https://xcancel.com/SimpleXChat/status/1887489846848999613#m
https://xcancel.com/epoberezkin/status/1983299739283075319#m
1 Like
Am I crazy or am I seeing contradictory info here?
yes, contradictory.
1 Like
~80%+ of all NFTs are a scam. Even associating yourself with NFTs is a huge red flag 
to me.
3 Likes
That’s what I was thinking. But I am also very confused here.
What a shame.
NFTs and crypto tokens, exactly what privacy tech was missing.
What exactly is wrong with this? They are designing a decentralized and cryptographically sound way to fund the decentralized server pool of SimpleX Chat. This seems good from a sustainability perspective.
Is there a potential for a scam here that I need more in-depth knowledge to pick up on?
The only concern I see is that they lied about it in February (the not planning part).
I really hope they don’t shit the bed. I really enjoy what they are right now.
Funny how despite the overhaul of site design they didn’t bother fixing their lies by omission.
The service advertises itself as no identifiers, but the server has access to your IP-address. The client could actively prevent that by routing over Tor by default, but they choose not to do that.
There’s exactly two service providers hosting the entire public server infrastructure: Akamai and Runonflux. Thus there’s about 50% chance the service provider is able to perform end-to-end correlation attacks to determine when you talk to your buddy. So much for complete privacy.
The CEO disappeared yet again, like fart to Sahara, before addressing this in the last thread.
And now the project is pivoting to the famously not-at-all scammy world of web3.
As always if you want E2EE messaging with offline-messages, use Signal.
If you want metadata-resistant messaging, use Cwtch.
3 Likes
This is such a bummer. SimpleX showed so much promise. I’m now more glad Signal exists.
I don’t really get why so many people seems to be allergic to cryptocurrencies. It’s not because there are a lot of scams in the web3 space that this has to be one as well !
Even if the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are not private, they do solve the problem of sending money in a decentralized fashion (avoiding censorship) to virtually everyone in the world. With fiat money, if your bank or your state is not ok with a transaction, you’re just screwed. Blockchains like Ethereum solve exactly that problem and do it well.
I believe that this announcement from Simple X would require a little bit more research so we actually understand what is its purpose - or at least a bit more credit until the testnet is actually live.
1 Like
>To cover server costs securely and privately.
And how this breaks privacy of mere users?
Maybe a professor of computer science can teach you why why it’s horrible on technical level.
3 Likes
“Informative, and unfortunate”
I think it’s because aside from very few projects (confidently I’d really only say Bitcoin and Monero) all other cryptos are actual ponzi schemes or at minimum unregistered securities solely intended to enrich their creators with zero actual financial utility.
Why does SimpleX need a crypto token? What benefit does it provide other than a way to provide a funding mechanism for the developers? Because if it’s just that it really is just a fraudulent unregistered security, and despite many crypto users’ allergy to anything even resembling a financial regulation, unregistered securities bypassing the rules that come with normal security issuance are just factually bad for everyone except the issuer.
Thats too bad they’re going to yet another bespoke in-house crypto. Should’ve gone with already established Monero or something. Even Signal’s MobileCoin still left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m not allergic to crypto per se, as a whole, but these yet-another-bespoke-token really induce spider tingling, that deep down feeling lol.
Edit: its not bespoke in-house, its Ethereum erc-20 token. Indeed I’m allergic to that haha
I would also add ethereum to your list of projects with utility
- Bitcoin - first crypto currency which started with good intentions.
- Monero - have private payments.
- Ethereum - have smart contracts which a lot of other projects depend on.
There are also a lot more projects with good intentions, but they did not grow big enough, so I don’t know them 
Did you read the article? It is a funding mechanism for servers, not the developers. It uses smart contracts to force the servers to provide what was purchased before they receive the payment.
I wonder if a decentralized funding mechanism for servers could help with that?
https://xcancel.com/SimpleXChat/status/1983849427640193293#m
Monero does not provide the utility needed for what they are trying to design.
It is not just a pop-up dialog with a donation address for each of the servers. It is a much more structured approach that needs things like smart contracts that are provided by or work with zkEVM.
These negative responses are so odd. The biggest thing SimpleX needs is a more diverse array of server providers, and this seems like an interesting attempt to incentivize that. Is this not beneficial to privacy?
And they are going to be running a testnet version of the feature that anyone can participate in, which indicates to me that their intentions are to improve SimpleX rather than “scam” people. Not that anyone has provided any evidence of this being a scam.
I would understand the usage of such a token to finance the infrastructure, but if they implement something like this, it needs to have high privacy standards.
A possible solution could be to use Cashu.
Nobody is stopping you from connecting over Tor/VPN to the smp servers
If you had read the thread I linked, you’d know what my gripe was: The application claims it by default has no identifiers and that it’s better design choice than Cwtch, that has a long term identifier (the P2P Onion Service identity key).
SimpleX does however have a long term identifier, your IP-address. It doesn’t mask it with Tor by default. Yet it tries to pitch this as an improvement over tools like Cwtch that hide the IP-address with the best way computer scientists know a low latency overlay network can hide it: onion routing.
So it’s not about if it’s possible to route SimpleX via Tor, it absolutely is, and they do decent job with automatic server domain address switches after you install Tor and make the settings adjustments to use the SOCKS proxy.
It’s about implying it does better than that by default. It doesn’t. Read the thread for my detailed argument.
3 Likes
Why don’t they just do that though?
1 Like