MobileCoin has raised $30M for private mobile payments

I was talking to Moxie&#x27;s cofounder, Joshua Goldbard, the other month about this. They strongly depend upon secure enclaves to achieve it.<p>It seems like a rather clever use of DMCA related technology, potentially backfiring in the DMCA&#x27;s face if it is extended to other use cases.<p>However, using secure enclaves seems like chasing a fading rainbow. The tech doesn&#x27;t work without trusting the enclave, yet if we trust it, we&#x27;re re-centralized our trust in chip makers like Intel.<p>Or worse, if it works extraordinarily well, I&#x27;m afraid DMCA related gangs will figure out how to lawyer those use cases out of existence in the same way they lawyer-ed in the tech to begin with.<p>I&#x27;m glad Moxie &amp; co. are trying though, somebody has to! I have been previously very skeptical about the claims made by Signal, though, but as long as the enclave works, then they seem to hold true.

Can someone explain why the average user would prefer this over using venmo?

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 &#x2F; is better than the slew of other privacy coins...? Also, is there a first real use case in mind that doesn&#x27;t involve a big established messaging app adopting it for payments? (that seems hard&#x2F;complicated&#x2F;requires a different skillset than building the software). In any event, congrats to the team. Smells like one of the better projects out there!

I don&#x27;t understand - was this a traditional fund raise, or an ICO? I had thought ICO at first, since it&#x27;s a crypto currency, but the article doesn&#x27;t come right out and say it.<p>If it&#x27;s an ICO - how does that work, exactly? People buy some amount of the coin at a valuation, and then they&#x27;ll be able to use it later once the actual application comes out?

It makes a lot of sense for this coin to be on Stellar network. It is fast and cheap, and they can actually create their own coin whenever they like and treat current ones as tokens. I think this is smart move and much better then creating on Ethereum because of speed and price that goes along with it and often is not mentioned.<p>My 2c. Or 2 satoshis

The idea seems exactly like Electroneum.

Mobilecoin is a token powered by a stellar smart contract. I don&#x27;t care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project, because it&#x27;s incredibly limited in scope (actually stellar advertises that as a feature of their smart contract platform) I doubt it will succeed. And no, a fancy mobile UI is not worth $30mil.<p>Before someone replies with a quote from the whitepaper about what it &#x2F;will&#x2F; do, don&#x27;t bother. Until it&#x27;s released I doubt any and all claims from the team. Because it&#x27;s no different from any other high profile raise for a cryptocurrency and every single one so far has failed to deliver.

You&#x27;re not going to beat out Venmo, Apple Pay, and other established platforms.<p>Can this blockchain currency nonsense end already? People need to stop trying to force a given tech to do something specific all the time. It&#x27;s literally the definition of &quot;trying too hard&quot;.