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Comment by gaius_baltar | Hacker News Reader

This forced integration is the worst decision Signal ever made (assuming they're sincere in their attempt to remove phone numbers as IDs).

If we really need a payment system, why not use GNU Taler? It's not a coin but just a distributed way to move real currencies around. Also, it does not run afoul or taxing and does not allow pump and dump or price speculation. (maybe this question just became rhetoric)

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Or it could have just been Monero, which is the most common privacy coin. The fact that they went with some no-name premined shitcoin is mind boggling and screams money grab.

This has been addressed on dozens of occasions

The article directly addresses this with it's list of requirements. Perhaps another privacy coin like Grin would be a better suggestion that at least fits most of their requirements.

A common trick in government is to identify the preferred solution first, and then reverse engineer a set of requirements only met by that one single solution.

I presume the real unstated requirement boils down to "Moxie is associated with the cryptocurrency." Not disclosed is whether he or Signal have financial interests in its adoption (they have said they don't "hold" any of these pre-mined coins, but that's all they'll say).

They could have even used AZTEC's Ethereum layer 2 solution of scalable and private stablecoin payments:

https://zk.money/

From my understanding that's just obfuscation and not a real privacy layer

What's the difference?

Obfuscation just makes it difficult to track. Real privacy makes it impossible by breaking the links.

How does AZTEC's smart contracts not break the links?

or Aeon, which is Monero's cousin that's meant for something like this

For one thing, Taler doesn't allow person-to-person payments.

It does, you just need two accounts. It does only have unidirectional secrecy though (on purpose).

Yep. GNU Taler should be enough for all needs of a decentralized payment system.

The whole need for cryptocurrencies is a dark area of tax evasion and illegality hiding (which it isn't even good at).

Oh, something it does very well is to waste energy [edit: actually it seems like MobileCoin is not that hungry, see children comments].

> Oh, something it does very well is to waste energy.

That's not the case for MobileCoin though. Energy waste does not seem to be direct a requirement by Signal to integrate a cryptocurrency, but the user friendliness and the fast transaction validation make it hard for a good candidate to be wasteful (there's only so much energy you can waste if your transaction is validated within 5s).

That's a positive point for MobileCoin.

This way it seems like they can follow a better path (regarding energy) than the mainline coins like btc, that's a very good thing.

Thanks. Never heard of GNU Taler,nice concept but is it being applied anywhere in the world today?

Yes, you can pay with it at a cafeteria snack machine in a Swiss university. https://taler.net/de/news/2020-09.html

Thanks.

More details on that implementation here:

https://www.bfh.ch/de/aktuell/news/2020/gnu-taler-bfh/ https://archive.ph/3YxkK

> Yep. GNU Taler should be enough for all needs of a decentralized payment system.

Not really. Unfortunately GNU Taler has distinct customer/merchant accounts so it is more alternative to specialized service-payment systems like visa/mastercard, than to general peer-to-peer payment systems like bank accounts.

Then everybody can have two accounts, Rx and Tx, right?

What is the problem then?

It would all be nicely wrapped in a fun and convenient app.

Having separate accounts allows you to immediately know how much tax you need to pay, it'll be just a fraction of your Rx account.

Because the exchanges can go down and take your funds with them.

A large part of the reason why Bitcoin was created was to ensure that there was a digital solution for avoiding trusting the banking system

Exchanges go down for a reason. If you don't want to be in it, you put yourself outside of the national economic scheme.

I can see the reason why, but if everybody does the same then the whole economy goes "informal" and you deprive the state from any income.

That what is happening in most West African countries (95% of the economy is in the "informal") and for exactly the same reasons (No trust in the state and want to avoid taxes. And note that money devaluation because of money printing is another form of taxation, with delaying time effects.)

And the net effect in those African countries is that you cannot even enforce the law, there isn't at all any budget for anything. If you're robbed then you will have to pay the police yourself in order to have them do the work to catch the culprit and find your stolen goods.

I use crypto currency and I pay taxes on it.

Sorry my "you" was rhetorical, my purpose was not to single you out.

If everybody using cryptocurrencies is like you and is still paying taxes, then that's effectively one problem solved.

>>tax evasion and illegality hiding (which it isn't even good at).

This is just a Big Brother smear against privacy, with a socialist twist emanating from those with a financial stake in empowering the state and its dependent industries over the private citizen.

Exactly your arguments are made in the campaign to criminalize the use of cash:

https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...

Credit card company representative's statement on it in 2014:

>There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy

-https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s

>If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous?

- https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s

I don't think this meets their privacy requirements.

Taler is not private at all. It gives the government a backdoor, like the old Clipper chip that some in the government wanted to put in processors to decrypt communications.

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