Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17505036

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107954

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

If cash were invented today, it would be illegal. For most small payments if not large transfers, in the USA consumers actually have the right to transact anonymously. Tracking micropayments publicly forever on a blockchain seems like a step backwards. Being able to track large transfers on a blockchain is one of the benefits of living in the world where the Byzantine General's Problem has been solved.

I see this as the start of a community effort to verify Intel SGX. I imagine that the process of rolling out a consumer facing high stakes product on SGX involves external verification of SGX beyond what it's gone through before.

Life pro tip:

If your Charles Schwab broker emails and says that they're wondering why your retirement savings are nothing but medical marijuana penny stocks and if you'd like to come in to talk about healthy portfolio management strategies, you should go into the local office and not ignore that email.

Do you see a future where blockchain technology exists but consumers don't use cryptocurrency? I do also. Who is to say that WhatsApps's implementation of Mobilecoin has to use their own proprietary cryptocurrency instead of letting users denominate transfers in local fiat currency?

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

Optimistically, they solve consumer micropayments by allowing the unbanked to send and store money via WhatsApp.

Zcash is more provably secure as it doesn't require trusting Intel's SGX but it's untenable on mobile right now as it's too computationally intensive. Monero and Dash are effectively anonymous for small transfers but for very large movements of money, the deep state can crack their tumbler algorithms. They provide good enough rather than verifiable anonymity.

As CEO of the Signal Foundation, Moxie is in a unique position to encourage Signal protocol chat services to adopt something like MobileCoin. I would imagine that progression would go Signal -> WhatsApp, and that Signal would only reject MobileCoin if Moxie himself rejected MobileCoin. I think there isn't really a first use case other than an existing Signal protocol service adopting it.

I think in the future, the average technologically savvy person will be just as confused about what bitcoin is and does as they are today and it will mostly be used to securitize options and derivatives of unprecedented complexity.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916472

Points: 48

# Comments: 49

The author's equation produces low valuations at high velocity and this suggests a use case for low valuation, high velocity cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange if not a deflationary store of value. I don't think this currency exists yet, though I get lots of pitches for things that want to be this while also trying to justify their own value into the future.

In the early days of crypto, libertarian economists predicted that bitcoin would go to the moon and the USD would undergo hyperinflation. This is clearly not happening. What I think could happen is a relatively stable USD under the guidance of the Federal Reserve and a simultaneous hyperdeflation of ETH and BTC as they become the reserve currency of distributed AI capital organizations.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913316

Points: 2

# Comments: 1