Come on. Mobilecoin was just a straight up method of transferring value from the non-profit into the pockets of private parties. It couldn't be more clear short of them saying it outright.

A purely premined purely centralized "cryptocurrency" with no selling point except that all signal users would be forced onto it which, once it was launched, made someone a billion dollars and then it was abandoned and forgotten. (The almost unusable demo grade integration in signal continues to exist, if you look really hard for it.)

> Come on. Mobilecoin was just a straight up method of transferring value from the non-profit into the pockets of private parties. It couldn't be more clear short of them saying it outright.

Matt seems to have said the same thing:

>"Signal sold out their user base by creating and marketing a cryptocurrency based solely on their ability to sell the future tokens to a captive audience,” said Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo, who also used to contribute to Signal’s open-source software.

But here is the thing; we've both have enough time in BTC to have seen some variation of this already; I was and remain a big proponent of Mycelium and I couldn't have done what I did with my startup without them, but there was no way in hell I was going buy their token and instead donated directly to the team. Nor would I purchase any of the exchange coins, I'm looking at SBF and CZ; so a level of due diligence is required so with the aftermath of the ICO-mania back in 2017 firmly in mind I think this should be a precursor.

I don't deny that Mobilecoin may have been in done in bad faith, but ultimately the consumer has to bear some responsibility; I was at hackathon at a major tech University, where the 1st-3rd prize was some small sum of cash and getting 1st round of interviews at some local tech companies and some recognition in media, but the rest were pointless things like Rokus or whatever.

I wasn't selected as a mentor for that event, I just crashed the event in the last 5 hours as I got out of work early, but after encountering a team from Stanford that created a proof of concept used to solve a major issue and creating transparency in donations for charities and non-profits using a blockchain to track, monitor and distribute the funds with real time tagging (like how we used to embed messages on mainchain).

Long story short is I managed to get them a pitch and demo with the guys from Tron and they won $10k worth of it, far exceeding the formal prizes, and I told them to split it 50/50 between them and to to keep most of it in BTC for obvious reasons. I hope they listened because Tron ended up being kind of a joke as were mos ERC tokens. I ope they listened but if they kept it in Tron they lost 66% since ATH and they only have themselves to blame.

I try to be really conservative with the "but ultimately the consumer has to bear some responsibility" because it's essentially always true: harms that were truly mitigable or unpredictable are quite rare.

No matter how careful and smart and conservative a person is-- sometimes they're just having a blonde moment and will fall for whatever. I agree that people do need to be responsible and avoid traps but I think their responsibility in no way diminishes the perps responsibility.

Putting responsibility on the victims is also complicated by the victim pools being heterogeneous. I have a lot less sympathy for some pre-mine recipient who deposited $10 million dollars of eth on FTX to get the 5% "yield" (and probably should have recognized that the yield was a ponzi red flag) and gamble a bit on ICO tokens with 20x leverage than I do for Joe-Sixpack who saw the superbowl commercials and decided to finally buy a half Bitcoin. The first was careless with their funds, greedily ignoring red flags... the second just made the mistake of being lulled into a false sense of security-- most things with a superbowl ad are okay (or at least Joe Sixpack will soon hear about their problems if they're not).

>No matter how careful and smart and conservative a person is-- sometimes they're just having a blonde moment and will fall for whatever. I agree that people do need to be responsible and avoid traps but I think their responsibility in no way diminishes the perps responsibility.

You're way more forgiving than I am, G.

I have seen and have reluctantly been in charge of people's financial affairs and the only sure way for them to have any level of operational security is when something is at stake and they subsequently lose some of it to learn why to do so--it is well understood that our human minds are hard-wired for risk aversion and optimized for limiting losses, so it makes sense that is why people an be so careless wen this is done for them in 90% of situations.

With that said, I agree greater efforts should be made for securely storing and handling funds, I just fail to see how more regulation (FTX was regulated and licensed) will achieve this. Rather I prefer to see a technological solution to key storage, but tat doesn't solve the ability to see a yield farm operation for the scam that it is.

> his web3 analysis seemed to exclude using an alt with no proven history in Signal for payments

I never suggested that nor do I think that. I just don't like the feature.