In Defense of Signal
yorple.medium.com
yorple.medium.com
All jokes aside, excusing Signal for doing this would be bad. For the many users who would be exposed to the potential security threats that abound with this new payment integrations. Am no crypto-head but I've seen negative criticism too about this new coin being added.
Signal seems to have built a good reputation of trust among privacy communities, despite having questionable anchors such as requirement of phone numbers for use and trusting only their centralized server. This sudden change in direction puts this app in even more shakier grounds.
I'm glad the true intentions behind this app are now coming to light.
More scrutiny is best for Signal.
Their intentions were never hidden either, you can see interviews dating 2017 thst matches their current stance.
If you’re doing payment processing then you need to abide by AML and KYC laws, which are incompatible with secure messaging.
Care to point to the contradictory section? Because that would be drastic and contrary to anything I’ve heard.
That PDF linked above ( https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20... ) would indicate Signal would be a 'money transmitter' rather than 'payment processor'.
Is that correct, or am I still confused.
> FinCEN’s regulations define the term “money transmitter” to include a “person that provides money transmission services,” or “any other person engaged in the transfer of funds.” A “transmittor,” on the other hand, is “[t]he sender of the first transmittal order in a transmittal of funds. The term transmittor includes an originator, except where the transmittor’s financial institution is a financial institution or foreign financial agency other than a bank or foreign bank.”
As long as Signal or its servers don't itself take part in transmission (which they wouldn't as long as the Signal app acts as a real user-side wallet and client) or trades/converts assets on behalf of the users, they should be exempt of this regulation.
Say what you want about this regulation, but so far I find it reasonable; as long as you as a business don't touch crypto assets or private keys either as issuer, key custodian, or transmitter but simply provide the wallet/node software, you're in the clear.
Unless Signal acts in bad faith, I see no way they would fall under scope of Fincen regulation wrt MobileCoin.
IANAL etc.
Thanks again
The idea of private messaging is a relatively easy one to talk to people about. Adding cryptocurrencies into the mix - when, fairly or unfairly, news coverage about it is mostly about financial speculation, the "dark web" and illegal drugs - is a terrible idea if the idea behind Signal is broad uptake of a secure messaging app that doesn't have links to companies like Facebook.
Whether the settings are buried or not people will find out about this as time passes, and when they do it's going to create distrust. As others have suggested, if you want to do cryptocurrencies, why not create a separate "Signal Wallet" app or something? Although even that won't help the fact that it will tarnish the "Signal" brand in the eyes of many.
Yes, I had informally announced my network that I'd move from Whatsapp to Signal - which I already used - and was just planning to make formal announcement to all my contacts, and install an autoresponder (Watomatic) on Whatsapp with reminders to reach me on Signal. But I'm holding off now, not sure what to do. I haven't accepted Whatsapp's new privacy policy yet, so I guess will continue using that for a while longer. Considering if Matrix wouldn't be a better choice as my next default messenger.
From what I've seen, Matrix is far worse metadata-wise than Signal. If Signal is bad, Matrix is worse.
What have you seen? I haven't come across anything to suggest this.
https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-ma...
https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-ma...
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/8473
Synapse does a lot of logging, apparently. I'm not sure I'd touch Matrix with a ten foot pole.
And that's why tech evangelism with deep personal interest is a flawed premise. People need to find their own thing. If these people got by with their lives so far, they will figure shit out. Your investment is only setting things up for friction and disappointment. Not to mention, you will become the tech support guy in all such endeavours.
Now I wish I hadn't bothered. I'm sure I won't be able to get them to move again and I've lost my confidence that any other new solution will be trustworthy. Maybe the devil you know in WhatsApp is better than more nasty surprises like this?
Signal is not a startup looking to get acquired or a private tech company fighting for market share. It's a non-profit foundation which develops software to advance certain goals. It's not just trying to please its users to make profit, it's trying to change society.
This is actually the reason Signal was able to disrupt the messaging space at a time when e2ee for messaging was unheard of in mainstream apps. They make design decisions not based on what makes users comfortable, but what they think the world needs.
Maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong, but I think their core motivation is a lot more trustworthy than that of WhatsApp or any other major tech company.
* Signal wants to make money (and they cite Tor as an example of the problems of not making money)
* Monero's isn't fast enough.
The first point obviously isn't really very good defense and the second point could be considered refuted by this tweet[0].
Monero is simply unlikely to reduce their block time or the number of confirmation blocks. Given the work in integrating SGX, Stellar Consensus and fog calling it a scam is going too far but its not a good look for sure.
[0]: https://nitter.dark.fail/moxie/status/1379560902463119361#m
Block time isn't really the obstacle the detractors are claiming it is.
This is a non issue if you already have coins in your wallet but it's not a very pleasant first time experience.
It's clear that the real intent was to make money, and it's unfortunate that they haven't been upfront about this.
"Won’t governments ban Signal now?
So far, we haven’t seen any indication this will happen. It has been possible to install open-source Monero wallets in the App Store and Play Store nearly anywhere in the world for many years now (excluding authoritarian countries — but they’ve already banned Signal anyway). For the most part, non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets are easily accessible."
"Some jurisdictions have gone even further and imposed restrictions on investments in cryptocurrencies, the extent of which varies from one jurisdiction to another. Some (Algeria, Bolivia, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, and Vietnam) ban any and all activities involving cryptocurrencies." [1]
Signal being banned in China. [3]
They also mention that this isn't a money grab because Signal needs funding. Signal has a 105 million dollar "loan" with zero interest with a repayment requirement in 2068.
This opinion piece is a joke.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/law/help/cryptocurrency/world-survey.php
In the EU it's treated like any other asset, my tax office here has been asking me to declare any, alongside (foreign) cash, banks, etc for years now.
So no, more blanket banning does not seems likely to me.
In any case, we'll see. My money's on it being a complete shit show two months from now.
You could also argue against the premise that a secure chat app needs payment integration, but that's one to bring up on twitter against Moxie.
It was an interesting move to adopt a coin like MobileCoin, but honestly it seems well reasoned, and at least as valid as most of the suitable alternatives from a technical standpoint.
My only hope is that the added overheard of interacting more with the financial world doesn’t detract to much time from keeping the core messaging functions great - time will tell but I suspect they’ll work it out.
I don't. Drew Devault articulates some reasons why[0], but it's an opinion I held before he wrote that. It was a pattern I first noticed reading Moxie's justifications for removing encrypted SMS[1].
[0] https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html [1] https://signal.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/
p.s. "illicit" means illegal. You mean "elicit".
(Happy signal user btw, no axe to grind. I am commenting how I see the meta quality of what went on with this decision.)
> Third, private transaction retrieval requires downloading blocks to your phone and manually filtering them. If you’ve ever used the Monero CakeWallet, you’ll know it can sometimes take quite a while before everything is synced and you actually see your full balance. MobileCoin solves this by using fog, which allows for instant and private transaction retrieval without putting a heavy computational load on your phone.
MyMonero and OpenMonero is this kind of light wallet and has similar privacy guarentees. Fog is still vulnerable to timing based attacks.
> Even if you assume that Intel SGX is completely broken in every way possible, MobileCoin provides at least the same amount of privacy as Monero. The purpose of SGX is to provide defense-in-depth by potentially mitigating heuristic analysis that CryptoNote protocols are vulnerable to.
Federation fundimentally offers less privacy guarentees and relies on trusting the nodes and fog servers. Malicious actors can perform all kinds of timing attacks.
> If anyone has read through Josh Goldbard’s comments on Hacker News, you will undoubtedly understand the frustration here. In multiple instances, he simply avoids answering a question altogether in his replies. I don’t believe he is trying to hide any foul play here.
This is quite an optemistic take, even other cryptocurrencies are more transparent about their initial token sale price, companies and amount purchased, distribution schedule, etc.
The article also doesn't touch on MobileCoin's lack of credit for Monero[0] and the founding engineer's now deleted post about the Monero codebase[1].
[0]: https://nitter.dark.fail/fluffypony/status/13795592735046410...
[1]: https://nitter.dark.fail/fluffypony/status/13796045413903441...
Almost as much as Kik and Kin (or whatever was that), as well as Telegram and TON.
Moved my Stellar out, exchanged to BTC and stopped using Keybase.
It's weird to see that it written about as crypto in a messenger app is novel though, as my keybase app let's me chat to friends and send lumens to them if I want to. That feature was also criticised a lot if I remember correctly, though it never bothered me.
Which is to add to the article's conclusion: it might be too early to judge.
I had zero idea it was released
Other than stablecoins, it’s unclear how it would be avoided?
Investment is a misnomer because it doesn't produce or fix anything in the real world, nor pay dividends. If you invest in a company that 3D prints modular homes you'll get a piece of the profits through dividends. Crypto“currencies” do nothing of the sort. You have to sell to a greater fool to profit. Meanwhile, the originators have trivially created digital tokens from thin air, backed by a mere white paper or faulty proof of concept, and consequently profit wildly by mere shilling. Yes, similar pyramid schemes occur in the stock market as well, which I criticize just as much.
If it's an actual currency then it's not an investment but a conversion.
And many of the cryptocoins are Proof of Stake, or planning to switch to PoS (such as Ethereum). This, besides requiring far less energy than the Proof of Work mining for block validation, allows someone who purchased the coin to gain more coin. By staking coin to assist in the validation of blocks, stakers are rewarded a percentage of the transaction fees as payment. They do not need to buy equipment to mine and effectively earn interest on staked coin.
Even if you bought in at the point a coin stabilizes and no longer appreciates, you could still increase your wealth without needing the price of the coin to increase.
I’m somewhat skeptical. But given that speculation drives much of the interest in cryptocurrencies, they might succeed anyway.
In the early days Bitcoin was given away for free via faucets, you just had to create a wallet
The existing fiat currencies suffer the same issue. It's called the Cantillon effect. People who are closest to newly created currency units (mostly financial insiders) pay lower interest rates and have more buying power with that money. They can also immediately turn around and lend the currency out at higher rates, pocketing the difference.
That makes it a ten-year-old pyramid scheme. It may be born from noteworthy ideals, but its flaws have become more apparent over the years. Stephen Diehl succinctly puts why the bubble has lasted so long:
“Writing about bitcoin for a lay audience is challenging. If people know enough about tech alone they might think there's no problem, if they know enough about finance alone they might think there's no problem. If people know enough about both then they know it's all a big scam.” —https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1363898199010852869
> The existing fiat currencies suffer the same issue.
Bitcoin touting to be the future of money while having the same if not more problems than fiat currencies is exactly why it deserves all the scrutiny it can get.
I'm totally on board that Bitcoin should be scrutinized and examined critically.
Concerning the Cantillon effect, in the fiat system, the beneficiaries are the already rich and well connected insiders.
Recent central bank monetary interventions are major drivers of inequality by pushing up the asset prices of the rich while the poor suffer joblessness and inflation.
With Bitcoin, new units are created in fierce and open competition, and not handed out to insiders.
Same with crypto“currencies”, hence why they're a pyramid scheme.
>Recent central bank monetary interventions are major drivers of inequality by pushing up the asset prices of the rich while the poor suffer joblessness and inflation.
Again, crypto“currencies” do the exact same thing; increasing inequality by creating another elite who hoard their wealth.
>With Bitcoin, new units are created in fierce and open competition, and not handed out to insiders.
New units are mined by the already filthy rich because mining on regular PCs has become obsolete.
Emitting half of all bitcoin in just the first 4 years is hardly fair. One would hope for a more Gold like distribution, such as a pure linear emission. This still has a finite soft total supply [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
An infinitely growing cryptocurrency presupposes perpetual economic growth, which requires ever increasing population and resource extraction.
Maybe that's realistic if we start colonizing Mars and mining asteroids, but it's not possible on earth alone.
If limited supply turns out to be an issue, competing currencies can be used to augment supply, it's basically already the case.
I'm pretty certain a MobileCoin wallet app in the play store would've been well received by those who are interested in the concept of MobileCoin. Users that are interested in both Signal and MobileCoin could just install both apps side by side.
The decision to link this coin to signal appears to me to be a decision to compete with other cryptocurrencies not by merit of being a better payment solution but by reach.
Facebook and Google frequently make this decision (reach instead of merit) and HN regularly criticizes them for it. I think it is fair and honest to criticize Signal for it as well.
I'm in more of a 'let's wait and see' mode (see: this article), but I understand the worry.
All Signal's developers have done is integrate the work of MobileCoin into their backend (fog) and client (fog wallet).
The server code base has historically had periods of non public updates and doing a quick grep of the commit log payments first appears in October 2020.
It's been clear since 2017 that Moxie has wanted to integrate payments to "stay competitive", so such effort was always on the schedule.
I also tried to get across that if payments caused the code to be private for a year, that's also a downside
edit: I'd like to have something self-hosted!
From what I have gathered, it is a fork of Signal, that tries to solve some of the issues with it - tied to phone# - meta-data from the network you use it on.
I don't know that it is prime time ready, but the entirety of the project (w/ oden, lokinet) is an interesting project.
The crypto stuff isn't great, but just... dont' touch it if you don't like it. It's unfortunate that it's there, but this is the trade-off for everyone not running their own Matrix homeservers. IMO Signal is still the best choice out there by far.
It avoids so much evidence of Signals past controversial changes, Moxie's past interviews about MobileCoin and his current tweets or the amount of work done to create MobileCoin. Even a quick look into it creates many holes that can only be filled with speculation.
I honestly mostly steer clear of Moxie and the other stuff related to Signal -- I personally was really annoyed with the phone number thing, but I can make peace with the fact that Signal is concerned with privacy, mass appeal, and then maybe some anonymity. I am getting a ton of value for absolutely free.
In the end, the code is open source, and that is the difference that puts it above the other choices with mass appeal. For me it was basically Signal or Telegram -- there are some other F/OSS options, but they just don't have the mass appeal for me to use with friends.
> IMO Signal is still the best choice out there by far.
I'm a little confused. How do you decide to excuse MobileCoin as a cry for help and then decide to ignore it?
To the spirit of your question though, the reason I take somewhat opposite stances is because I expect the first thing is just a tin foil hat theory, and the crypto thing is neither here nor there (I know I don't plan to buy any, but even so maybe it's good for some people). Signal being banned by a lot of oppressive regimes is some pretty good supporting evidence towards it not being compromised.
Now understand you meant some tin-foil hatters think it was compromised, but you don't. That makes sense. (I also find the "it's a signal they're compromised" theory absurd).
Personally the code being F/OSS is enough for me -- if I need to run my own instance of the server then I could, and if the many-eyes theory holds true and signal's security audit is any good, then I'm pretty happy with that. I already assumed I wasn't quite out of the reach of three letter agencies because I had to use a phone number to get started. Phones are essentially pwned by default and easily pwnable for the agencies.