Moxie is a who. Probably referencing this blogpost, https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html.

Who is Moxie? Moxie Marlingspike.

What is Moxie? A regional beverage that is the origin of the word, now the official soft drink of the state of Maine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie

Moxie and a Fluffernutter sandwich. Doesn't get any more New England than that.

Thank you for replying to the question. ;-)

It's guy that promised you private chats by asking you to register with a phone number.

Don't forget they now offer their own cryptocurrency ... to make us more secure and private, I guess.

This is confusing privacy and anonymity. He 100% delivered on the former; the latter was the trade off.

there was no need for the trade off in the first place

You're welcome to try and claim that, but the sheer success of Signal and Moxie's approach is proof you're arguing in bad faith.

Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing. Signal foregoes the latter to provide the former to a much wider range of people; foregoing the latter enables substantially better usability for non-technical people.

> You're welcome to try and claim that, but the sheer success of Signal and Moxie's approach is proof you're arguing in bad faith.

This makes no sense. If you wanted to prove that you would need to have a signal equivalent that does not use phone numbers. Where is that?

That is basically their point, that these alternatives are not successful because they chose not to use phone numbers.

Anyway here’s some alternatives:

Briar (no iOS client?)

Threema (not free as in free beer)

Wire

Matrix

XMPP

Telegram (can be used E2EE for 1:1 chats only and is off by default)

Moxie Marlinspike is a widely-respected security hacker and parent's comment is referring to this post of his -> https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I wonder if he told that he was also part of a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scam as well? [0]

After learning this I just lost respect for him.

[0] https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...

Eh, look at the full timeline. When MobileCoin stuff was happening, when Moxie left Signal, and when he posted the Web3 criticisms.

I've been using Bitcoin since 2009, and RedPhone/TxtSecure (Now called Signal) since 2010, and I still have zero clue how I'm even supposed to obtain MobileCoin. It's really a toy project at this point with no real adoption.

Being able to send money via a secure chat network is a super important utility that is currently under-served in a big way, but MobileCoin itself is basically a whitepaper and a bunch of toy code that has a novel re-implementation (in rust) of Monero as a stableishcoin, which, last I checked makes it completely incompatible with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem.

They are making zero effort to shill, or push MobileCoin in any way, and neither Moxie nor anyone on the team stands to profit greatly from massive MobileCoin adoption.

It does not matter. We know it is another scam coin, the fact is the crypto wallet is still in the Signal app. If it is a 'toy' project why didn't they remove it already after years of developing it in the first place?

The CEO of MobileCoin already admitted to using MobileCoin to fund Signal [0] and Moxie being the original CTO and paid advisor of the coin as mentioned in the article; also meaning he was a paid shill and part of the scam.

They already made the effort to create, shill, and then dump the tokens as soon as it was listed on the exchanges. The fact that Signal already accepted the tokens in the first place tells us that they were most certainly involved from the beginning and were part of the pump-and-dump scheme of the token.

Since MobileCoin was pre-allocated with them owning over 50% of the supply with that being the only supported token on Signal tells you that both Signal, Moxie and MobileCoin are all complicit in the scam.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26726246

The person behind Signal.