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Why not use an existing currency which solves the problems you highlight, like Nano?

Nano doesn’t solve privacy to the degree we were excited about. Again, fast + privacy protecting is really hard to achieve, particularly if you care about fast tx recovery on a mobile device.

If you actually cared about privacy, you'd have just used Monero, and saved yourself 4 years effort building YAS (Yet Another Shitcoin).

And no, speed is not the most important. As long as the user can see the payment incoming, it's trivial UX to say "Payment received. Will be confirmed and available for use in 3 minutes."

edit: it appears MobileCoin is (allegedly) built on a combination of XMR + the Stellar consensus protocol? If true that's a slightly better scenario than I previously thought

Monero isn't fast enough and doesn't support transaction recovery (it also has probabilistic linkage which MobileCoin doesn't due to our use of secure enclaves). We spent almost 18 months building MobileCoin Fog to solve the second problem (https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog). It's a non-trivial stack of code to allow users to recover strings from servers they don't control without the operators of those servers being able to learn what strings are being recovered.

Don't get me wrong, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but there's a lot of new tech here.

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