Signal's Cryptocurrency Feature Has Gone Worldwide [telecom]

[BILL Horne]

A beta "payments" feature now lets users of the popular encrypted
messaging app send MobileCoin around the globe.

IN THE SPRING of 2021, the encrypted communications app Signal
announced that it would add a payments feature in beta for its users
in the UK, testing out an integration with a relatively new,
privacy-focused cryptocurrency called MobileCoin. But a much broader
phase of that experiment has quietly been underway since
mid-November. That's when Signal made the same feature accessible to
all of its users without fanfare, offering the ability to send digital
payments far more private than a credit card transaction--or a Bitcoin
transfer--to many millions of phones.

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency-payments/

Is-that-why-it's-so-evil department ...

Cryptocurrency is being cried through every electronic village, as the
epitome of evil and the certain destruction of the 'mericun way of life.

Leaving aside the very real questions about Cryptocurrency's security
and/or validity, and omitting the various real-world thefts and swindles
which have occurred, there's a larger issue: the governments which
have issued, and demadned we use, "fiat" currencies are peeing their
collective pants about the possibility of Cryptocurrency challenging
their own notes as a trusted medium of exchange.

That fear contains three nightmares for the price of one:

1. If the guviment's "official" money isn't the only choice we can use
as a "standard of value," then the "value" of the official "standard"
becomes questionable. After all, whenever some guv'mint worthy
demands we be suspicious of Cryptocurrency, (s)he's really admitting
that his/her employer is terrified that citizens might wonder just
how "valuable" the pieces of paper being cranked out of privately-owned
printing presses really are.

2. Be-thankful-I-don't-take-it-all tax men are terrified that they won't
be able to examine anyone's banking activity at will, without a
search warrant.

3. A second (or third, fourth, etc.) form of currency makes it impossible
to achieve political ends by manipulating the "value" of the "official"
money. Inflation? The "fed" will take care of it, at the same time the
privately owned banks that form it will profit from their own monetary
policy.

I'll stop now: the black helicopters are approaching.

Bill