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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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.

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