Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them.
Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog).
I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.
> Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards.
Signal has obvious financial connections to MobileCoin, something that frankly nobody else has ever heard of before today. I find it really difficult to believe that MobileCoin paying Moxie (which you've acknowledged), and Signal/Moxie happening to choose MobileCoin for inclusion in Signal when nobody wanted it was a coincidence. It's insulting to the intelligence of the reader to even make that claim.
> Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github.
That's significant in this space, because it implies that he does not benefit directly[0] from speculation on MOB, and so has less incentives to get involved in a pump and dump.
What I would still like to see for more transparency:
- legal commitment from the Signal Foundation that no employee owns any MOB
- disclosure of money transfers between MobileCoin and any Signal Foundation employee
Maybe some of this information could already be extracted given the statuses of the entities involved?
[0]: he benefits indirectly because if MobileCoin stays up, he'll probably stay as a technical advisor
The article says “Marlinspike has served as a paid technical adviser for the project since its inception” in the same paragraph, so I would say the article is quite clear on the financial relationship.
The problem here is not that people think that MobileCoin is not a useful technology or is not innovative. From what you are describing it actually seems like a good combination of features that are particularly suited for the messaging use-case.
The problem is in the way the coins were pre-mined. It seems (we don't really know from the outside) that the knowledge that Signal would be using MobileCoin has been known early on. With that knowledge it is very easy to make money by pre-mining coins. The proper analogy here is insider trading. It is immoral and that is why people are calling this a scam.
Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them.
Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog).
I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.