Many technologists viscerally felt yesterday’s announcement as a punch to the gut when we heard that the Signal messaging app was bundling an embedded cryptocurrency. This news really cut to heart of what many technologists have felt before when we as loyal users have been exploited and betrayed by corporations, but this time it felt much deeper because it introduced a conflict of interest from our fellow technologists that we truly believed were advancing a cause many of us also believed in. So many of us have spent significant time and social capital moving our friends and family away from the exploitative data siphon platforms that Facebook et al offer, and on to Signal in the hopes of breaking the cycle of commercial exploitation of our online relationships. And some of us feel used.
Signal users are overwhelmingly tech savvy consumers and we’re not idiots. Do they think we don’t see through the thinly veiled pump and dump scheme that’s proposed? It’s an old scam with a new face.
Allegedly the controlling entity prints 250 million units of some artificially scarce trashcoin called MOB (coincidence?) of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply. This token then floats on a shady offshore cryptocurrency exchange hiding in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, where users can buy and exchange the token. The token is wash traded back and forth by insiders and the exchange itself to artificially pump up the price before it’s dumped on users in the UK to buy to allegedly use as “payments”. All of this while insiders are free to silently use information asymmetry to cash out on the influx of pumped hype-driven buys before the token crashes in value. Did I mention that the exchange that floats the token is the primary investor in the company itself, does anyone else see a major conflict of interest here?
And there goes Signal, down the drain, throwing away all the goodwill it has managed to build up. Apparently, the donations they received from users weren’t enough, and it has to resort to shady schemes like these to keep the service running. I wasn’t using Signal to begin with, but this ensures I’m not touch it with a ten foot pole.
As for cryptocurrency, a topic we effectively do not cover on OSNews – I’m not saying cryptocurrency is by definition shady, but let’s just say I don’t read many stories about cryptocurrency that instill me with any confidence in its trustworthiness and stability in any way, shape, or form. The technology in and of itself is cool, but what people are doing with it is, well, not.
Any time a company brings up that they’re implementing some cryptocoin (or blockchain for that matter) it always makes me weary about supporting them.
With that said, I’ve been slowly moving to Matrix/Element instead. I fully endorse using this as a messaging app.
Yeah, “We added [latest fad technology].” is definitely a signal the company lost the plot and the VCs are coming around asking for money.
Does it run on Docker? Is it web scale? Does it leverage K8s? Is it cloud?
Matrix has a lot of issues, but in the long run is probably the way to go.
Cryptocurrencies are really stupid. Millions of tons of CO2 are produced each year for something that is nothing but speculation.
Really stupid, shows that people like Elon Musk only care for money and not the planet when they invest in it.
Maybe crypto is just the incentive to sell more emission rights.
Digital / crypto currencies *might* make sense. For example, there was an attempt by Facebook, which got a lot of traction from many partners including Visa and Mastercard. [Put conspiracy theory hat on] And they had to pull support due to external pressure. [Hat back off].
That is very useful, in theory, for cross border payments. If I want to send money to family, I have to tackle with Western Union offices, or pay high fees. However USDC coin will do it for roughly $6.
Yet, it all depends how the system is set up. You can have a fairly democratic system (like BitCoin, albeit excessively wasteful in terms of resources), or something that is essentially a pyramid scheme.
This looks more like the second type, where the masters hold all the inventory, and let the users scramble for crumbs.
What exactly is the problem? Looks like they have added a payment option that doesn’t require disclosing private information, how is that interfering with privacy and security of users and their communications?
Signal is a centralized, proprietary protocol, so there are risks involved (company takeover, business plan change) but having a crypto currency payment system shouldn’t be one of them.
For me, it is not that they are adding a payment method that is the problem. Many messaging apps have options to transfer money. However how they are implementing this raises some alarms.
If they just added BitCoin, Ethereum, or ESDC/ESDT on Tron etc, I don’t think they would have received this many complaints.
They desperately need money (or rather an income stream):
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
And these two facts together (they need money, they implement their own crypto currency) makes the thing more suspect.
If they would figure out how to host private instances, people would give them money.
I trust the crypto, and I would like to use it for business/org communications. However, it’s unusable for businesses/orgs because it’s one giant space which makes access control impossible.
As it stands, Matrix has private instances, and it is the better solution. Warts and all.
Flatland_Spider,
Yes, they kinds shot themselves in the foot, and now doubling down on it.
There are many viable business models for apps, from ad supported for premium/freemium all the way up to selling themselves to Facebook. However many of them would not work for Signal (for obvious reasons). They not only advertise privacy as a core feature, but the client is open source. Let’s not forget it is a non-profit.
But, yes, they could focus on a premium offering. Something just to limit / integrate the contact lists with an Active Directory would have gone a long way. To be fair, I have not read up on their protocol, but even if it is not compatible *today*, it would pay for itself in the long run.
I agree, Signal would need to sell something in order to raise money. The app is a great base, and it should remain open source. It’s all the silly little value adds that people would like that could be sold.
Sticker packs are something they could sell. Private groups, private distribution lists, private feeds.
Threema has a good model I think Signal should follow. They charge for API access (Threema Gateway), business/org instances (Threema Work), they have lists and things for interacting with users (Threema Broadcast). https://threema.ch/en/
Threema Broadcast inpaticular is really interesting idea.
There are things people would pay money for. Other companies have figured out this business model. I don’t feel Signal is being creative, aside from how to get Moxie a couple million dollars via a cryptocurrency scam.
Signal being developed by a non-profit doesn’t really matter. There could be a corp owned by the non-profit which sells the value adds. Much like how Element sells hosted Matrix servers while Matrix and software is developed by the Matrix.org Foundation.
I’m pretty sure that would be possible with a little bot with read only AD access. Signal can already uploads people’s contacts to find other people on Signal, so I’m pretty sure this is possible right now.
I still don’t see anything wrong with it. At least they don’t simply link to my credit card like many messaging apps do.
Of course they raise money. Signal may be a privacy respecting company (or they are simply unable to aggregate vast amounts of data Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft can) but it is still a company using a centralized protocol and infrastructure and therefore being at risk of a buy out or simply changing their policies. For now, however, they are a very important middle ground between the likes of Whatsapp and Matrix.
It’s about the Optics. Moxie is heavily involved with MOB. He was one of the founders, and presumably, MM is selling out Signal’s user base for his own profit.
Next, MobileCoin owns 85% of MOB. It’s self-dealing. The link below explains.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html
Finally, they are going to get kicked in the shins by the Feds. If they aren’t already cooperating, they will be. This is a liability, and it opens a giant hole governments can leverage.
Crypto… is it a miner? Or ICO, ? That report is vague. I would be up in arms if it was a miner. eating my cycles without my knowledge or permission. It would be akin to malware in my book.
I think it’s a wallet. Kind of like how PayPal has cryptocurrency support.
It could be a miner. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Stephen Diehl, the author of the main article, is anti all crypto currencies. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/banbitcoin.html
So his view on Signal going crypto says a lot less about Signal or MOB specifically.
It’s like the pope coming down hard on one particular brothel and folks thinking he means that some other brothel is the place to go… no …. he wrote about that last week.
This is a more balanced view – https://www.coindesk.com/signal-messaging-app-launches-mobilecoin-payments-feature-in-beta
Thanks. That was informative.
Both the quote and Thom’s commentary sounded very critical of Signal, so I wanted to know if there’s anything wrong with Signal’s choices and implementation or is it just a bias against crypto currency. Sounds like a non-issue to me.
Add Signal to the small but growing list of services and apps that are pulling shady crypto monetization schemes (looking at you Brave) and should be avoided like the Plague. As Thom said, cryptocurrency in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but I feel that trying to monetize apps with it screams of desperation. In the case of Brave it’s outright shady and anti-privacy/anti-user, defeating the entire stated purpose of the browser in the first place.