Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

• hanke@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Okay, does this use a common crypto currency, or how do the node owners “profit” from upholding the service?

  If it has its own cryptocurrency, where can they spend it?

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  • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It uses it’s own crypto. It’s not really a crypto -currency- in the sense that it’s meant to be used for payment or to store value. It’s more of a crypto -token- that’s meant to provide some limited utility in it’s ecosystem. Like an arcade token in an arcade, you can use it to play the games but that’s about it. Likewise the session token can be used to get some extra functionality within the network, like registering custom names on it’s dns like service that can be used to add new contacts instead of the long default user hash or as a stake if you want to run a node. The functionality is fairly limited right now but the devs plan to expand it soon. People also sometimes use these kind of tokens as a stock of sorts, so if the service/network becomes popular the value of it’s “stock” can grow so it can be used as an investment (personally I wouldn’t recommend that but whatever floats your boat [not a financial advice btw]). The node operators profit from selling these tokens to whomever wants to buy them.

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    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Hey, thank you for providing actually informative answers to the other guy’s questions. It was interesting for me to read as well.

      I looked into running a node, but apparently the required amount of tokens to stake is over 1000 euros. I’ll have to pass for now.

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      • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        No problem, glad I could be of use.

        You can bring down the stake amount to 6250 tokens (~300€) by running a multi-contributor node link, but your cut of the rewards will be proportionally smaller as well.

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