mobilecoin nonse
paper for those reading along at home: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/Mechanics-of-MobileCoin
okay so first off: scalability. 7.3 "once a transaction has been validated most of its data is discarded, and never gets stored in the blockchain"
that means the blockchain isn't growing for all eternity and you basically keep a consensus who currently owns what.
mobilecoin nonse
fees: there's transaction fees for validator nodes which confirm a transaction. this gives an incentive to run validation nodes, but not to build up excessive capacity, because rewards are limited.
afaict there's no "mining" in the classical sense. in the pdf the tombstone block, the first block comes with a large fee which ofc gets paid out to the first validator.
mobilecoin nonse
this means that mobilecoin has control over the *initial* supply of the coins and can keep volatility down insofar as they are the only ones who can sell you coins. this plays well with all the AML and KYC stuff.
dunno where i saw this, but i think they want to link prices to current exchange rates so that you don't get ripped off. given that signal wants to roll this out to potentially millions of users, this would kinda prevent the speculation and volatility (hopefully).
mobilecoin nonse
all in all, my take on this is: ehhhh, let's see where this goes. it's not proof of work so it's not using huge amounts of electricity and it discards unnecessary information so it doesn't have boundless growth.
also the fog protocol allows users to participate in the network without having to run a full node. cool.
i'm still skeptical, but it's not an *obvious* grift. the biggest issue is centralization of initial supply though.
re: mobilecoin nonse
@slowfallinward that's true ^^
i was just interested how bad it is compared to the other stuff and needed to know :3
only feature i'm missing right now in xmpp/matrix are disappearing messages...
re: mobilecoin nonse
Maybe I'm being a little overly cynical with prior reply, but I do quite distrust signal and dislike its phone-number tie-in...
Couple friends seem to want me to have matrix and even if it's a mess it is open so I'll probably acquiesce at some point
re: mobilecoin nonse
@slowfallinward i like it for discussing things which i don't want to keep around. most other messengers i know keep logs by default (i mean, you can turn it off but there's no way to enforce it).
it's a usability feature for low-effort data-hygiene basically.
i don't necessarily trust signal either, and moxie is a shithead, but the crypto is sound.
re: mobilecoin nonse
@slowfallinward oh and i definitely hate the phone-number req. especially because it's very hard to get anonymous sim cards in most places...
re: mobilecoin nonse
mobilecoin nonse
@ln Though is decentralized currency actually good? Kinda worried people will mainly use it to avoid taxes and fines and other people would barely use it to any extent
mobilecoin nonse
@x44203 in essence, it would be just like cash. what you do with that 🤷♀️
it ofc comes with the same downsides and benefits
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@ln I mean like there was the case where somebody with a lot of money in bitcoin "forgot" the wallet password to avoid fines
mobilecoin nonse
@x44203 i don't really see this as an issue. sure, there's outliers and all, but it's way too hard in practice to evade taxes on a massive scale so that it would become a problem.
or, corporations and rich people don't need cryptocurrencies to do it either. so it's kinda moot.
mobilecoin nonse
@ln thanks for that, I agree
re: mobilecoin nonse