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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of any kind of crypto, but the handwaving excuses for why they aren't pursuing alternative currencies are laughable. You could say the same about MobileCoin, and you don't provide any other justification other than blanket statements without citations.

Signal, your bias is showing, and it makes me wonder what other vendors will get your ear and be integrated in the future.

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> Signal, your bias is showing, and it makes me wonder what other vendors will get your ear and be integrated in the future.

The "vendor" in this case is the creator of Signal. The rabbit hole runs very deep on this situation.

https://www.coindesk.com/signal-founder-may-have-been-more-t...

I’m in the crypto field and no, it’s not laughable, it makes sense to me. Very few cryptocurrencies are good at targeting mobile users unfortunately. I think both Celo and Diem have good chances due to the fact that you can prove everything pretty easily to the client (and Celo does it with recursive zero knowledge proofs) but they are not privacy coins.

What does "targeting mobile users" mean in the context of a currency? My bank doesn't "target mobile users" when it chose to offer interac payments.

The whole point of cryptocurrencies is that you don’t need to trust that your bank and all the other banks have settled funds correctly, you can verify that they’ve done it (to some extent). In the case of your experience, you have really no clue if the number your bank is showing you is accurate (and indeed errors are frequent, you probably have seen double charges or transactions that later disappeared).

In the context of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin you also have to trust the server you’re talking to, if you’re a light client (a client that doesn’t want to download the whole history). So Bitcoin is not a great choice for mobile clients that don’t want to have to trust another third party. Which in general is the threat model of Signal.

So, in short, a mobile-friendly network is a small network with simple algorithms and fast transfers, where every address is pseudonymous and may drop in or out at any time with no reputational results? These are very bad properties for a blockchain to have, from an integrity context.

That’s not what I said: a mobile friendly cryptocurrency is a network you can query and that gives you a response you can fully verify: this is your account balance at this point in time, and it’s correct you can verify it with this proof of a small size (because in some coutries you’re paying for every bytes you’re downloading).

Now fast transactions (finality) is an upside for any type of currency really.

https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog#overview

This explains the issues fairly well. tl;dr most blockchains require a CPU and/or network expensive sync which is prohibitive on mobile. As a fix/hack many web and mobile apps have a SPOF gateway which the client must trust absolutely.

Which alternative currency that fits their requirements are you suggesting?

I think if they develop something similar to fog, Grin might fit.

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