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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big cryptocurrency skeptic, but if they had used a more reputable coin instead of a pre-mined coin distributed in such a fashion as to enrich the founders, they could have avoided most of this backlash. People who aren't enthusiasts already understand that the raison d'etre of the cryptocurrency landscape is to get rich quick, but these guys got so greedy they've even pissed off the enthusiast community. Unfortunately for Signal, the thrust of its popularity is among those users who have a pet peeve for the term "crypto" used as a shorthand for "cryptocurrency" instead of "cryptography". It'll be interesting to see Signal's public statement in regard to this PR disaster.

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Agreed. Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done, but it wouldn’t have enriched the founders.

Pre-mined altcoin scams have been around so long that everyone in the crypto world knows to avoid them. Building up a dedicated following of people using an encrypted messenger app was a genius way of submarining a pre-mined crypto scam into an unsuspecting userbase.

I suspect a lot of us are going back to all of the people we recommended Signal to and revising our recommendations to avoid the cryptocurrency portion of the app.

I honestly don’t see the issue. They picked a crypto coin with a much faster transaction settling time than the alternatives you mentioned, and they’re explicitly discouraging people from using it to store wealth.

Do you have a link to where they're discouraging people to use it to store wealth?

> Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done,

Those cryptocurrencies have a large energy consumption. I assume that part of the reason to go with MobileCoin is because it's less power hungry.

Transacting the coin itself rarely has any energy footprint. It's the security of the network that requires the mining and that is very separate to signal using it.

Unless the idea is that by using another coin, they don't add to the security requirements. That's a dubious line of thinking.

You only increase the energy consumption of a crypto if you put many transactions on it (via increasing demand on the coin, and hence the price), so it doesn't really matter whether you use an existing PoW coin or a new one.

> it doesn't really matter whether you use an existing PoW coin or a new one.

MobileCoin isn't a PoW coin.

> Monero or ZCash would have gotten the job done,

These take minutes to send (very stressful!) preventing a nice venmo-like experience. They also pollute the planet

and by send I mean network confirmations + generating zkSNARKs on the client. IMO for a payment network to work, my mom needs to be able to use it and not be frustrated. Venmo barely clears that bar

On most clients spending and receiving is instant.

What takes a maximum of 2 minutes on monero is waiting for your received balance to become available.

They take minutes to send and pollute the planet as a byproduct of their security and decentralization. Anyways, Monero does not contribute much to pollution at all. I guarantee you that you do far more things that pollute the planet in your daily life than a Monero transaction.

MobileCoin is a farcical alternative to Monero, where a few “trusted” corporate nodes are run and 80% of the coin is premined.

100% of it is premined.

I'm actually going to go out on a limb and defend their choice of MobileCoin.

Signal has always been a decent privacy/convenience tradeoff and MobileCoin is no different. Features like phone numbers and contact uploading were always a user friendly tradeoff. They also seem to trust SGX.

Monero's isn't slow by any means but isn't fast either. UI changes can alleviate the issue but being unable to spend your entire balance until the next block is a step back in UX.

ZCash's lack of privacy by default doesn't fit with Signal's E2E by default ethos.

Using most privacy coins on a mobile device with limited storage is a privacy tradeoff no matter how you cut it.

The reality is that integrating a cryptocurrency for payments into Signal was probably the actual misstep rather than their selection of which token to use.

They could've created a federated SGX-based model on top of any of the existing cryptocurrencies. The only reason for them to invent a new one is making $$$.

How so? When I consider how to build it on top of an existing smart contact platform you'd have to have a whole extra, nonstandard layer for key rotation and you'd miss out on privacy guarentees. If we assume their goal of privacy and sub 10s finality I can't see how they could have done it on an existing cryptocurrency.

What they've done is essentially take Monero as a base, remove mining and use Stellar Consensus then solve any new privacy issues that arise.

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