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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

The majority of the MobileCoins are available for purchase for non-us persons at https://www.buymobilecoin.com right now.

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Yes, we’re well aware that you would love to sell us those coins you pre-mined.

That’s the problem.

If Signal was serious about this they would have launched their own fork instead of pitching a pre-mined coin to their users.

> If Signal was serious about this they would have launched their own fork instead of pitching a pre-mined coin to their users.

Agreed. They either would have launched their own fork and distributed the vast majority to their users, or at the very least chosen an existing project that was fairly well distributed.

This makes me believe they primarily did this in return for an incentive from Mobilecoin.

What?

Marlinspike's been an advisor to MobileCoin from like... the beginning. The article also notes that neither he nor Signal own any actual MobileCoins.

Signal may not own any MobileCoins, but the CEO of MobileCoin said:

> MobileCoin has not yet paid Signal anything for integrating MobileCoin. We intend to donate a great deal of money to Signal over the coming years.

In my view there are worse ways to make money from a chat app. Like selling all your users data. Ir worse yet just selling out to FB. At least a crypto scheme can maybe be the cash cow that helps them keep true to the privacy aspect....

I'm really tired of every single company going through some abusive scam or data harvesting scheme to avoid simply charging me money.

Yet somehow the Wikipedia project has managed to stay afloat during all these years...

I'm pretty sure more than one WikiCoin has been pitched too.

Isn't this because most users have decided that charging money is a death sentence? Hell, there's a HN article on this like every month.

Someone should always take the time to point out to such threads that WhatsApp was running very profitable based on that model without eveb trying.

Also feel free to read anything by the Basecamp guys (yep, the guys behind Rails).

It won't get you or the investors (another) yacht, but there exist a number of companies that delight their customers and change history far more than many attempted unicorns.

Until something goes awry in that crypto scheme and some intelligence agency decides to use that as leverage to undermine the security of Signal. Moxie, on his own, may be resistant to pressure, but when there's a secondary company involved that might be pressured by threats of losing several million dollars...

This commingling of business interests means there's more angles of approach, and much more risk exposure.

Yes, I've read that. I find it a stretch to draw that conclusion though, as if it's some back door deal for funding.

For all the criticisms of cryptocurrency (and I have many...), I don't particularly see anything on MobileCoin's work that indicates the usual shady cryptocurrency stuff. I'm not sure it belongs in Signal, but I do think this stuff can be evaluated without people starting conspiracy theories.

It's not a conspiracy when it's all out in the open. Calling things you don't like a conspiracy theory to discredit them is a poor form of argument.

A bunch of decently well of people decided to do a few handshake deals to make each other a whole bunch of money. That's how most of the world rolls so this is simply par for course.

If the owners of MobileCoin own 85% of existing coins which at current rates is valued at $14 billion, you actually expect they're not in this to liquidate their coin for that $14 billion if they can snooker people into using it?

>It's not a conspiracy when it's all out in the open. Calling things you don't like a conspiracy theory to discredit them is a poor form of argument.

This statement would work better if that's what I was doing, but I'm not.

You (and nobody else) on this thread knows for sure what's going on there, and if Moxie's been advising MobileCoin for years I don't see how it falls under a handshake deal.

There is nothing to indicate that he, or Signal, are directly profiting from this, other than some MobileCoin people saying they want to donate to Signal (which is a good thing - I'm really not bothered by that particular point).

The CEO said:

> I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work.

I don't see how it's a conspiracy theory that this is a backdoor way of funding Signal when the CEO literally says that MobileCoin was created as a way to fund Signal.

Yeah, I don't really see anything particularly wrong with that. I'd be more bothered by it if Signal wasn't a nonprofit.

Is it potentially a bad business model? Yeah. Is it necessarily some backdoor funding deal? I dunno, I don't really buy it.

It's literally a quid pro quo? What conspiracy theory do you need here?

I don't see how it's a quid pro quo for someone like Moxie, with his background, to advise a project for years and then work with them to integrate it given the alignment with regards to privacy initiatives.

I find it conspiracy-theory in nature to assume otherwise; I think it could've been handled better from a server source code side but I don't really see why this has to be an assumed bad faith thing.

It's quid pro quo to include an obscure scam coin out of the blue into an entirely unrelated product, with a public promise from the scam club owners to donate their money to your business. The fact the the owner of signal had already been associated with MobileCoin for a long time makes it worse, not better.

...no, the fact that the founder of Signal advised it for years indicates it's not an "obscure scam coin" from out of the blue.

If Signal had built this themselves, in house, nobody would bat an eye.

You're stretching hard here.

Signal including a cryptocoin came completely out of the blue (well, apparently there were rumors, but that doesn't mean it was an expected change). MobileCoin is also deeply suspicious in its mining model, and is not some well known coin.

And what is the downside to them if this isn't entirely true? On one hand you have tens of millions of dollars and potentially a lot more, on the other you have a few angry nerds.

The slashdot effect triggered Cloudflare’s DDoS protection and is returning errors for that page.

No, this is just what happens when you try to hit the page from a US IP address.

Why are you blocking the US?

I'm guessing because they don't want an SEC investigation into whatever they're running.

Don’t want to end up in a US prison for the obvious scam they’re running.

because the US has a long reach in the financial world even into Switzerland (these days). The IRS is on a war path against crypto currently and I think they believe 50% of it is something they can be taxing or is fraudulent. The US government doesn't like things that are hard to track.

There is only a "contact us" link on that page.

Will you buy my coins back at a fair price?

What value do you provide? at least when I buy vbucks from Epic I know I'm getting fortnite skins with it.

Why should we run a node free of charge when you extract all the profits of our efforts?

When I see statements like "there's no economic incentive."

I read "I want all the profits, and screw everyone else".

If you genuinely wanted a decentralized network, then you would provide fair compensation for the added value the node provides against attacks on the network.

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