Not all cryptocurrencies are scams, not all traffic on Tor is CSAM, and not matrix messages are spam. Some of us use all of these decentralized systems daily for their actual intended use cases of sovereignty and privacy.
Things like money and messaging are too important to a functioning society to allow any single party to control.
We need -actually- decentralized money and -actually- decentralized communication.
MobileCoin and Signal are neither and the results are predictable.
That's why there is no single party to control communication, and even for money there is US vs EU systems.
"Actually decentralized" has a lot of problems, especially with things like spam and scams (see also: usenet). Federation makes sure no single party has too much power, and yet allows one to have usable systems.
Well I have clients that pay me in cryptocurrencies monthly, and I pay for goods and services with them regularly without Visa or Mastercard learning my purchasing behavior to sell to advertisers.
Sure cryptocurrency is not as widely accepted online or in person locally as US dollars, but it is far easier to spend those same places than my Euros which actually meets your definition of money.
I remember watching a conference video featuring Moxie - he was the golden child, and there was an older guy saying "We've been doing cryptography for so long... how do we get paid?"
Sounded very much like a inner circle backroom deal kind of moment.
I can’t imagine many people less interested in $, that could make boatloads of it, than Moxie. Dude would rather weld, help society cryptographically, and enjoy life with friends than be the billionaire founder he obviously could be.
Judging by Mahar's TED talk about the diminished value of truth vs. alignment circulating on twitter, it looks like the Signal Foundation has finally fallen under the influence of the nihilists as well. FOSS doesn't need non-profit orgs, and people in tech aren't equipped to secure them from the people trained to take them over.
Being a non-profit is a huge advantage to Signal as they are not beholden to profits or shareholders. A messaging app that is used by millions worldwide, is a very juicy target for profit making via advertising otherwise. Meredith (Signal president) equates it to a a rampart against tech surveillance gobbling up Signal
> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you
know an incorporation of you know in the
US where you you agree not to take
you know profits you get Revenue you can
get Revenue but you're you not for
profit and you have kind of a charitable
aim and that requires that you do
certain transparency protocols so
there's sort of forms we file that show
our finances that also means that we
don't take sort of investment in the
classic venture capitalist sense and
that we cannot be acquire we could be
acquired but you know the executives and
the the board would not get a payout so
if we sold signal for billions of
dollars to say you know Palantir here or
something evil like that um we would
have to reinvest that money in
charitable causes um now why is our
incorporation structure important well
it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a
rampart that allows us to keep fully
focused on our mission of providing you
know meaningful private
Communications and in Tech that is you
know particularly important because the
barrier we're protecting against is the
fact that the business model in Tech is
monetizing
surveillance so if we had investors if
we had you know you know limited
partners breathing down our neck if we
had you know shareholders who were sort
of hassling that one old guy on our
board about you know increasing revenues
or growth or this doesn't look too good
the Privacy thing that seems a little
dated we're not getting the kind of
growth we need um we would be pushed to
compromise our privacy Focus because the
money lies in surveillance
There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.
I have tremendous respect for Whittaker. The alarming change is that the founder (Moxie) is no longer on the board, and one of the board members is someone publicly opposed to the freedom signal provides, who is also member of organizations who advocate against what signal provides, and appears to be a former employee at agencies with an interest in mass surveillance. Even Peter Theil would be a more reliable and trustworthy board member than Maher after what's come out about her views.
The other problem is Signal is now in a tacit monopoly position because neither the Apple or Google app stores will allow an app that does not do content moderation, and there is zero chance of them being challenged on that by the current US admin. I'm not sure what the current status is, but Element/Matrix was quietly cut out of the mobile market through that coordination. Judging by the stakes and the players, to me there's something very, very sinister about Marlinspike's exit as well.
Imo, the canaries for some very serious political problems are dropping like flies, and one of their tools is stacking boards of software projects with assets from compromised institutions.
Element (or Matrix in general) hasn’t been cut out. The comment might be thinking about https://element.io/blog/element-on-google-play-store but it got reverted after we explained what decentralisation was to Google.
It is true to say that Matrix is more at risk than Signal, though, given Matrix allows for public chatrooms - whereas in Signal you have to invited into whatever abusive content rather than being able to selfinvite (ie join).
> "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
For adversaries, it's just easier to take over tech companies than good willed folks to build them. Going on, the community should just not trust anything that is centralised. Implementing that well, lack of profit and fatigue are the great challenges.
DHH's "I trust Meta over Signal because a board member at Signal is woke" is utter content-farming clickbaity dishonest discourse for someone of his skill and intelligence (given the guarantees inherent in the Signal protocol and its opensource nature) and his previously stated stance against cancel culture [0]. This quest for influence seems to break people's brains in weird ways.
Her work history is indeed extremely concerning, but you're probably being downvoted because you invented a fake quote. Double quotes means a literal quote, he never said that. You invented it.
Well this is certainly an unexpected and weird announcement. I actually thought Moxie was (the main person behind) Signal. Not giving any details about this feels weird to me. How are we supposed to trust an organization that prides itself to be the beacon of free communication, when they communicate so... cryptically? Does anyone have more information on what happened here? (And what/if any are the current alternatives?)
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
Totally. She seems really thoughtful and aware of how absolute freedom (anarchy) just leads to a situation where implicit power structures are created by those who get there first. Hope she and others keep doing good work to ensure that the site lives up to its goal, to catalog all knowledge, not just the knowledge that's easy to catalog.
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
DHH only has strong feelings. Katherine Maher is a great CEO and leader and has been taken out of context in order to isolate her and make her unsupportable by people who claim to not like cancel culture. The whole thing is ridiculous.
You're the second person in this small thread to make a quip about "people claiming to not like cancel culture". Smells pretty fishy to me. Also the whole "she's a great CEO and leader" bit, what are the odds that you have personal experience to where you can make this claim? Even if you did, you could at least provide reasoning for why you think that. Anyways, all put together, I suspect a non-genuine person (or bot/LLM) posted this.
2. Moxie is paid for being on their board
3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin
4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale.
5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60
6. Moxie steps down as CEO of Signal but remains on board
7. Mobilecoin price today is $0.09
8. Moxie is no longer involved at Signal
This is why we need decentralization.