- Moxie's involvement with MobileCoin (could be as simple as saying: "for the same reasons Signal's interested in MobileCoin, moxie is as well").
- The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
- Why it involved hiding the server source code.
The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive, but I very much hope the obvious concerns won't play out in practice (which time will tell), and it would be good if they'd also addressed the above.
Also: why Mobilecoin, which is as far from "an alternative payments infrastructure" as most other cash-grab cryptocurrency ?
It isn't known how much of it was premined, and from an early version of their whitepaper, the founders might have as much as 80% of the total supply of the coin. This isn't fine for a cryptocurrency which aims to be "an alternative payments infrastructure", and it isn't fine for Signal to try to promote them as such.
To play Signal's advocate, MobileCoin is one of the only cryptocurrencies that meets their requirements. The only other cryptocurrency that I know of that might come close is Grin.
The details of the distribution are lacking but as a beta it meets the experience they're going for - it's not as if they'd choose something that doesn't meet their requirements for the beta.
To clarify the only coins that meet their privacy requirements are ZCash, Monero, and MOB. The only subset of that that meets their transactional speed requirements is MOB.
At least AFAIK. There's a ton of alt coins so I might have missed something.
Their "privacy" is strongly based on the confidentiality of SGX. If you're willing to trust SGX for your confidentiality and security, as they have, they could use any cryptocurrency in a highly private and instant manner.
MOB is transparently a scheme to generate a windfall from shoving a pre-mined coin into a mass-market application. One could debate the ethics of that with a straight face, I suppose, but to argue that it is anything but is just dishonest.
My understanding is that SGX is only a layer. As in that it acts like ZCash or Monero and then has SGX as an additional layer. Even Signal uses SGX. But breaking SGX isn't going to break Signal. Also, my understanding is that these speculative attacks are still difficult to pull off in the first place. I mean everything is hackable, question is how easy it is to pull off.
The monero like part effectively runs on their servers inside SGX for performance reasons. If the SGX were completely insecure the users would have no privacy against the operators at all.
The client fully identifies itself and its keys to the server, the wallet is entirely implemented server side. Without SGX there is no privacy what-so-ever.
Usage of ringct is incidental. It's like claiming that your documents are private when your operating system submits them all to the NSA because the NSA encrypts them after receiving them. :) (and, of course, we trust the NSA to behave honestly...)
Also, _even if_ we steel-manned the design and imagine SGX is truly only used as a "defence-in-depth" layer on top of a ringct blockchain, using SGX to prove that SGX Lightning nodes weren't keeping transaction info would still be better privacy under many circumstances.
Lightning transactions are ephemeral: once the transaction happens, _no_ data about the transaction actually needs to be kept by anyone, let alone on a public blockchain. And only the peers directly involved in the route ever learn about the transaction directly.
Whereas with SGX, if SGX is broken in the future - and it will be - the statistical analysis on the underlying blockchain data is still possible. And unlike MobileCoin, this design wouldn't put SGX in any kind of trust or custodial position at all: if SGX failed, you'd just close the Lightning channels the same way any other Lightning implementation would, and open new channels with non-SGX peers.
You got sources for that being how the construction works?
From various telegram groups with the devs in them , my understanding is 1) rings are constructed client side 2) uploaded to the server inside SGX. This has two major weaknesses 1) it doesn't specify how payment notification happens, which can be a massive privacy hole 2) if SGX is broken you are subject to all of the long term intersection attacks on Monero's/k-anonymity because the rings are now public.
This is a very limited threat model and worthy of serious scrutiny.
I clearly misunderstood you but can you explain how you've come to that conclusion?
I'm trusting their whitepaper but it looks to me that fog provides similar security guarentees between MyMonero (shared view key) and other light wallets (computation on device).
I don't see how the privacy could be any worse than MyMonero even if SGX was compromised.
At best we know that he (claims to) have no coins. But that he was an advisor for them and focused on what he saw as a problem with crypto payments: speed. But yeah, there are still a lot of open questions here.
> The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
They addressed this before and the code reflects it. They whitelist country codes that allow it.
> Why it involved hiding the server source code.
This was weird and I'd like it addressed but probably not relevant to this particular topic/post.
> The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive,
Same. I mean it is a core element of the cyperpunk manifesto[0]. But I don't want to use a payment system that is volatile. If I have to choose to be beholden to services that collect my data or use a currency that is volatile, I'm going with the former every time. This is the question that I would have liked to be further addressed.
I mean, regardless of whether they addressed it before, to me this blog posts reads like their attempt to address all concerns raised in a single place, and these are all concerns I've seen raised. Thus, it seems to be like it would be very relevant to address them in this post, and would help restore some of the trust that some people already lost, and that others are at risk of losing.
Even if he has no coins personally, that's a very narrow claim. Far more likely is that he has an interest in the company which happens to have pre-minted and owns most of the coins.
> - Why it involved hiding the server source code.
My guess: to reduce the noise and speculation. Much better to deal with it now that there's something to be gained (feedback from beta testers and actual deployment). There was little to gain before, since the server accepts very few contributions anyway.
I wander enough on GH to see how much time big open-source project maintainers spend addressing toxic comments. Open-source is nice when you get relevant contributions and constructive feedback, but it's really not free, you have to deal with all the rest as well.
I sympathize with this. On the other hand, you have to consider the big picture:
- the open-source argument was mostly meant for everyone to look at the sources and draw their conclusions regarding privacy and security
- these guarantees are mostly client-side (and you can't check what's running on the server anyway, even with the code)
It's fair to say that the server code was proprietary for one year. Most of their code was still open-source during that time, and most of it (now that they push to the server repo as well) is now.
I feel they would have taken less flak over this if their server code had never been open-source to begin with, or if they just released it now.
Well take it further – is is still open-source if you update the public repo once every 10 years?
For the vast majority of people, OSS in 2021 means having a public repo hosted somewhere that all commits are pushed to, or PRs are made to. Periodically updating a public repo with changes made to a private repo is not really what people have in mind.
The biggest example I can think of projects that worked this way was how WebKit and Android would publish code dumps with every release. You can't go longer than that: if you put out releases without updating the source you're not open source.
Can they? First they'd have to never have accepted contributions, then if they ran an updated version on their server wouldn't they be in vialation of AGPL (not providing end users, in this case specifically those who use Signal an updated codebase).
They have a CLA, the legal side of things is clear. They can use their code however they want, the licenses are only relevant for others. When you contribute, you basically license your code under a permissive license to Signal (because of the CLA).
If they have never accepted contributions, then they are the sole copyright holder, and thus can do whatever they want with the code. Including not providing the source code to users.
You can't sue the copyright holder for infringing their own copyright.
Interestingly one of the comments in that thread refers to the server code as a reference implementation. This implies that Signal's server code isn't opensource, and that this code is just a reference implementation.
The readme.md on the repo doesn't really clarify one way or another on the matter.
Signal claims they shipped server updates without releasing code? Do you have a link to that?
When others were complaining about the lack of an update to server, they're complaining about the client and server APIs being out of sync. Reading through these comments, I don't get the impression that the server code published is what's actually running. In fact the following comment even refers to it as a reference implementation:
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter much what server code is running since the Clients manage encryption and the Server has no insight into the messages being exchanged.
It is not about how often you update your project.
To be open source, you need to publish the source of applications you run. It's as simple as that: "we developed this app, and it's running on our servers, and the source can be found here".
They kept updating their server app for a year, without publishing their source. This is not open source. Signal server code was not open source for a year.
Isn't the allegation that they made changes to the deployed version of their production server that were not pushed to the GitHub project? (i.e., that they stopped updating the server repository for around a year, but not just implausible but contradicted by evidence that they never changed the server code for about a year?)
If so, then the code quite simply is not open source by any possible definition. I agree with you that a project that is dormant, or even receiving internal development that is still under review, can defensibly be called "open source" even if the development isn't happening in the open. (For instance, your favorite begrudgingly-GPL-compliant hardware vendor who releases .zip files every time they release a new product is releasing "open source" code.) But if the source code to the Signal server isn't even published, it can't be open.
Why do you think more transparency would lead to noise and speculation? Exactly the opposite is the case. They could have gone the open route and maybe even gotten help from the community at implementing their payment feature.
But the way they did it they left everyone wondering whether their server is now spyware or what other reasons there could be for them to not update the public repo.
> Why do you think more transparency would lead to noise and speculation?
Because of the current situation: people argue about whether Moxie lost it, if Signal is still the right solution, etc.
If the feature had been implemented in the open, this debate would have taken place since the beginning, again with little benefit.
> maybe even gotten help from the community at implementing their payment feature.
Signal does not have an open development model. They're a small team, and most things beyond bug fixes are done by them. You can debate whether that's the most efficient approach, I'll just say it's an open question, and that's the model right now. So contributions to this brand new feature by the community would not have been possible.
> But the way they did it they left everyone wondering whether their server is now spyware
If people misunderstand that most of the security guarantees come from the clients, there's little an up-to-date repository on GitHub can do. I think the noise and complaining that has been happening for one year about the closed-source server is still negligible to what's happening now.
I would have preferred if they had kept it open, but I can definitely understand why they thought it was a better course of action.
> I’m not a beta tester, but cryptocurrency is the worst
100% this. I'm not a beta tester, but I am a signal user. I reeeally don't want to have to hedge my recommendation of signal because it's involved with some cryptocurrency BS. Please, just be a chat app.
I somewhat disagree. Sometimes I need to send payments internationally; in the US most chat apps allow for this. Or people use CashApp/PayPal. Sometimes I'm chatting with friends outside of the US and the choices to send money are very limited and problematic (e.g.: Argentina inflation, low PayPal adoption outside US and I think CashApp isn't available)
I don't know the specifics of the cryptocurrency being used, but adding the ability to send money is welcome
> having yet another weird cryptocurrency is not the right solution though.
Maybe we disagree on the problem. From the US one of the most convenient solutions is Xoom; in my experience the turnaround is around 24-48 hours depending on the country and institution that's receiving funds. First there is a transaction fee, I usually pay $3 - this seems to be flat so 3% if I'm sending $100 and 1% if I'm sending $300 (I've sent $300 maybe once, more commonly I need to send <$100). Then they double dip by using a favorable exchange rate. I would be surprised if we can't do this better with crypto (note I am not a huge crypto supporter in its current state)
That list is global, and the US list[0] seems weird, but I'll go over some apps that are and aren't on the list:
FB Messenger (#1): looks like it does
Snapchat (#2): did, but killed it in 2018. Don't think it ever had significant traction
WhatsApp (#3), Instagram (not listed, probably because it isn't primarily a messenger, but from personal experience it is commonly used as one): nope, but might be getting it soon[1]
Messenger by Google (#4): looks like it does from their website, but I don't use Android
Discord (#5): nope
iMessage (not listed, but hard to believe that's correct): does, via Apple Cash
So yes, messengers with send-money features are fairly common in the US. That being said, at least in my experience (college age, PNW) nobody uses them—we use use dedicated apps like Cash and Venmo.
Yeah in the US CashApp/Zelle/PayPal works great. FB/Apple/Google messenger apps support this but adoption is relatively low especially compared to something like WeChat
How are you going to a cash a crypto whose value is very volatile, like unless you cash out immediately its value in "real money" is in loss or is much higher?
Ever heard the expression “do one thing well”? Unix applications were built on this principle, if you need a reference.
Let the chat app be a chat app. Let the payment app be a payment app.
Or, to put it another way, do you recognize that a chat app and a payment app have different incentives? Combining them means now your chat app has payment app related incentives. Do you see this as a good thing? If so, why?
This is an often said criticism but the reality is that the mobile app ecosystem fundimentally breaks this principle.
When was the last time you saw an mobile app taking advantage of another one apart from tre camera? The only and most common time Android apps communicate is with Google Play Services.
Context switching on mobile or GUIs in general also don't follow this principle. Modern GUIs integrate plenty of things (file explorer, image editor, basic camera, etc) becuase mobile package management doesn't resolve dependancies automatically or allow for a great deal of UI customisation. Especially in a messaging client imagine not being able to send photos, videos, audio, or files!c
GUIs are here to stay so until we figure out a composable and we'll adopted GUI solution "doing one thing well" is not really an option.
> When was the last time you saw an mobile app taking advantage of another one apart from tre camera? The only and most common time Android apps communicate is with Google Play Services.
I do this all the time when I use mobile payment apps. Website has a link that opens the app, I do my payment, back to the safari afterwards. It also works from within other apps.
I think signal is and have been very clear that they won't remain "just a chat app". I don't have anything against cryptocurrency but I'm taking this as an opportunity to evaluate my alternatives.
It would have been more interesting to read your reaction to their answer to this concern, which is:
> We’ve only been testing this in beta in one country, so lots of people haven’t seen this yet and are imagining the worst. Don’t worry, it’s an opt-in feature, so if you don’t ever want to use payments in Signal, you never have to.
I think it's a non-answer that doesn't need a new response. "You don't have to use it if you don't want to" doesn't address the GP's concern around recommending the app to people who might not know better.
"Bad guys" already use Signal to communicate and some countries try to ban encryption, I'm not sure much will change here.
Whether you should be able to transfer money in a private manner is a political choice. Signal is mostly showing that it's technically feasible. I don't see braving regulations to provide this feature to everyone, but time will tell.
But before integrating payments, Signal was not a good way for phishing/ransom. Look at all the scams and whatnot where people have to go and buy some kind of coupon and pass the codes to the scammers and whatnot...
Signals now integrates all of this right into the app.
Signal is still not a good way for phishing/ransom anyways.
Users would either have to already have the attacker in their contacts list or enable sealed sender. Enabling and funding a cryptocurrency wallet is going to be difficult. Even for WeChat who's payment service is popular it only captures 40% market share and as a result generally people are more educated about the risks.
Bad guys use WhatsApp to communicate but that's not given it a bad image, in fact just the opposite. When it was revealed that WhatsApp encryption was used by terrorists in the UK and the government wanted a backdoor the image improved as more people learnt about it and learnt that it works.
So will their be a version of the app that doesn’t have payments built in at all? Because if not it will only be a matter of time before someone comes up with a playbook convincing nontechnical users they need to send mobile coin to them in order to keep using signal.
Even my non technical relatives know not to install another app that some stranger tells them they need. Trying to explain what cryptocurrency is and how not to fall into that trap if using signal sounds like a nightmare.
> someone comes up with a playbook convincing nontechnical users they need to send mobile coin to them in order to keep using signal.
This sounds pretty unlikely, as long as signal does not integrate a payment processor (and they've made no indication they will) the majority of users will not have enabled or funded their cryptocurrency wallet(s) (whichever cryptocurrency they settle on).
Funding MobileCoin requires steps of non insignificant difficulty, not to mention Signal's trust model of using your contacts by default.
Of course it's opt in, it'd be patently absurd for it not to be. Nobody would use a chat app where some kind of weird crypto payments were mandatory. Advertising its opt-in nature as a feature is like advertising your cereal as asbestos free.
> Advertising its opt-in nature as a feature is like advertising your cereal as asbestos free.
I fail to see how, care to explain?
It's opt-in as any other feature which is not the core of the app. You don't have to send stickers or GIFs. If you don't want to receive messages at all, you shouldn't install Signal because it will be hard to avoid, it's a core feature, it's not really opt-in.
Except it's not enabled or visible by default. It will take the user navigating the settings to enable it. We all know non-tech users rarely if ever change default settings they don't understand.
If I wanted to use the external money app they're piggybacking on, I can use that. I don't need it to be all one app. I have a web browser app for all-in-one app when I want that.
Yeah, you get to choose if you're the one sending the money. But sometimes people who want to send you money think that they're being helpful and find you on Venmo before you've had the opportunity to talk about payment privacy.
If you're using a privacy focused app, it should guide you towards defaults that maintain that level of privacy. Explicitly choosing a medium that has different privacy profile should be non-default behavior.
Letting people who don't want to think about it say "good-enough-for-signal-is-good-enough-for-me" and use the built in wallet is totally in line with Signal's mission.
Over time the standard expectation for a chat app has become send text + online status + image + gifs + video + link previews + typing indicators + @ mentions + emoji reactions + stickers
Fundamentally I don't see why adding "send money" violates it being just a chat app.
You're right, chat apps have evolved. That's the problem; Signal is good, but it's not the best. I wish it'd focus on matching or overtaking WhatsApp feature-wise rather than getting distracted 10 meters from the finish line.
When I'm trying to convince people to switch, privacy isn't the main draw, but if the features they care about are there, then privacy can push them over the edge to switch. I view this foray into payments as a sign that Signal feels its already "good enough" in the chat app department and will be spending its effort elsewhere.
Learn from SnapChat: if you're going to shoot the king, don't miss.
Beyond all the technical issues with this—and there are many—the product just doesn't make sense.
In the US, bank transfers are a pain. The credentials needed to send someone money are the same ones needed to take their money, and in any case, they often take several business days. So nobody uses them, instead preferring a whole industry of apps to do "that, but easier": Apple Cash, Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, all the features built into messaging apps.
On the other hand, the UK's Faster Payments system just works; you give someone your account number, they punch it into their bank's app, and the money goes through instantly. None of the aforementioned apps work in the UK, because nobody needs them. Bank transfers work well enough.
So the value proposition here is "Instead of sending someone a bank transfer, you can send us a bank transfer, send the coins to someone via Signal, then have them turn it back into real money via bank transfer. Also, be quick, since the coins are volatile and might lose value if you don't turn them back into real money quickly enough." I can't see how anyone would use that. (Sure, it might be more private, so people who really need it could use it. But Signal's whole value proposition is building privacy-protecting tools that are usable enough that they'll be used even by people who don't need the privacy feature per se.)
It's a feature designed by Americans for Americans, but released in a market where it doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm am American in their first year as a student at a UK university. I think my understanding of the UK cultural issues here are decent, but I could be wrong.)
> Instead of sending someone a bank transfer, you can send us a bank transfer, send the coins to someone via Signal, then have them turn it back into real money via bank transfer. Also, be quick, since the coins are volatile and might lose value if you don't turn them back into real money quickly enough.
You missed "pay us 50p for the privilege of doing something that's 100% free otherwise"
Bank transfers in the US are about to become much better once banks implement FedNow (scheduled to launch in 2023)[1]. You'll have to you use your bank's app but it should be possible to send PayPal/Venmo/CashApp-style payments without having to involve third parties in the transaction so all these payment apps and payment features in chat apps are running on borrowed time (unless they can offer some kind of value-add to justify themselves).
A private currency still provides added privacy guarentees even assuming the steps you've outlined. Private payments would also be useful in a number of countries outside of the West.
Currency volatility is obviously unsolved but remains an area of active research - Algorithmic stablecoins like Dai and MakerDAO are obvious candidates but live on the public Ethereum blockchain. Private smart contacts chains like SCRT exists but are mostly under explored. Most privacy cryptocurrencies also have secondary OTC, P2P or will have atomic swaps.
This is all to say that a privacy preserving stable cryptocurrency is possible.
> UK's Faster Payments system just works; you give someone your account number, they punch it into their bank's app, and the money goes through instantly.
In Switzerland, they punch in your account number, tap send, and then wait until the next business day for it to go through (for no technical reason at all, sometimes payments do go through instantly, usually next business day, because the law says they need to do it by next business day at noon).
That's still fine for a friend to pay you for a pizza, because you know they'll actually pay you, but sometimes you still want instant payment confirmation. It's not just the US.
Similarish in the Netherlands, there's an app called Tikkie (some banks have their own app, but everyone still calls it tikkie), with that app you can make a link "please pay me €20 for pizza" to share through any messenger, that opens an app or a website that takes you to your bank, you authenticate with that (often using the bank app on your phone so it's a quick process), approve the transaction, and in about 5 seconds the sender has a notification that you paid. It's so convenient and useful, and free, that people use it all the time even for tiny amounts - to the point where there are jokes about people asking for €0.50 "for mayo on your fries"
In New Zealand it's more like you describe in the UK, you type in someone's bank account number into your banking app and send it. There's a bit more overhead (exchanging the number), but not a whole lot. Also free and pretty quick.
No one is going to use something restricted to one messenger client that costs money to use, and presumably requires work to put money in/take it out, when these more convenient and free methods exist.
I can guarantee you that almost no Germans will use this feature. There are many places here where you can't even pay with EC cards, only with cash. Many people I know are hesitant to use PayPal.
In all of the previous discussions, josh2600 has very pointedly avoided answering the question of what financial interest Moxie has in the MobileCoin companies. He's only said that Moxie doesn't personally own any of the currency, without saying whether he has any financial interest in the company that owns most of the coins. This does not engender trust.
This forced integration is the worst decision Signal ever made (assuming they're sincere in their attempt to remove phone numbers as IDs).
If we really need a payment system, why not use GNU Taler? It's not a coin but just a distributed way to move real currencies around. Also, it does not run afoul or taxing and does not allow pump and dump or price speculation. (maybe this question just became rhetoric)
Or it could have just been Monero, which is the most common privacy coin. The fact that they went with some no-name premined shitcoin is mind boggling and screams money grab.
The article directly addresses this with it's list of requirements. Perhaps another privacy coin like Grin would be a better suggestion that at least fits most of their requirements.
A common trick in government is to identify the preferred solution first, and then reverse engineer a set of requirements only met by that one single solution.
I presume the real unstated requirement boils down to "Moxie is associated with the cryptocurrency." Not disclosed is whether he or Signal have financial interests in its adoption (they have said they don't "hold" any of these pre-mined coins, but that's all they'll say).
> Yep. GNU Taler should be enough for all needs of a decentralized payment system.
Not really. Unfortunately GNU Taler has distinct customer/merchant accounts so it is more alternative to specialized service-payment systems like visa/mastercard, than to general peer-to-peer payment systems like bank accounts.
Exchanges go down for a reason. If you don't want to be in it, you put yourself outside of the national economic scheme.
I can see the reason why, but if everybody does the same then the whole economy goes "informal" and you deprive the state from any income.
That what is happening in most West African countries (95% of the economy is in the "informal") and for exactly the same reasons (No trust in the state and want to avoid taxes. And note that money devaluation because of money printing is another form of taxation, with delaying time effects.)
And the net effect in those African countries is that you cannot even enforce the law, there isn't at all any budget for anything. If you're robbed then you will have to pay the police yourself in order to have them do the work to catch the culprit and find your stolen goods.
> Oh, something it does very well is to waste energy.
That's not the case for MobileCoin though. Energy waste does not seem to be direct a requirement by Signal to integrate a cryptocurrency, but the user friendliness and the fast transaction validation make it hard for a good candidate to be wasteful (there's only so much energy you can waste if your transaction is validated within 5s).
>>tax evasion and illegality hiding (which it isn't even good at).
This is just a Big Brother smear against privacy, with a socialist twist emanating from those with a financial stake in empowering the state and its dependent industries over the private citizen.
Exactly your arguments are made in the campaign to criminalize the use of cash:
Credit card company representative's statement on it in 2014:
>There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy
Taler is not private at all. It gives the government a backdoor, like the old Clipper chip that some in the government wanted to put in processors to decrypt communications.
What a handwavy article full of stuff that's not addressing the real issue in discussion; collusion with MobileCoin.
WhatsApp management must be really happy with this sudden move from Signal. Signal has lots of detractors who would like to discredit it, and Moxie and co. just handed it on a platter to them.
Although the relationship isn't clear and not clarified I find the article does a good job at addressing why they chose MobileCoin - the list of requirements.
Generally people probably wouldn't be so hostile about making a new cryptocurrency in general, there's well over 1000, but premining and bring up front about the premine is very important info.
> 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?
>"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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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!)
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.
> 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).
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).
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.
In addition to the conflict of interest Moxie has (and, honestly, I can see that side -- of course he'd want to be involved in the cryptographic design of a privacy-preserving payment system -- but he still needs to come clean about his relationship with MobileCoin), the most disturbing thing to me remains that the source to the server wasn't publicly updated for nearly a year while they added this feature, the timing of when the source went dark clearly indicates that specific intent, and Moxie's statement as recently as January that they didn't have specific plans to add payment/cryptocurrency when it's clear from the server source that they had been working on it for many, many months at that time.
What is up with people thinking he's not "come clean" about his relationship with it? He/Signal have noted they own no MobileCoins, and that he's been a paid advisor to MobileCoin. Doing anything behind the scenes feels like it'd be inviting SEC attention, which MobileCoin seems to want to actively avoid by trying to keep Americans off of it.
What lack of transparency do people feel is missing (beyond the server source not being updated - I agree that's a big miss)?
As the server source drop showed, they had been working on it since April 2020, publicly downplayed the idea just three months ago, and then... launched the beta. I would describe that as pretty deceptive.
"Marlinspike played down the potential of crypto payments in Signal, saying only that the company had done some “design explorations” around the idea. But significant engineering resources have been devoted to developing MobileCoin integrations in recent quarters, former employees said."
They begin by describing what I had in mind when they said "Signal will integrate payments": some kind of framework for existing wallets/exchanges to send info via Signal that enables transactions to take place. QR codes that are "auto scanned" (like paper wallets that can be swiped), or something else entirely. I thought they would focus on building this framework, making it available to the crypto community, and then seeing what happens.
Instead, they are still pushing their own coin, which has been heavily criticised for many reasons. They mention in the article that many cryptos have been nothing but "asset speculation" for a while. Well then why did the Mobile Coin creators premine so many coins? If they don't want to speculate on the value of their coin, why not just release it into the wild from Day 1? Every crypto founder cannot escape the FOMO of the Bitcoin era. They all wish they had made it big like some of the early lucky Bitcoin adopters, and no amount of grandstanding, or tech speak is going to convince me otherwise about any crypto founder.
> They all wish they had made it big like some of the early lucky Bitcoin adopters, and no amount of grandstanding, or tech speak is going to convince me otherwise about any crypto founder
If you do the math on the 80% ownership of coins, total coins, the ridiculous price ramp that occurred before this was even announced, and the current price ... some people did "make it big". Very big.
There's a difference between how many Mobile Coin premined (all of them) and how many they currently own, aren't available for sale and was sold for partners at what price.
Unfortunately their CEO has made no comment about this distribution or why they chose this as their coin distribution strategy. The topic is nuanced but it is very suspect they didn't select a more fair strategy.
I'll not be using this cryptocurrency, but whether I continue to use Signal seems to be down to how much effort I have to put into trying to explain away the apparent conflicts of interest here. They certainly don't seem to be putting any effort in. "hey, relax, guy!" is not an explanation. They seem to be happily spending the Foundation's credibility on this though, so I guess the clock has started.
Why am I seeing payment integration while I still lose my place in an audio playback when I switch from landscape to portrait? Or the fact that I still can't tell whether I've listened to a message yet or not? Still losing messages in the middle of recording.
Honestly, having a hard time with my switch from WhatsApp to Signal, and certainly don't need any cryptocurrency integration.
Likely because keeping your place in audio playback doesn't bring in as much cash as a cryptocurrency deal.
If Signal can get a decent amount of money from this crypto scam, there's a good reason to implement it over some minor usability features. Free users don't directly bring in any cash, after all.
And many of us switched to Signal due to bad-faith money-grubbing behavior of a certain other company. There was an illusion of free, safe, "by the people for the people" and by implication, commercial interest and profit wasn't the driving force.
Woah so MobileCoin implements everything Monero has but with the Stellar/Ripple consensus model and uses intel SGX coprocessor?
That’s kind of interesting, cheap fast transactions, not proof of work, and only the validators have the SGX burden (Secret network does something like this with SGX for private-ish smart contract execution)
So we dont like the premine and the forced integration and pump, which is meh to me, everything is premined these days I cant care much about that.
I’m actually surprised it has some cool technology involved, most “privacy” coins dont pass the smell test and with a name like MobileCoin I just assumed the worst, but I still have to laugh that the purchasers had to do KYC then.
Oh crypto.
Its pretty clear that they omit some information to give people less to disagree with. They pump it and sell, thats going to happen. I don’t care much about that either, speculators are going to get sold into, that’s not even controversial.
The Signal forced integration is grimy.
I still wish there was a stable privacy coin. USDC and DAI on Tornado.cash is okay, but too few inputs to mix with. Mobilecoin doesnt solve that, just another volatile asset.
Perhaps you'd be interested in TUSD on SCRT[0] (or any bridged stablecoin) that can be wrapped in SNIP-20[1]. As far as I know this is as private as you'll get when it comes to a stablecoin.
Partisia[2] (currently in beta) and Tari[3] could provide something similar.
I think by being SNIP-20 they would hide the amounts by nature of the private smart contract execution but would still show the sending address, perhaps the receiving address would be hidden as well due to the private smart contract execution.
I haven't used it yet because I havent acquired any SCRT for the transaction fees on that blockchain, but any variable should be hidden for a smart contract (of which tokens are), while the initiating address writing to the blockchain would by visible for consensus purposes and state management.
I agree, this post doesn't address any of the real feedback. I'm a fan of Signal, and I think a crypto wallet inside Signal could work, but it should:
- Not be MobileCoin or any small-cap coin
- Support Bitcoin/Litecoin/Etherum/other popular and trusted coins
- Sync private keys using the same mechanism as messages
Signal has had some questionable choices in the past, but this is over the line for their goal of privacy/security/trust. MobileCoin does not belong in Signal.
> - Support Bitcoin/Litecoin/Etherum/other popular and trusted coins
The post explains their requirements which these cryptocurrencies don't fit. Do you take issue with their requirements?
> Sync private keys using the same mechanism as messages
AFAIU it's non-custodial and it stays on the mobile client, meaning that there's no synchronization so far (the desktop client does not support these features). This could come eventually, but it's part of their requirements to stay out of the way and let the user handle their coins without trusting Signal.
> this is over the line for their goal of privacy/security
Why should it not be all those same things, except also a stablecoin, so that the price can't fluctuate and the owners/speculators can't make massive profits off of manipulation, exploitation of others' manipulation, and social dynamics?
The goal is to transmit money through a mobile messaging app. If the MobileCoin wants to take donations to support the platform, or even wants to take a tiny cut of each transaction, that seems fine. But I see no justification for their platform to be based around a volatile speculative asset which generally serves no purpose but to create a new gambling market and enrich the founders.
A mobile-friendly alternative to Monero seems like a really cool, valuable idea. But I don't think it's acceptable that it's both a volatile security to speculate on and the payment system for a supposedly non-profit privacy-and-freedom-oriented messaging app.
The problem isn't cryptocurrency; it's penny stocks and all the zero-sum bullshit that comes with them. You don't have to make your new cryptocurrency a penny stock if you don't want to. Here, it seems they probably want to.
In short it's a a hard problem and area of active research.
Stablecoin mechanisms have tradeoffs whether that's being on a public blockchain, a centralised party, collateral risk or lack of privacy. Monero is the current gold standard when it comes to privacy but trades off speed (confirmation blocks), mobile friendliness and a volatile price. On the other end of the spectrum Tether is very stable but is produced by a centralised entity and is on a public blockchain.
From Moxie's 2017 interview (https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/) we can safely assume that their list of requirements existed from the start (MobileCoin didn't have much to show at this point). Since then it's been public knowledge and since the market cap of MobileCoin is dictated by the market so I'm not sure about your penny stock comment, it seems more sensible to direct criticism at their lack of distribution transparency.
Because the price of small cap coins is insanely volatile, and even more subject to manipulation than cryptocurrencies in general. Mobilecoin's price changed by 1000% over the course of a couple weeks last month.
> Mobilecoin's price changed by 1000% over the course of a couple weeks last month.
It's not even really used right now, it's hard to tell how much it reflects what will happen later.
With a centralized cryptocurrency there's a lot they could do to make it less volatile, and it's still to be seen what will happen in practice. It's a hard problem, but I don't think we can easily conclude that they will fail, or that a better solution already exists.
If this was a public rollout I'd be more inclined to agree but as a opt in beta for a limited number of users who explicitly opted in to provide feedback this is less of an issue.
The future volatility of MobileCoin is to be seen. Past performance is not indicative of future performance and whatnot.
Wether they should have used a test net, MobileCoin should have only released a limited portion of the coins or whatnot is another question entirely.
Maybe they should rename MobileCoin to SignalCoin since it appears that was the purpose all along.
As for the conflict of interest, Moxie appears to (currently) have a "name your price" reputation so he could have chosen any cryptocurrency and they'd probably pay him the same advisor fee. When he says that he chose/founded MobileCoin because in his opinion it's the best (in his value system), I actually believe him.
Isn't that still a huge conflict of interest? As a key person of a foundation he should not be charging a private advisor fee from a company whose products the foundation plans to promote in the future. That seems like an excellent (and immoral) way to use a foundation enrich yourself.
After the last discussion I have been trying Element. It has some rough edges still but it has vastly improved since the last time I tried it.
Additional bonus, no electron based client, native apps for ios, Android, Web, Mac and even Linux.
If they can make the verification process for a new device smoother, I can recommend to folks. My worry is the amount of influence I used to get people to switch over to Signal only to ask them to switch again
The "Element" branded desktop apps are actually based on Electron, but since the underlying Matrix protocol is open, there are a plethora of fully native third party clients in varying stages of development.
Oh no problem at all -- I think it's a great counterpoint to closed ecosystems like Signal and Discord which are actively hostile to third party clients.
It's still early days, but Element is genuinely committed to Matrix's success as an open protocol, and I find the community enthusiasm to be very encouraging.
I have found instructions to reverse-proxy matrix service, which satisfies my need for a minimal cloud presence and private (behind enforced NAT) homeserver. Combined with p2p via SQLite dendrite, that might solve my whole problem. (Is Dendrite considered ready for personal use, e.g. p2p, even if not a replacement for Synapse? What should I watch out for?)
I have not found details about identity portability vs. Synapse version. Can identity be ported out of a Synapse 1.29 homeserver?
The problem with Element is that the matrix.org main servers can already often be slow with message delivery, and will only get slower as more people onboard.
And self-hosting Matrix is hard and requires pretty hefty hardware. If performance improves, it will certainly be a great option. For basic chats though, XMPP+OMEMO is still a really great lightweight option.
I'm excited for Dendrite, their new homeserver written in Go which will hopefully solve at least some of these performance issues. I've hosted a Dendrite server for a couple months now, but haven't had the chance to use it much.
With that said, it's been disappointing to see how slow development has been on it. Hopefully it picks up and they can get it out of beta this year.
Im looking forward to Dendrite, I think that changes the game for them in terms of performance. If im not mistaken at least one server was running on dendrite
They have https://dendrite.matrix.org, and they use Dendrite to test new features (like Spaces). But its issue is it's not feature complete so I don't think it sees that much usage.
It's not something that is always reproducible, and I suppose it depends on traffic and location as well to a certain extent. I've certainly found it satisfactory for general conversation but I do often see delays in delivery.
This is, however, something I also see with Signal. Texts can often take 5-6 seconds to deliver.
Isn't the biggest question: Why not a different app with some sort of signal integration? If that takes off and is successful, it could eventually be merged to be one application I suppose. But leveraging a huge user base from Signal (a messaging app with a sales pitch of a certain purity and no bs attitude to the problem at hand) to push a cryptocurrency payment system?
Don't tell me anyone involved in doing this felt like this was 'the right way to go'. Which makes exact motivation behind it all the more questionable.
> But leveraging a huge user base from Signal (a messaging app with a sales pitch of a certain purity and no bs attitude to the problem at hand) to push a cryptocurrency payment system?
> Don't tell me anyone involved in doing this felt like this was 'the right way to go'. Which makes exact motivation behind it all the more questionable.
If this feature is to stay relevant, it has to be integrated within Signal. Otherwise competitors (who do integrate a payment feature) will just have a better UX.
I don't think that's honest. Signal has the reach to get plenty of beta-testers on board, enough to maybe grow it from there. I'm not saying that it isn't tougher to do this way, but it's not like a "Signal Payments" App with a similar Logo by the same outfit trusted by many people for secure messaging already, starts at absolute zero. Plenty of outfits would kill for the Signal IP to create something like a payments app.
> Signal has the reach to get plenty of beta-testers on board, enough to maybe grow it from there.
I think we need a reality check here. When I check the Playstore, Signal has 50M downloads. WhatsApp has 2B. Signal is still largely the underdog.
I could definitely imagine a few people using a "Signal Payments" app instead of whatever WA offers. But to actually compete with WhatsApp (which won't create a separate app), you can't afford to split the app in two. The aim is not that HN users are able to transfer money in a privacy-preserving way, it's that everybody can.
If the illusion is that it's Signal's ultimate goal to dethrone WhatsApp (and Paypal for payments?), I think I'm not the one in need of a reality check (forgive the provocative wording, I have no ill will towards you).
Signal's (meaning the app) goal should be to be a long-term, secure, honest alternative for more privacy minded users, no matter their technical expertise? At least that's what I'm thinking.
I see it more like setting the baseline for the whole ecosystem. If Signal allows me to do X privately, why can't WhatsApp? To have this clout, they need to keep a non negligible market share and remain a threat to other messengers, which you can't do if you miss features your competitors have and that users value.
Signal's increasing reliance on SGX is the elephant in the room. They keep announcing new features that require sending your cryptographic keys to someone else's "super trustworthy" computer.
You don't think the sealed sender feature is an improvement at all?
Nobody relies on it. But if we can make an attack 10 times more expensive (because we can't prevent it completely), why not do it?
Secure remote computation is better than nothing. I'd start having problem with it when people rely on it when there are better solutions, but that hasn't been the case so far, AFAICT.
I think this point is too technical to be addressed in this blog post, and it's already addressed in technical documents / talks from MobileCoin. In short, and IIUC, no Intel SGX means a bit less privacy but is still ok. In particular, it's not a kill-switch. Happy to be corrected though, I still know little about MobileCoin.
It's true an SGX compromise means most of the MobileCoin privacy goals are still met. But dsome compromises would open up new methods of traffic analysis, and the SGX-dependency still makes the consensus process dependent on Intel's trustworthy key-management.
If I understand correctly, Intel could (if compromised or untrustworthy):
* revoke any node's SGX keys - knocking any number of consensus nodes out at zero cost
* create false attestations of what code was run (which would presumably be detectd eventually)
* dominate the consensus mechanism with its hand-picked SGX nodes
Among other things, this means Intel could turn off the MobileCoin chain, if commanded to do so.
(I could be somewhat off on some of this – if so, corrections with explanations very welcome.)
So, if your threat model is "Intel Inc is always trustworthy & secure", Signal & MobileCoin are wonderful. If you have doubts about Intel's trustworthiness/security, the designed privacy properties start to degrade.
Sadly, the LAST thing I ever wanted the signal foundation to do. And this adds to the PIN & cloud "features", insistence of a phone number, refusal to work with 3rd-party apps...
I'd rather them have done _nothing_ at all.
Oh well.. further proof you really need federation.
No, you do not need federation. You need an organization and leadership in it that is focused on their mission.
For example, Let's Encrypt reliably, like clockwork, distributes certificates and maintains related PKI infrastructure. That is what Signal was supposed to be (at least, my interpretation based on their PR) with regards to secure messaging, and they have utterly failed to maintain the focus you'd expect of a non profit with their mission.
If I want payments (unregulated payments at that), I would use and donate to a payment app, not a messaging app. But heh, report it to regulators and let them be the bullwhip to Signal and their poor choices if they ignore the community (who are their stakeholders as a non profit entity). Of all the ways to kill your project, this doesn't seem like the "hill to die on." Don't drag secure messaging into your fight against nation state currency regulations, and have some common sense about compartmentalizing around regulatory risk.
Which is why you need to see "where's the money coming from" because a non-profit that can't survive will go looking for it. Let's Encrypt is small enough that it can entirely exist under the donations of some of the large internet companies - Signal doesn't have that and so the temptation to look for money will be there.
As far as I know Signal has no issues with funds. I feel this is more about Moxie and potentially other employees who want to make money for themselves, not for the foundation.
No, I'm talking about the company/organization itself. A non-profit like Signal can be all high and mighty and principled as long as the bills are being paid (by whom?) but once that dries up (or never materializes) the temptation to monetize by doing things that go against the original mission becomes greater.
Let's Encrypt doesn't have a reason to try to blockchain their certs because their bills are being paid. Signal clearly wants more money (they openly state that the coin will pay $1m/yr to Signal).
Open protocols is the way. Then if a client starts acting sketchy or bloaty, you can ditch it for a better one.
Plus, an open protocol changes the risk calculus for the group that manages the client implementation, in a way that would prevent situations like this one.
However, open protocols beget federation, so I don't think you're at odds with the above poster. Email, DNS, etc are all open protocols with federation built-in, but we trade away some centralization of servers (GMail, Cloudflare, etc) in exchange for nice things (DoS protection, spam filtering, etc).
In the worst case, where a server starts acting scammy (like embedding ads in your email) or tries to diverge from the protocol, you can always go back to hosting it yourself, or paying a small and trusted shop to host it for you.
In the arena where Signal is competing, Matrix [1] is probably our best bet. (Assuming irc is too barebones for your needs, in 2021). It has also supported end-to-end encryption for some time now [2].
One problem I don't see anyone talking about is that there's likely a taxable event nearly every time you want to get money out of this ecosystem. With MobileCoin so volatile, you may earn a 10%...30%...taxable gain from the time you put it in and take it out. It's going to be a bit of a pain and the ass for a mobile payment system.
Thought experiment: If the payments feature was based on a fork of MobileCoin that distributes all pre-mined coins evenly to all existing Signal users, rather than the status quo, would people be still upset?
I think it would address some concerns, but personally, mixing concerns of secure messaging and cryptocurrency payments would still make me too uncomfortable.
Something somewhat similar already happened: Stellar gave away XLM to Keybase after Keybase added an integrated Stellar wallet. Many people didn’t like it[0], even I was not too impressed despite working in the Stellar ecosystem. Some people didn’t like the mix of cryptography and cryptocurrency (at least, I certainly didn’t)
I'm not a fan of any kind of crypto, but the handwaving excuses for why they aren't pursuing alternative currencies are laughable. You could say the same about MobileCoin, and you don't provide any other justification other than blanket statements without citations.
Signal, your bias is showing, and it makes me wonder what other vendors will get your ear and be integrated in the future.
I’m in the crypto field and no, it’s not laughable, it makes sense to me. Very few cryptocurrencies are good at targeting mobile users unfortunately. I think both Celo and Diem have good chances due to the fact that you can prove everything pretty easily to the client (and Celo does it with recursive zero knowledge proofs) but they are not privacy coins.
The whole point of cryptocurrencies is that you don’t need to trust that your bank and all the other banks have settled funds correctly, you can verify that they’ve done it (to some extent). In the case of your experience, you have really no clue if the number your bank is showing you is accurate (and indeed errors are frequent, you probably have seen double charges or transactions that later disappeared).
In the context of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin you also have to trust the server you’re talking to, if you’re a light client (a client that doesn’t want to download the whole history). So Bitcoin is not a great choice for mobile clients that don’t want to have to trust another third party. Which in general is the threat model of Signal.
So, in short, a mobile-friendly network is a small network with simple algorithms and fast transfers, where every address is pseudonymous and may drop in or out at any time with no reputational results? These are very bad properties for a blockchain to have, from an integrity context.
That’s not what I said: a mobile friendly cryptocurrency is a network you can query and that gives you a response you can fully verify: this is your account balance at this point in time, and it’s correct you can verify it with this proof of a small size (because in some coutries you’re paying for every bytes you’re downloading).
Now fast transactions (finality) is an upside for any type of currency really.
This explains the issues fairly well. tl;dr most blockchains require a CPU and/or network expensive sync which is prohibitive on mobile. As a fix/hack many web and mobile apps have a SPOF gateway which the client must trust absolutely.
I know, from watching Signal's development and public writings over the last several years, that their strategy is to bring privacy and security into as many people's lives as possible while matching the UX of the best for-profit surveillance capitalists out there. In HN threads like these, I usually find myself in the minority because I believe in this mission and how they've prioritized it over other goals e.g. decentralization, free software, etc.
All that being said, I feel like they're really unfairly dismissing a lot of real concerns by characterizing them as just saying "cryptocurrency is the worst". The Signal Foundation absolutely understands that the key to winning the competition against FAANG and surveillance-based tech is just as much PR as software development. It requires people trust the app and the foundation to have their best interests in mind. Cryptocurrency may be popular, but it's definitely not synonymous with "safe and trustworthy" by any means.
They also don't really answer the regulatory question. Governments, in particular the US government, really doesn't like unregulated finance. If there's a case to be made by some SEC or FBI busybody that the Signal Foundation is involved in financial crimes, they have a lot of resources available to bring the hammer down on them. And that's just the worst-case scenario. There are plenty of other avenues that the US government could use to kill this feature (or the app as a whole), including exerting legal pressure on Apple/Google to remove it from their App Stores, or simply making MOB next-to-impossible to purchase legally.
I am in support of their mission to make payments private and secure. And I think there is a universe in which I can see this working out for Signal. The last few years have brought news of several well-known powerful people using Signal. US politicians have been known to use it, and the latest Facebook data leak seems to indicate Mark Zuckerberg is a user as well. If Signal is widely understood to be so valuable that people in positions of power are interested in using it, maybe they're betting that no one will dare touch them because they're too big to regulate. Here's hoping!
I'm neutral to cryptocurrency so I share similar sentiments. Apart from the lack of addressing MobileCoin and Moxie's relationship and funding, MobileCoin's distributution and SGX I think the article has done a good job addressing people's concerns. Most don't support the premise and that's that.
> dismissing a lot of real concerns by characterizing them as just saying "cryptocurrency is the worst"
Their list or requirements seems to dismiss most if not all cryptocurrencies.
> They also don't really answer the regulatory question.
The FBI is probably more likely and even so Exchanges would be a bigger target. So far we've seen no indication that cryptocurrency wallets, not unlike tor or torrent clients being banned. So far exchanges have given mixed signals about if Monero will be banned so this is the most likely issue to watch out for.
Not sure crypto is quite ready for this, but how can one justify these integrations with these purpose built "coins", when stable coins pegged to fiat exist? I would much rather send stuff over a medium that is digital and fixed in value.
I know a lot of folks are big crypto naysayers, but there is a certain magic to being able to remit funds with ease to people and places where the process is not friendly. Chat app based money transactions is a thing and probably not going away anytime soon.
In theory: yes. In practice, wiring traditional currency requires KYC (Know Your Customer) and has a lot of legal/regulatory requirements. One of that is data collection and retention for auditing purposes.
Heads up. Facebook have payments in whatsapp which you didn't ask for and will 100% be tracked as well as tying a large number of the population to facebook creating a lock in barrier.
Don't use this unless at some point in the future you decide it's a good idea. Maybe in 5 years or more. Until then just ignore it. Sure continue to keep a vague eye on it such that Moxie continues to be neither crook nor zuck as he has shown himself not to be at all points in his past, sure, but still watch, total blind trust is a bit silly especially when you don't have to.
I, myself have never found a use for "stickers". Surprisingly I use signal voice and video more than I thought I would. Lockdown effects I guess...
This really isn't much more exciting. Might not even work at all as far as being used by a significant number of people...
It would be an enormous conflict of interest if Moxie had a financial stake in MobileCoin, and then drove signal to adopt this random crap coin.
These guys keep on claiming just to be technical advisors with no financial interest or benefit from mobilecoin. BS.
Let's get some auditors into Moxies / Signal Foundation stuff, figure out how this decision was made, if signal foundation received fair value for pushing their users this way etc etc.
I got voted down before for saying this, but will keep on saying it. You can't use a charity and then leverage that charitys assets to enrich yourself outside of the charity.
What's interesting is despite all the claims of "trust" and "security" vs using google etc these guys turn out to be what appears to be scammers.
"Signal Messenger LLC. was founded simultaneously with the Signal Technology Foundation and operates as its subsidiary. Its CEO is Moxie Marlinspike and it is responsible for the development of the Signal messaging app and the Signal Protocol."
These single member LLC's are considered disregarded entities in most cases. Many nonprofits use LLC's to own property, do app development etc for liability reasons. That doesn't obviate their need to act in a manner consistent with their parent entities objectives and public purpose.
You claim to be judge, jury and executioner in one. I agree it all looks odd, but I can also see why no other integration might easily work. Would be good to dig for any possible issues but it might well be that that they write is actually the real set of reasons. I won't leave signal anytime soon both 1) because I see weirdness but no proof of wrongdoing and 2) because there is literally no better alternative.
Strongly agreed. And Moxie has not denied being paid in stocks or stock options for his "technical advisor" position. But even if he was just paid in cash it would still be a conflict of interest. If MobileCoin needed him a a technical advisor they should have paid the Signal Foundation a consultancy fee for Moxie's time, not Moxie himself.To an outsider it looks very much like he used a donation funded foundation to enrich himself.
People are very weirdly upset by the addition of a feature that they are under no obligation whatsoever to use. If you think cryptocurrency is stupid...just don't use it.
OK, I have what is probably a silly question: Why is it a good thing for this wallet to be non-custodial?
As far as I can tell, this massively changes the user experience around the security properties of using Signal. For Signal chats, I have one of two options:
- Default behavior: I trust the Signal network to verify my contacts via SMS and notify me if the physical device changed, and I rely on my social connection with people to know if they're getting a new physical device (e.g., if someone says "I'm stranded in a foreign country and I need immediate help" from a new device when they have neither new phone plans nor travel plans, I'll be suspicious)
- More secure behavior: I verify safety numbers out of band, e.g., in person
Optionally, my contacts (or I) can make things more secure than SMS by adding a PIN.
This is great. This is not the level of security I'd need in order to commit treason against my government and win so the history books don't call it treason, of course. But it's a far higher level of security than letting Google / Facebook / AT&T / etc. see all my messages, and it remains usable. As a practical threat model, it's a very good level of security for attorney-client communications, labor organizing, etc.: it's easy to keep a bunch of folks who aren't crypto nerds reasonably secure and private against attackers who don't have a zero-day research team. If one of those non-technical folks loses their device, it's pretty easy to decide whether to let them back in.
With a non-custodial wallet, Signal is saying that your money doesn't work this way. It's protected by some other private key on your device completely unrelated to Signal.
First, what is that mechanism? The MobileCoin website https://www.mobilecoin.com/ says, as its very first feature: "Easy wallet recovery - Securely recover your wallet if you lose your phone, without trusting a provider with your private keys."
That sounds great! That sounds like it lines up with the Signal model, I think. How does it work? Do I need to hold on to a recovery key or something?
I see absolutely no information in the repo about how.
If Signal is going to implement a money-transfer mechanism, it feels to me like it should work like Signal - I should have a way to get back on board if I lose my device. I should be encouraged to have some place I trust more than Signal (just like I'm encouraged to trust in-person conversations more than Signal), and I should be able to wire money out. Honestly, I think this matches Signal's practical threat model / use case: if I text a friend saying "Actually can you PayPal me at this new address" via Signal, they're generally going to do that, if it came from my Signal account. So there already isn't a particularly stronger way to safeguard money than the safeguards on Signal conversations itself.
Am I missing something in this reasoning? It seems like they adopted this design because it makes sense for a cryptocurrency, but it doesn't seem like it makes as much sense for a cash transfer mechanism within a chat app.
If you look at their forum you can find more about their beta client.
The signal app acts as a light wallet. Right now it generates keys and encrypts then with your signal pin. You can also restore them from the recovery phrase.
The term non-custodial means that Signal never has access to your keys and cannot send funds on your behalf.
I bought a small-ish amount MobileCoin last weekend after the Signal announcement made me realize it was available. I might as well write up my thesis for why I like it so much, so sorry in advance for the stream of semi-consciousness following.
I sympathize with the people who are worried this will degrade the Signal app. I like Signal over iMessage and WhatsApp partly because of the purity of purpose of the app. I like Signal because it doesn't create a treadmill of constant change and features added to drive engagement. I like Signal because it doesn't have Stories.
Signal as a messaging app is the best of its category, but there are other near-peers, new messaging apps are created every year, and I have ten other apps on my phone right now with DM capabilities.
I view MobileCoin as unique in the cryptocurrency space as a cash-like, private, fast and efficient payments platform and store of value and as that alone it would be great. My biggest issues with using cryptocurrency in a physical-cash-like way are mostly proposed to be addressed by MobileCoin+Signal:
- The hassle of using a non-custodial wallet, which is needed to truly possess your wallet. MobileCoin promises to let you control your own private-key on a mobile device. The iPhone is the most secure device I own: encrypted, biometric'd, and sandboxed. Having my private key on the phone plus a paper backup of the seed phrase is my ideal scheme for holding amounts under five figures.
- Waiting 10+ minutes for a transaction to go through isn't good enough for everyday use. (Look up Monero and Zcash block times and how many confirmations exchanges require for a comparison.) Faster is better.
- The meaninglessness of addresses: sending coins to a 40-character random string has already caused so much confusion. Linking it to your existing Signal address book is far superior.
- Broadcasting your financial life to the universe just seems imprudent, I think privacy wins over non-privacy for this reason. Privacy has intrinsic value.
- Proof-of-work systems just have a certain inelegance that I'm happy to leave behind. And the last few years in the Ethereum world shows how challenging this can be.
It doesn't address the potential volatility that causes problems for a store of value. Which is a negative but not a deal-breaker in my opinion. It might be addressed with something like Stellar USDC but I really don't know enough about the MobileCoin design to know if it is possible on the MobileCoin network. The technology is still useful for transaction processing, it is just more useful if it is also a stable store of value.
I don't view other cryptocurrencies as a risk to MobileCoin. If someone else can create better technology I'll use it happily and I'm guessing the people involved in MobileCoin would do the same.
I don't view MobileCoin as a risk to Signal messenger, because I think Signal will do a good job, or if they don't, someone else will, and myself and my close contacts will switch apps for the nth time.
The biggest risk to MobileCoin is that there might not be a citizen alive with the legal freedoms to actually use it. I really hope the project succeeds and I think Signal has a unique opportunity and unique credibility to do this. I think it will take 2-3 years to fully play out.
> It might be addressed with something like Stellar USDC but I really don't know enough about the MobileCoin design to know if it is possible on the MobileCoin network.
This would involve a significant overhaul. Unless they partner with a stablecoin provider they'd have to create a stablecoin bridge from another network. Keeping it stable would require an unbridging mechanism. Trusting the stablecoin and providing stable native currency rates is another matter.
I had a look to Element after seeing it mentioned here multiple times. Sadly it' is too complicated for me to ask my friends and my family to switch to it. Signal was just so simple to use in comparison. Here even the name, Element/Matrix, needs explaining. Matrix is much more that a chat app, it's too much to be a Signal or Whatsapp replacement.
Element's security UX is a disaster. They either have no UX team whatsoever or the team they do have are incompetent. Average users have no idea what it means to "verify" another user and the UX is baffling to them.
Engineers are running the show, and poisoning the UX so that only other engineers know what the hell is going on.
This is just such a staring, atypical comment of someone who has spent their entire career as a technical bod, and hasn't the faintest idea how an ordinary person uses technology.
Explaining federation (it's just like email, but we put the @ at the front and a : between uncertain nods) and key management, especially with multiple devices is the hard part.
People's insistence at bringing up Telegram as an alternative to Signal seems to be as incoherent as bringing up Go on a Rust thread. Their similarities end after the level-0 description as "recently-ish released messaging app / programming language". Telegram's requiring users to opt-in to encrypted messaging on a per-thread basis does not enable claiming feature parity with Signal's always-encrypted threads.
Telegram tried to create their own cryptocurrency _twice_ :
Gram which was cancelled due to the SEC cracking down on unregistered ICOs and TOM which is no longer affiliated with Telegram at all.
To all those complaining about this feature in signal, can you answer this question- how is a non-profit dedicated to providing a safe messaging supposed to make money to drive that mission? Do you think they will be able to compete with those deep pocket ed competitors to achieve their goals? Have YOU donated significant money regularly to signal to support them? If not why the hell are you cribbing about this change?
Because of the lack of transparency. Signal users are not naive and can deal with the truth. If they need money, or want to be profitable why is there zero mention of in in the explanation? Whatsapp was dead to me the instant zuckerberg said it will always be free.
This is not an argument. I do support XMPP developers who do great work with a budget that is less than 0.1% of signal’s , without vendor lock-in, and without partnering with dubious cryptocoin schemes. Granted, they do not have the "hacker extraordinaire" moxie vibe, but they get work done.
I don’t use Signal, nor do I really know much about this situation. But on a quick glance, it sort of reminds me when Keybase added Stellar Lumens wallets.
Of course, a lot of the friction with Keybase & Stellar was due to the magic ‘airdrop’ of coins, and all the craziness & flood out outsiders not interested in the Keybase mission itself.
But, the part that stands out to be, is many of the long time users or ‘die hards’ being very vocal about their distaste for the move. They say it doesn’t fit here, or ‘we don’t need this’, or whatever.
But the way I see it, who really cares? Some people will use it, some will ignore it. But if you’re a dedicated Signal user, and you don’t need or want this, why can’t you just keep using Signal the way you are now and not let it affect you?
Why does everything have to be some big philosophical nightmare when a feature you don’t care about gets added?
Trust. No one's judgement will be impaired by bolting a GIF pack onto a messaging app. VC-backed crypto wants a seat at the table and want you--exclusively--to facilitate the market for the coin? Different story maybe? Can you make the same impartial decisions regarding integration when you are not impartial? (Well, as far as we can divine from the various allusions, hints and allegations .. I mean even needing to ask these questions is weird.)
Trust in regards to what? It’s an encrypted messaging app. I presume that’s why you, or any other user has chosen it. You trust your messages are secure, and nobody unintended can read them.
What are you suggesting? Are you afraid they will give a back-door to the VC backed crypto vendor? Because my point is, unless you think somehow adding a crypto wallet to some obscure coin is going to jeopardize the security of you messages, I just don’t get it.
Just pretend like it’s not there, and keep using it the way you use it. That’s what I did with Keybase. Yeah there is stellar wallet sitting there that I never click on, but I’m still a happy user.
I’m just not interested in sitting around and fuming about business practices I have no idea about. They are a big company, and in this world all companies have to ’grow’ year in and year out. Yeah maybe it’s misguided, but I think it’s wasted energy to sit around and be outraged over how some company decides to run their business.
And if it is so outrageous, then find an alternative. It’s just so exhausting to read comment after comment of people who think they know better than the people who created the thing. It’s there business they can do what they want with it.
At some level you always have to trust whomever is vending the software you use.
If you don't audit and re-audit every bit of code in the whole stack for only alternative, as flawed as it is, is doing calculus based upon the reputation and character of the people producing the code. We differ in that I stopped using keybase when the stellar airdrop occurred. That company is now an appendage of Zoom, another company I've watched closely from a security point of view. I imagine you are also a happy user of that, whereas I'm a begruding/throw-away-laptop-under-duress user. I haven't seen the code from either product but have made a judgement based upon their behaviour.
This is the topic of this debate. If you find it exhausting reading comments from people trying to explain why they might be losing trust in a piece of trusted software, you are free to not read the comments and spend more time auditing code.
ps. There are literally thousands of encrypted messaging apps. That Signal claims to be another is a small differentiator. How does it back up the claim? These lines of reasoning always lead back to the people running the show and how they behave. Short of a State actor using gagging orders to insert back-doors, which is way outside at least my thread model, I moved to Signal because of its claims plus its aggregate reputation.
I’ve never touched Zoom and nor will I. Thanks for the rude assumption though, you can jump off that tall horse.
I don’t use Keybase much anymore but for some fun stuff. I still find the the file system useful.
Sounds like you will be quitting Signal soon too. Time to spend more time & energy researching which company to jump to next, splitting hairs, agonizing over business practices. Reading blogs & Twitter feeds of company officers and forcing opinions of them. Until 6 months later they do something egregious, and you have to start all over.
My main avenue for anything secure now is self hosted Matrix Synapse server. I’m in full control, and I don’t have to waste energy and mental cycles on getting mad about how other people run their business and stirring up outrage in forums.
It’s fantastic, low effort and low stress :) I’ve gone down the rabbit hole you describe before, I don’t need a lecture on it. But I decided it’s not worth it.
I believe I am happier by skipping all the stuff you’re taking about. Which was really my main point, I didn’t really say it very well though.
It's getting harder and harder for the tech elite (including HN) to denigrate crypto as something that is worthless. Bitcoin 60k, Ethereum innovations, NFTs, Coinbase IPO, every bank and financial company having a crypto / blockchain plan, and tens of millions of Americans owning cryptocurrency... not sure how much longer the blockchain haters can claim that all of this is 100% worthless.
- Moxie's involvement with MobileCoin (could be as simple as saying: "for the same reasons Signal's interested in MobileCoin, moxie is as well").
- The concerns about regulatory risks/attention involved with a cryptocurrency integration.
- Why it involved hiding the server source code.
The idea of privacy-friendly transactions easily available within an app I'm already using is attractive, but I very much hope the obvious concerns won't play out in practice (which time will tell), and it would be good if they'd also addressed the above.