I bought a small-ish amount MobileCoin last weekend after the Signal announcement made me realize it was available. I might as well write up my thesis for why I like it so much, so sorry in advance for the stream of semi-consciousness following.

I sympathize with the people who are worried this will degrade the Signal app. I like Signal over iMessage and WhatsApp partly because of the purity of purpose of the app. I like Signal because it doesn't create a treadmill of constant change and features added to drive engagement. I like Signal because it doesn't have Stories.

Signal as a messaging app is the best of its category, but there are other near-peers, new messaging apps are created every year, and I have ten other apps on my phone right now with DM capabilities.

I view MobileCoin as unique in the cryptocurrency space as a cash-like, private, fast and efficient payments platform and store of value and as that alone it would be great. My biggest issues with using cryptocurrency in a physical-cash-like way are mostly proposed to be addressed by MobileCoin+Signal:

- The hassle of using a non-custodial wallet, which is needed to truly possess your wallet. MobileCoin promises to let you control your own private-key on a mobile device. The iPhone is the most secure device I own: encrypted, biometric'd, and sandboxed. Having my private key on the phone plus a paper backup of the seed phrase is my ideal scheme for holding amounts under five figures.

- Waiting 10+ minutes for a transaction to go through isn't good enough for everyday use. (Look up Monero and Zcash block times and how many confirmations exchanges require for a comparison.) Faster is better.

- The meaninglessness of addresses: sending coins to a 40-character random string has already caused so much confusion. Linking it to your existing Signal address book is far superior.

- Broadcasting your financial life to the universe just seems imprudent, I think privacy wins over non-privacy for this reason. Privacy has intrinsic value.

- Proof-of-work systems just have a certain inelegance that I'm happy to leave behind. And the last few years in the Ethereum world shows how challenging this can be.

It doesn't address the potential volatility that causes problems for a store of value. Which is a negative but not a deal-breaker in my opinion. It might be addressed with something like Stellar USDC but I really don't know enough about the MobileCoin design to know if it is possible on the MobileCoin network. The technology is still useful for transaction processing, it is just more useful if it is also a stable store of value.

I don't view other cryptocurrencies as a risk to MobileCoin. If someone else can create better technology I'll use it happily and I'm guessing the people involved in MobileCoin would do the same.

I don't view MobileCoin as a risk to Signal messenger, because I think Signal will do a good job, or if they don't, someone else will, and myself and my close contacts will switch apps for the nth time.

The biggest risk to MobileCoin is that there might not be a citizen alive with the legal freedoms to actually use it. I really hope the project succeeds and I think Signal has a unique opportunity and unique credibility to do this. I think it will take 2-3 years to fully play out.