanges. Once you possess MobileCoin, you can then send or receive it using the app without further wire transfers unless you choose to cash out. A wire transfer isn't necessary for a transaction in Signal.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  No, I did not misunderstand at all. I care about solving my problem which presumably is sending money to my buddy in the easiest, most straightforward way. That is what a solution is going to be measured on. (Hint: you can just give people contingents of your make-believe currency. But it's a better scam if they wire transfer money for it!)
  - hiq 6y ago
    You have a point in the case of a volatile cryptocurrency: if 1 MOB is worth USD 10 one day and USD 1 the next, nobody will want to keep their MOB, so you have one bank transfer for one MOB transfer. It sucks. If MOB becomes less volatile over time, you could imagine people having USD 100 in MOB that they would trade for small debts, and they could be fine leaving this sum in MOB. In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement. How stable they'll manage to make it, frankly I can't say, I believe it's still an open problem for them.
    - iudqnolq 6y ago
      > In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement. It'd be less inconvenient that a worse cryptocurrency, but more inconvenient than hitting a button in your bank app (the uk has instant transfers already).
      - hiq 6y ago
        > but more inconvenient than hitting a button in your bank app Sure, assuming: 1. you have the app 2. you have the IBAN (or equivalent) I'd say 1. is a good assumption for younger generations (?), but 2. is still more friction than what Signal could offer.
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        But you need a bank account to make a wire transfer to turn your real money into MOB.
        jeltz 6y ago
        Only 2.5% of the UK adult population is unbanked and if it is anything like here in Sweden that means virtually all of the other 97.5% have IBAN.
        roywiggins 6y ago
        How do you buy MobileCoin without an IBAN?
        Dma54rhs 6y ago
        These are standard things people have when they are savvy enough to own a mobile phone. In UK/EU they don't solve a problem tiny bit but rather make it more risky because of volatility and more difficult abs expensive to cash out.
        hiq 6y ago
        I should have been clearer with the IBAN point. In particular I was not talking about people outside of the banking system. I'll respond here to most replies I got so far. What I meant is that you need the IBAN of the person you want to send money to (of course you need to have an IBAN, as in, you need a bank account for your MOB to be actually worth anything). Assuming Alice and Bob are contacts on Signal, and Alice wants to send money to Bob, Alice still has to ask for Bob's IBAN. We can safely assume that Bob does not know his IBAN by heart, and has to use his ebanking app (for instance). You already have some kind of identifier for Bob, Signal would allow you to reuse it. Some ebanking apps already allow you to do that, but I think in most cases both have to be clients at the same bank (?) The idea is that you have less friction. The chat would be something like: > B: can you send me 5 USD > A: sure, here it is > A sent you N MOB, equivalent to 5 USD. Of course the UX is still far from being there (volatility is the biggest problem I think).
harry8 6y ago
>"Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a _____ wire transfer?" Yeah, it clearly did and they didn't like that you and everyone else doing that now has their transactions tracked. They know X paid Y an amount of $Z. They want you and everyone else to be able to transfer without anyone knowing to who. Just like using cash money in a shop (withdraw, transfer to Y, Y deposits in their bank and your banks know nothing as opposed to a direct deposit from X to Y where your banks know precisely when and who is on either end of the transfer). Yes, as they note their current solution has issues. Transaction fees are too high. Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely. So what is this? A start that can be improved on. If you want your transaction to be secret from your banks and those your banks share info with a wire transfer is probably not an improvement. Might not work at all. Might have other issues as yet undreamed of. We'll see. Given I don't ever have to use this and Moxie has earned a reputation of not being neither crook nor zuck I'm kinda happy to watch and see what happens. Immense amount of "Signal is terrible" on this site which doesn't make much sense to me. edit: Immense amount.
- ac29 6y ago
  > Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely. Volatility is not an issue for any major world currency (USD, Euro, Yen, etc). If I pay the bill at a restaurant and ask my friends to repay me on Venmo, the money I receive is worth exactly the same when it hits my bank account a few days later as when the bill was paid. Perhaps you could argue it changed by 0.01% or something due to inflation, but cryptocurrencies can easily change by several percent per day.
  - harry8 6y ago
    The smaller the level of volatility the smaller the problem. Cash in USD is good enough, not so long ago (still? I haven't kept up) cash is not at all good enough in Zimbabwe (unless you use a foreign currency like e.g. USD).
  - qqii 6y ago
    Volatility doesn't have to be an issue with a cryptocurrency tokens either, there are plenty of stablecoins backed by currencies and plenty of algorithmic stablecoins backed by other cryptocurrencies. At the moment the majority of these exist in public blockchains. There are plenty of models that facilitate the same privacy guarentees for stablecoins.

vinay427 6y ago

> Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a fucking wire transfer? You may have misunderstood what they're saying. The full sentence from which you quoted: > It currently requires a wire transfer for people in the UK to get funds in and out of cryptocurrency exchanges that support MobileCoin, which costs money. They're saying that you need a wire transfer to buy and sell MobileCoin using the currently-available exchanges. Once you possess MobileCoin, you can then send or receive it using the app without further wire transfers unless you choose to cash out. A wire transfer isn't necessary for a transaction in Signal.

stefan_ 6y ago
No, I did not misunderstand at all. I care about solving my problem which presumably is sending money to my buddy in the easiest, most straightforward way. That is what a solution is going to be measured on. (Hint: you can just give people contingents of your make-believe currency. But it's a better scam if they wire transfer money for it!)
- hiq 6y ago
  You have a point in the case of a volatile cryptocurrency: if 1 MOB is worth USD 10 one day and USD 1 the next, nobody will want to keep their MOB, so you have one bank transfer for one MOB transfer. It sucks. If MOB becomes less volatile over time, you could imagine people having USD 100 in MOB that they would trade for small debts, and they could be fine leaving this sum in MOB. In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement. How stable they'll manage to make it, frankly I can't say, I believe it's still an open problem for them.
  - iudqnolq 6y ago
    > In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement. It'd be less inconvenient that a worse cryptocurrency, but more inconvenient than hitting a button in your bank app (the uk has instant transfers already).
    - hiq 6y ago
      > but more inconvenient than hitting a button in your bank app Sure, assuming: 1. you have the app 2. you have the IBAN (or equivalent) I'd say 1. is a good assumption for younger generations (?), but 2. is still more friction than what Signal could offer.
      - iudqnolq 6y ago
        But you need a bank account to make a wire transfer to turn your real money into MOB.
      - jeltz 6y ago
        Only 2.5% of the UK adult population is unbanked and if it is anything like here in Sweden that means virtually all of the other 97.5% have IBAN.
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        How do you buy MobileCoin without an IBAN?
      - Dma54rhs 6y ago
        These are standard things people have when they are savvy enough to own a mobile phone. In UK/EU they don't solve a problem tiny bit but rather make it more risky because of volatility and more difficult abs expensive to cash out.
      - hiq 6y ago
        I should have been clearer with the IBAN point. In particular I was not talking about people outside of the banking system. I'll respond here to most replies I got so far. What I meant is that you need the IBAN of the person you want to send money to (of course you need to have an IBAN, as in, you need a bank account for your MOB to be actually worth anything). Assuming Alice and Bob are contacts on Signal, and Alice wants to send money to Bob, Alice still has to ask for Bob's IBAN. We can safely assume that Bob does not know his IBAN by heart, and has to use his ebanking app (for instance). You already have some kind of identifier for Bob, Signal would allow you to reuse it. Some ebanking apps already allow you to do that, but I think in most cases both have to be clients at the same bank (?) The idea is that you have less friction. The chat would be something like: > B: can you send me 5 USD > A: sure, here it is > A sent you N MOB, equivalent to 5 USD. Of course the UX is still far from being there (volatility is the biggest problem I think).

harry8 6y ago

>"Did it appear to these clowns that if I have to use a wire transfer anyway, I can just use a _____ wire transfer?" Yeah, it clearly did and they didn't like that you and everyone else doing that now has their transactions tracked. They know X paid Y an amount of $Z. They want you and everyone else to be able to transfer without anyone knowing to who. Just like using cash money in a shop (withdraw, transfer to Y, Y deposits in their bank and your banks know nothing as opposed to a direct deposit from X to Y where your banks know precisely when and who is on either end of the transfer). Yes, as they note their current solution has issues. Transaction fees are too high. Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely. So what is this? A start that can be improved on. If you want your transaction to be secret from your banks and those your banks share info with a wire transfer is probably not an improvement. Might not work at all. Might have other issues as yet undreamed of. We'll see. Given I don't ever have to use this and Moxie has earned a reputation of not being neither crook nor zuck I'm kinda happy to watch and see what happens. Immense amount of "Signal is terrible" on this site which doesn't make much sense to me. edit: Immense amount.

ac29 6y ago
> Volatility is a problem for any currency used as a medium of exchange absolutely. Volatility is not an issue for any major world currency (USD, Euro, Yen, etc). If I pay the bill at a restaurant and ask my friends to repay me on Venmo, the money I receive is worth exactly the same when it hits my bank account a few days later as when the bill was paid. Perhaps you could argue it changed by 0.01% or something due to inflation, but cryptocurrencies can easily change by several percent per day.
- harry8 6y ago
  The smaller the level of volatility the smaller the problem. Cash in USD is good enough, not so long ago (still? I haven't kept up) cash is not at all good enough in Zimbabwe (unless you use a foreign currency like e.g. USD).
- qqii 6y ago
  Volatility doesn't have to be an issue with a cryptocurrency tokens either, there are plenty of stablecoins backed by currencies and plenty of algorithmic stablecoins backed by other cryptocurrencies. At the moment the majority of these exist in public blockchains. There are plenty of models that facilitate the same privacy guarentees for stablecoins.