fog VS gomuks

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.

The problem with this is that this is just fundamentally untrue. There are plenty of non-Electron apps that are viable. For core functionality of e2ee, messages, exploring directories, sending images, etc, those are available in multiple alternative apps. If you're talking about other integrations like video calling, plugins, and spaces, then you'd be right as I don't know other clients that have those. But, none of those things are really required in the matrix protocol anyways, and those available features in other clients already far surpasses what IRC can do. You don't need these bleeding edge features to have an enjoyable experience on Element, and given the IRC crowd, I would assume they're adverse to bleeding edge anyways. If you want an experience similar to irssi, then you can use gomuks for a superior experience in a familiar(ish) client. So saying Element is the only suitable client implementation is outright false.

There's also a nice terminal client called gomuks.

gomuks is probably the most feature complete one.

gomuks is a command line-based Matrix chat client

I am running my own home server, everyone in my family has an account they use there (the domain is our surname). Non-techy people use it and like it (past the initial setup, since setting up a custom domain requires a few more clicks than :matrix.org account). I am not waiting for the day, though, when they will need to set up a new device without access to the old one.

> I personally haven't met any "real" people who are even aware of Matrix. When I broached it with a non-IT friend, they were actively uninterested in unifying messaging applications as they had "facebook friends" and "whatsapp friends" and interacted with them differently.

I tried to sell it too with the "unify your messaging apps", but this is a wrong selling point to new users. First they need to start using matrix as their messaging app, realize that it works well, including VoIP and video calls. Once trust is there, only then start thinking about using bridges. Because there will be rough edges (e.g. federated voice/video calls do not work).

Because of the way bridges integrate to third-parties, they are not bug-free. Reliability is just not great yet. Maybe except a hosted service, Beeper[1], which is run by people who know most about these bridges and can provide support.

To sum up, I am using Matrix for my family network, and some bridges personally; I am not yet planning to spread the use of bridges beyond myself. Besides the encryption setup, I like the UI a lot. I also use gomuks[2] from time to time, which is a terminal matrix application. I have not stumped into server-side problems.

I am donating monthly to Tulir[3], the most prolific Matrix bridge developer (and, to my knowledge, co-founder of beeper). Because I started using Matrix because of the bridges.

Oh, and I love the Matrix sms bridge[4]. I set it up to see if it works, and I am not going back. It's great.

[1]: https://www.beeper.com/

[2]: https://github.com/tulir/gomuks

[3]: https://github.com/tulir

[4]: https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix