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Comment on MobileCoin has raised $30M for private mobile payments

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Read about this one on Wired awhile back. Nice to see it making progress. Would love to see a succinct description of how this compares to / is better than the slew of other privacy coins...? Also, is there a first real use case in mind that doesn't involve a big established messaging app adopting it for payments? (that seems hard/complicated/requires a different skillset than building the software). In any event, congrats to the team. Smells like one of the better projects out there!

rmsOP

The main difference is that MobileCoin trusts Intel's SGX to create a platform that should be able to scale quickly on mobile. It also has a solution to allow for private key recovery in case you lose your phone.

Zcash is more provably secure as it doesn't require trusting Intel's SGX but it's untenable on mobile right now as it's too computationally intensive. Monero and Dash are effectively anonymous for small transfers but for very large movements of money, the deep state can crack their tumbler algorithms. They provide good enough rather than verifiable anonymity.

As CEO of the Signal Foundation, Moxie is in a unique position to encourage Signal protocol chat services to adopt something like MobileCoin. I would imagine that progression would go Signal -> WhatsApp, and that Signal would only reject MobileCoin if Moxie himself rejected MobileCoin. I think there isn't really a first use case other than an existing Signal protocol service adopting it.

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