Signal Tests Payments Feature To Let Users Send Cryptocurrency

Signal announced on Tuesday it's now testing a new peer-to-peer payments system in the beta version of its apps. From a report: Appropriately called Signal Payments, the new feature right now supports only one protocol: the MobileCoin wallet and its companion cryptocurrency MOB. MobileCoin has a close relationship with Signal co-founder and CEO Moxie Marlinspike, who advised the company prior to its most recent round of funding announced last month. "The first payments protocol we've added support for is a privacy focused payments network called MobileCoin, which has its own currency, MOB," wrote Jun Harada, Signal's head of growth and communication, in a blog post. "As always, our goal is to keep your data in your hands rather than ours; MobileCoin's design means Signal does not have access to your balance, full transaction history, or funds. You can also transfer your funds at any time if you want to switch to another app or service."

Girls, Girls! You're all pretty!

[Anonymous Coward]

... and obviously all as dumb as a rock.

Re:

[cas2000]

Bitcoin is the original shitcoin. Don't be fooled by imitations! If it's a shitcoin you want, get only the original, the first, the one and only real ePonzi: Bitcon.

Slashdot: a filter, please!

[Sebby]

Why does slashdot keep posting articles about this stupid fad crypto currency. Bitcoin is using more energy than New Zealand and should be made illegal.

I tend to agree; it'd be nice to have a filter for not showing particular types of stories (they s/could add a story type of 'Bitcoin' or 'Cryptocurrency' so that we could filter on those in the Options).

Re:

[CaptnCrud]

Well, msmash got too old and fat to steel your data, so it has to earn a living shilling garbage crypto coins.

Re:

[meisdug]

It's too bad Slashdot doesn't give a preview of each post on the homepage so we could pick and choose which article we want to read and which to skip over.

Re:

[meisdug]

This is honestly the first article I've ever seen on Slashdot about MobilCoin.

Re:

[GuB-42]

I don't care about cryptocurrency but I care about Signal, so that article is relevant to me, and not in a good way.

Re:

[Vintermann]

This isn't bitcoin though. And I thought, if it was just another bitcoin clone, Moxie would not be on board on it.

It's short on details, but it doesn't seem to rely on the usual proof of work (or proof of stake) schemes. From what I can gather, it may actually rely on Intel SGX, a "trusted computing" thing, to get sufficiently many sufficiently trusted nodes that they can do away with most (or all?) of that.

It'll probably drive bitcoin purists up the wall, but it's been known for a long time that if you can

Re:

[dimko]

So by same rationale, we also should shut New Zealand down? :D While i do agree, currency is currently is not currency - I believe it will stabilise. Its revolutionary technology. All such technology upsets existing order of things. Things need to calm the fuck down. Tulps went down to normal state. So will cryptocurrencies.

Phone numbers

[bill_mcgonigle]

Some day Signal will figure out usernames and then something like crypto payments might take off.

Having phone numbers in the mix is a recipe for intervention by bad actors.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Signal make it difficult to be interoperable with their app, and don't fix long standing security issues. The app itself is bloatwear. I've given up on Signal.

Won't like it

[Malifescent]

The Fed and the ECB won't like people being able to send money anonymously between different parts of the globe.

Session

[virtig01]

Session [getsession.org]: no account, no phone number required.

Re:

[lessSockMorePuppet]

Thanks! That looks very much like what Signal used to be about. I'm going to give it a shot.

This coin is NOT a privacy coin

[Karganeth]

After reading the MobileCoin website its clear that this is not privacy focused at all. It relies upon there being TRUSTED nodes that are approved by the MobileCoin organisation. It seems like they've missed that the whole point of cryptocurrencies is that they are TRUSTLESS. There are well known privacy coins like Monero that don't rely on selected trusted organisations to run nodes. But of course MobileCoin being a coin with a low valuation means that adding it to Signal will boost its value massively (it

Re:

[Plugh]

After reading the MobileCoin website its clear that this is not privacy focused at all

This!! They are ever so proud of using the SGX enclave; it's like they haven't read [thehackernews.com] any [nist.gov] CVEs [nist.gov] in the last 2 years.

If they wanted to include a private payment system, why not just integrate [monerointegrations.com] Monero [getmonero.org]?

Re:

[Plugh]

XMR is impossible to scale

I disagree [localmonero.co]

Re: The Shitcoin rule

[Plugh]

Someone doesnâ(TM)t understand https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE [slashdot.org]â>how Lightning works

Re:

[Vintermann]

It relies upon there being TRUSTED nodes that are approved by the MobileCoin organisation.

Not as far as I can tell. It does rely on trusted nodes, but you can decide who to trust yourself, and then it uses some sort of "Byzantine federation" to achieve a consensus anyway, provided there's enough overlap between who users on the network trust.

Yes, bitcoin is "trustless", but

1. It pays a very high price for it, both in terms of computing power and in terms of being on the mercy of a speculative asset price.
2.

Altcoin = Easy money for a few

[soundbtc]

With a shitcoin, Signal becomes Noise.
https://twitter.com/bitstein/s... [twitter.com]

Re:

[Bengie]

Cryptocurrencies aren't trustless and there's nothing that says a cryptocurrency can't be centralized. Bitcoin trusts the mob majority, be that a bunch of nodes playing by the rules or a 51% attacker. Most people say "even if there is a 51% attacker, they wouldn't want to abuse it because it would destroy bitcoin". You have no idea what they want. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Maybe they want to attack a specific person to forge a transaction. And the amount of energy bitcoin consumes is cr

This is kinda ghastly

[trawg]

Long-time Signal user and supporter here. I have been trying to migrate family and friends off Whatsapp onto Signal, both because I want to get off FB and I just like Signal better (reactions alone I think are worth it).

But this move seems terrible. Other users have noted there are things that would be really nice to spend dev time on - e.g. some of the long-standing bugs/issues (like any open source application has) that would be nice to fix. I routinely have little issues, like messages seemingly getting corrupted and becoming unreadable on a device, or unreliable or very slow message delivery.

Adding more bloat into an application that is not directly related to its core purpose - cryptocurrency bloat no less!!! - is exactly the kind of thing that is going to drive me away.

Re: This is kinda ghastly

[aRTeeNLCH]

Question: if you're driven away, where to? I agree on the priorities that should be more on fixing things, it seems there focusing on feature creep instead. Then again, I got my family and the in-laws onto Signal, and I don't recognize your fault descriptions at all.

Re:

[trawg]

Question: if you're driven away, where to?

I've got no place left to go!

Then again, I got my family and the in-laws onto Signal, and I don't recognize your fault descriptions at all.

Yeh most of my family/friends network don't have these problems, but they have other entirely different problems.

The only total showstopper was my sister - she installed Signal on iOS and it wouldn't find her contacts. She could receive messages and then reply but we couldn't figure out how to get the app to pull all the contacts in.

This was in the middle of that huge usage spike when they had all those new users sign up (after the Whatsapp terms was announced) which might h

Re: This is kinda ghastly

[aRTeeNLCH]

Yeah, nowhere to run either. It's a sad state of affairs, but for messaging there should be a focus for it to be useful...

Re:

[coofercat]

I too am worried - having seen what happened to Keybase, I hope the same doesn't happen here. Everyone's got to make some money, but hopefully not to their own detriment.

If you didn't know, Keybase started giving away crypto money (by a trick of accounting, they gave away "free" money, so it didn't cost them to do it). This meant that every last bottom feeding arsewipe from the bowels of the Internet signed up to Keybase trying to get their share of this give away. Keybase then spent all their time batting