fog VS LibreSignal

I had an idea that you could shard the blockchain into multiple parallel networks representing a fraction of the total supply each. This could spread tx volume among each sub-network. Combined with something like Fog for txo recovery could greatly increase the upper bound of scaling on the base layer.

https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog#overview

This explains the issues fairly well. tl;dr most blockchains require a large CPU and/or network expensive sync which is prohibitive on mobile. As a fix/hack many web and mobile apps have a SPOF gateway which the client must trust absolutely.

“Monero isn't fast enough and doesn't support transaction recovery (it also has probabilistic linkage which MobileCoin doesn't due to our use of secure enclaves). We spent almost 18 months building MobileCoin Fog to solve the second problem (https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog). It's a non-trivial stack of code to allow users to recover strings from servers they don't control without the operators of those servers being able to learn what strings are being recovered. Don't get me wrong, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but there's a lot of new tech here.”

I personally love Dash. One thing that was a requirement for me was that privacy in the system can't be optional if you want to give system-wide guarantees about the privacy of the system. That is to say, non-privacy-protecting transactions weaken the privacy of correlated privacy-protecting transactions. Second, I don't personally think CoinJoin goes far enough, specifically there's still a transaction graph to analyze. MobileCoin does not have a transaction graph which is a distinguishing factor from other cryptocurrencies. Finally, other privacy coins have implemented encrypted ledgers (see CryptoNote), which is something MobileCoin has; to the best of my recollection CoinJoin does actually have an encrypted ledger which is a big distinguishing factor. In order for users to recover transactions from an encrypted ledger, you need an encrypted recovery service which, again to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever invented. This is where Fog comes in, which allows fast mobile recovery of user transactions even in an encrypted ledger (https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog).

Hi,

Before you label MobileCoin a scam, I would encourage you to take a look at the Github. I think you'll see that we've made a lot of very carefully considered choices on how to deliver a great payments experience without many of the compromises other cryptocurrencies have chosen. Of note, the speed of transactions, much greener energy design, privacy-protections, and mobile-first UX are differentiators. Many cryptocurrencies have some of these features, but I don't know of any other that has all of them.

Believe me, I have a lot of feelings about how absurd cryptocurrency has become in the last decade. At its core, I still believe that there is something beautiful in decentralized ledgers and I think that this is the way that the world will settle debts over the next hundred years. Signal chose MobileCoin because nothing else met their performance and privacy standards. In order to meet those goals we wrote a lot of new technology that is fundamentally different from how other cryptocurrencies are architected today (check out our oblivious RAM implementation, for example: https://github.com/mobilecoinfoundation/fog).

I love Signal and I started MobileCoin to help fund their work. For me, a world with Signal in it is a better place.

>what does this mean?

Moxie (Signal's founder) has thrown fits in the past over the existence of third-party clients using their servers: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...

0: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37

I push back when anyone recommends Signal because they are fundamentally not an open network.

OWS has historically been hostile to third party implementations outside of their clients. There are multiple unofficial options but the only one I've been looking at is the bridge with matrix, though setting up a matrix server just for this is likely overkill.

I have to say that I find him fascinating too, but there are a few things that raise my suspicion, but of course do not convict him of anything:

The way he is attacking this alternative Signal client and rules out interoperability:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Signal was a word before he decided to turn it into a brand.

The signal server source code repo was not updated for a year. Communication intransparent.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signa...

I am not even against crypto integration, but I found the choice of MobileCoin odd. Instead of integrating an existing privacy coin or working with the community, he decided to integrate MOB and to be one of their "advisors":

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/mobilecoin-moxie-marlinspi...

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/mobilecoin

Is that so surprising? Signal had always a hostile attitude to alternative clients. They have this weird disconnect of the new CEO saying they want to be available to as many people as possible and be a fully commited FOSS app, and then have no version on F-Droid (while Telegram has!) and actively fight alternative clients (see https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...)

Because of this hostility Signal is not a trustworthy organization at all.

LibreSignal existed before Moxie was like “no, don’t”: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal

They have shut down third party clients, and resve the roght to continue that.

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

1) You need to audit that code, which.. everyone will have to do.

2) https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

> the Signal Android codebase includes some native shared libraries that we employ for voice calls (WebRTC, etc). At the time this native code was added, there was no Gradle NDK support yet, so the shared libraries aren’t compiled with the project build.

a good answer in my opinion, but it means what you run from the play store is not reproducible and thus can never really be confirmed to be what the sources actually include. There are also binary blobs needed for interacting with Google Play.

3) Signal is openly hostile to third party client implementations: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37

Moxie Marlinspike on May 5th 2016:

> I'm not OK with LibreSignal using our servers, and I'm not OK with LibreSignal using the name "Signal." You're free to use our source code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license, but you're not entitled to use our name or the service that we run.

> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.

Moxie Marlinspike left Signal this January[2] 2022.

Whose to say whether there will be any change, but it's been interesting seeing Signal as a somewhat defended property. Although various third party clients/tools/libraries do exist already.

The claim that running servers is expensive would have been more interesting, imo, had there been any viable way to run your own. But for a long while Signal server source code wasn't being updated at all.

[1] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

[2] https://signal.org/blog/new-year-new-ceo/