[deft]

Mobilecoin is a token powered by a stellar smart contract. I don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project, because it's incredibly limited in scope (actually stellar advertises that as a feature of their smart contract platform) I doubt it will succeed. And no, a fancy mobile UI is not worth $30mil.

Before someone replies with a quote from the whitepaper about what it /will/ do, don't bother. Until it's released I doubt any and all claims from the team. Because it's no different from any other high profile raise for a cryptocurrency and every single one so far has failed to deliver.

[ghayes]

> I don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project

> Until it's released I doubt any and all claims from the team.

It's fine for you to have your opinion, but understand that you aren't meaningfully contributing to the conversation with statements like the ones above. Other people, obviously, will have different viewpoints, and it's best that we can talk on the merits of the arguments.

[stale2002]

It is absolutely contributing to the discussion.

The merits to be discussed are "its not done yet, and anything that doesn't work NOW in crypto probably won't work ever".

If someone wants me to belive their claims they should build something, get it working, and THEN sell it. None of this pre sale IOU stuff.

[darpa_escapee]

A voice of (reasoned) doubt in a sea of unwavering optimism and praise is a contribution. HN tends towards the latter. See: Sharing economy, autonomous vehicles, Musk-related anything, smart contracts, etc

[mrb]

«don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project»

By this attitude, you would have failed to correctly value the potential of early Amazon (because "an online bookstore is not worth $X.")

One of the core principles of YC is that the value of an early-stage company mostly depends on the founders, not the initial idea (as it can change.)

[moe]

> potential of early Amazon

Except this is not "early Amazon".

This is someone promising to build a mini-Amazon on AWS.

[mrb]

Again, the initial idea—mini-Amazon or whatever—doesn't (really) matter. It will evolve. It will change. The company may pivot. The valuation reflects the potential of the founder's skills, relentlessness, overall vision, track record, etc.

[sebleon]

> because it's incredibly limited in scope (...) I doubt it will succeed.

What is the correct amount of scope to ensure success? I'm curious what's the logic behind your comment and negative predictions.

[RIMR]

I would say that being legitimately innovative and not exactly like every other ICO with hollow promises would be where I draw the line.

[sebleon]

> legitimately innovative > exactly like every other ICO > hollow promises

These are subjective opinions, doesn't seem like a rigorous line.

[sebleon]

What are some ICOs you do support?

[vimota]

This seems unduly negative. Genuinely, why do you think their use of Stellar's consensus algorithm makes it limited in scope? From my understanding they are just using their consensus not the actual network, and the use of SGX seems like a valid innovation. I'm not aware of any cryptocurrencies that can run on a "light" client without having to trust their node - is there one?

I hear you on the delivering bit though.

[rms]

Your github led me to https://turtlecoin.lol/ which makes your point and undermines it at the same time. Turtlecoin launched with an incremental and a catchy name and no ICO and on the surface sounds like it achieves a lot of what Mobilecoin attempts to.

Ultimately though, Turtlecoin is a parameter tweak and relaunch of existing coins that doesn't solve the core problem of consumer payments. Mobilecoin is at least attempting that, and for $30M, they should at least get a fancy mobile UI, hopefully one that filters up to an improvement of the Signal UI also.

It's right to be skeptical. Blockchain applications aren't being delivered. Still, the promise of blockchain convergence requires us to believe in a future that we can't quite see at hand where applications start being delivered all at once and the ecosystem hits critical mass. I'm now in the business of skeptically predicting the future and I've basically started pre-rejecting all ICO pitches if it's not being delivered imminently.

MobileCoin still stands out as a clever, simple design where the economic value comes from one trusted crypto anarchist saying that we as a society can in fact use Intel SGX for critical applications -- like a simple implementation of consumer micropayments. I, like many others, didn't believe this until Moxie said it was ok, but I believe in this because Moxie is in fact the most trusted person in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious about your blockchain side projects beyond Turtlecoin hacking, feel free to email me if you have any interesting code running...

Also I recommend Moxie's English language writing to everyone; it's sublime. https://moxie.org/stories.html

[deft]

Thanks for the detailed reply. To me TurtleCoin is just a fun project that's trying a different approach: make something first. It has a long way to go and as it exists now is how you describe. In the long run the project members are hoping to take it well past that, which I'm sure you saw on the site.

When I first heard about mobilecoin I thought it was different too. The problem I have is why are they raising money right now? Show me a working MVP (not a sketch UI) first. It's crazy that people are raising this amount of money with absolutely nothing to demo. I have more faith in mobilecoin launching something worthwhile compared to other coins but I'm still very skeptical... name recognition and private raises don't change much.

As for now I've just been messing around with TurtleCoin. The project (along with the low price) has managed to create a community that's interested in building things with it. I like being able to hack on something, and no other crypto project has offered that environment.