Moxie, as an individual, is a paid technical advisor to MobileCoin but the reality is that we could never pay Moxie what his time is worth. I am thankful that he has chosen to help make this project a reality.
I've been a longtime signal user (since the textsecure/redphone days).
I've always given moxie a pass on his controversial decisions (no federalisation, no 3rd party clients, no fdroid repo, relying on Google play services, being slow to release serverside source code) because the team was small and obviously had to cut corners somewhere.
But learning that they spent their time adding support for a (premined?) cryptocurrency just because it's Moxie's pet project is disheartening.
What are the odds that this would've been merged into the project if it had been a merge request opened by someone from the outside?
What are your (you guys) opinions on Session (https://getsession.org/), the Signal clone that uses Tor, and no phone numbers? Any significant downsides? Anybody know the team there and can speak on their trustworthiness, longer term intentions etc? What about the code they've added? Anybody review that? At a quick glance it looks like a decent but less user friendly alternative (no phone numbers - good for privacy, bad for grandma's to be able to adopt it easily). Thanks.
Signal is entirely centralized and Moxie runs the organization.
For all intents and purposes Moxie is 100% in control of the Signal network and could shut it down or release a malicious update that plaintexts messages at any time.
And a reason surfaced to continue to connect users to their phone numbers...
>>The UK also has receiver verification. If I try to send to an account and it doesn't match the name I'm sending to, my bank will warn me. How do you stop impersonation?
A: Signal relies on phone numbers for identities. Other apps that integrate MobileCoin may have a higher threshold for identification.
