Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

> Speaking solely as a person who is really into encrypted messaging, it terrifies me that they're going to take this really clean story of an encrypted messenger and mix it up with the nightmare of laws and regulations and vulnerability that is cryptocurrency.

Moreover, there are three other points I'd add:

1. I don't like "do everything" apps like WeChat or Line. One of Signals strengths was UX that focused on it's core competency. Early in Signal's development they would add privacy features. Lately they have been adding social features. This, however, feels especially out of left field and likely to hurt the UX.

2. This smells like dev resources will be spent building and maintaining something not related to messaging.

3. I've always had a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" rationalization that gives Signal autonomy to grow a privacy centric messaging app despite the deficits (e.g lack of federation). In contrast, I personally associate "crypto" with "scam". There have been so many shady ICOs and pump-dump schemes around crypto. This will taint the product for those of us who don't think of crypto currency as being anything more than pump-and-dump schemes and a way to buy dab rigs online.

It's only when you're transferring them back to dollars/yuan/yen/etc. that it's suddenly currency from a government.

This is intentional and relates to Signal's growth in the past few years. It's not "a hacker tool for nerds" it's "a friendly, easy to use chat app with stickers & voice messages (also strong encryption)."

IRC does one thing and does it well, and barely anyone uses it. The "clean technical vision" story isn't enough on its own.

Technically, yes. Legally and sociopolitically, no.

And if you intentionally muddle the data streams, that brings the full force of anti-money laundering, tax evasion and terrorist financing law against you. It gives almost any government a free pass to do what it wants.

Freedom to speak privately is, in most democracies, popularly recognised as a right. Freedom to pay using dark money is not. Attaching the second to the first weakens both.

Except it's not, strong encryption and privacy emphasis goes against easy to use. I recently got my family to switch to Telegram (because I like the interface) - my sister works in an environment where she has to have a separate work phone without a camera and everything synced up out of the box, history, etc. Brother lost his phone - same thing, has chat histories and everything is back to normal. I use Telegram on desktop and mobile and it synces instantly.

Compare that to Signal, you don't even sync between active devices and you can forget about having old conversations on a new device. And just to give you a scope of how important messaging history to people is (I've seen people say nobody cares about IM history) - designer from work is lugging around her Android phone year after switching to iPhone just for WhatsApp history (it doesn't sync between OS-es).

Otherwise, agree with the thrust of your statement. I believe getting Signal into the hands of more users is an overall net good and if stickers are the answer then get to making some stickers.

or just respect reasonable limits?

Does it make sense to destroy one feature for the illusion of having both?

Elements.io and telegram (to a much lesser extent) are safes. You place something there and it is locked. Signal, whatsapp, et al promise to be safes, but as soon as you place something, a hidden camera scan all the documents and print copies in a hidden printer at your home safe.

Would you trust that safe? would you still even call them safes? Yet some product manager/marketer convinced you that these are essential features for a "easy of use safe".

The whole "not available in the US" messaging around MobileCoin, no doubt to avoid regulatory attention, gives this particular ponzi scheme a very nice ring.

> you don't even sync between active devices

I use Signal on a phone and a laptop, switching between the two frequently throughout the day and see the same conversations on both. (Edit: I realised you probably meant multiple phones, yes I see that's not yet supported.)

>and you can forget about having old conversations on a new device.

There's been a manual, secure transfer process between Android devices for years. More recently they've added an easy OTA transfer process for Android->Android, or iOS->iOS.

Here's the iOS announcement: https://signal.org/blog/ios-device-transfer/

I've had multiple issues with this before I gave up on Signal, it wouldn't show history when I initially paired up even when importing forever, then randomly stopped being connected and required me to pair again (losing everything on PC again)

> There's been a manual, secure transfer process between Android devices for years

Doesn't help much when you lose your phone.

I guess what I'm trying to say for most people the value of having your chat messages hosted in the cloud > security.

Signal should in theory also be able to just sync/backup everything to the desktop client, this would largely solve the inability to transfer between Android and iOS issue.

I don't understand why such basic quality of life improvements have yet to be implemented, especially since they are especially desirable for less technical users.

I don't see how these relate. Signal isn't explicitly aimed at high security targets, although it works for them (seeing the Snowden endorsement). Signal is about bringing encryption to the masses. Making E2EE the default choice for everyone. Is is much more about mass surveillance. Your sister has a different threat model, one where they are also concerned about the physical device being compromised (i.e. stolen, hacked, or being physically accessed).

These are different threat models. For E2EE for the masses you need things like stickers and for it to be "fun" in addition to being a tool. In your sister's threat model she's more concerned about the tool over the fun part. It is a work phone after all (I mean this is why they take out the camera).

E2EE for the masses is pointless if you can't appeal to the masses. Cypher nerds will always have their fun toys to communicate with but we are also in dire need for something that prevents mass surveillance. That is, after all, one of the fundamental necessities of a democracy: being able to speak your mind without fear of government spying/involvement (this is the reason they got funding from Radio Free America in the past). Unfortunately this means some compromises need to be made. But as far as I'm concerned Signal has done far better than any service I've seen and the relative leak is near zero. The weak points are SGX and pins, which only hide some minor metadata (even fully leaked this would be better than WA or Telegram).

The counter argument would be seeing the success of WeChat in China and wanting to reproduce that success AND expecting that if they don't do it someone else will do it and take their market.

Whether that's true or not I don't know but if I believed it was true then your arguments wouldn't matter since I'd believe not doing it is an existential risk.

Facebook would have no trouble funding a basic iCloud-GDrive bridge if there was enough demand for it.

Yes there are sacrifices and trade offs for the security signal offers and it’s not 100% as convenient as Facebook messenger in that regard, but it’s also not 100% as cumbersome and impractical as GPG email. It strikes what I consider a decent balance of being secure and private and usable enough for non-technical users. Yes the message history story is lacking, I lost my messages moving iPhone to iPhone because I did it wrong and yeah it made me sad for a moment but I’m philosophical about it I guess. Dust to dust and all that.

I think we’re violently agreeing.

In contrast, any crypto-currency based solution will be inherently distrusted, and few if any states will endorse it. It is more likely to be actively discouraged by many states, and the crypto support may well end up as a pretext to ban Signal on economic rather than censorship grounds.

It is overall a disaster of an idea.

Bitcoin Core (the software) is not registered as a money transmitter anywhere in the world, its developers are fine and never got into any trouble.

We agree. There is a legal difference between a custodial exchange and noncustodial wallet. Just as there is a difference between a non-money messaging system and a noncustodial wallet. The comment you are responding to concerned itself with the latter.

In such cases, Signal could easily be banned in such countries outright.

You can get away with this when you're the established player, but when you're the new guy every annoyance is a reason to revert to the previous app.

I, for one, welcome this; the larger market is asking for a privacy-focused WhatsApp alternative, and Signal could be it.

What all these "tech" companies tend to do is to exploit a captured audience. They are generally not focused on doing one thing well (producing a product or providing a service), they are more focused on building a following and then doing with those users whatever they like. One of the most blatent examples of this line of thinking is Microsoft's acquisitions. They acquire companies in order to get access to users. The "technology" is secondary. Another example is WeWork. They started introducing WeEverything. The product or service being offered is what is important. It could be anything. Instead the focus is on building an audience and exploiting that captured audience. One can apply this analysis to almost any "tech" company. "Growth" is the number one focus. No one really cares about what it is the company purports to be selling.

Telegram stores all history (except secret chats, which are a pain to use) server-side and effectively unencrypted.

I have a smartphone that I control. I have a desktop computer that I control. I use an application on both computers that lets me send secure messages between device. The application somehow can sync new messages but refuses to let me import old ones. How insane is that? But apparently integrating with cryptocurrencies was above that in the todolist.

Signal is clearly a great protocol, but man is it seriously in need of a great implementation...

>But Marlinspike and Goldbard counter that Signal's new features won't give it any control of MobileCoin or turn it into a MobileCoin exchange, which might lead to more regulatory scrutiny. Instead, it will merely add support for spending and receiving it.

Oh, that's going to be a recipe for a great user experience again. You can send MobileCoin super easily... after you've gone on some crypto exchange platform to trade a highly speculative asset into one of your wallets. It's basically like Venmo indeed.

The promotion of pseudonymous and anonymous digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies is vital to a healthy and functioning society.

Stickers on the other hand are something that does attract many casual users and has no security implications.

Payment features... I think it's a bad idea for many different reasons but it might attract many users if it's not too complex.

I don't like using SMS for 2FA because it encourages people to social engineer the phone company to port the victim's phone numbers. I wouldn't want crypto in my messaging app for a similar reason.

Right now hacking a user's Signal account means you get some txt messages. Big deal. With payments there is now real reason to try to hack Signal accounts because some percentage of them will contain money.

happening right now as a test

Frequently messages aren't even synchronised between those two or they're out of order. Also, the desktop client itself is a bit of a joke.

Of the three (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal) I find WhatsApp to be the worst from a UX pov and Telegram the best. Personally, I find this exodus of users from WhatsApp to be a good thing even for no other reason than having to deal less with their UX.

Signal is not much better UX wise, but at least it gives hope of being better because they have to compete and because they are open source. If they fail to bad at growing the project or providing the infrastructure, someone will eventually fork and setup a separate network. WhatsApp has no pressure. It is in Facebooks interest to eventually migrate everyone to FB Messenger.

Sadly, Signal's developers don't think trade offs exist

I associate nootropics with scams but I definitely don't think all nootropics are scams. If someone said, here buy this pill that will make you smarter I'd be incredulous.

My point was cryptocurrency has a deserved bad reputation (for the reasons I mentioned).

I love the lofty ideals but the reality is the altcoin world especially is a minefield of scams. That reputation will hurt a messaging app that has done a pretty good job of building good will.

   ## Linux
   ### Linux Requirements
   - CMake 3.1 or higher
   - Clang
   - OpenSSL => 1.0.2 (Optional)
   ### Linux CMake Configuration
   The linux build can be configured using the standard CMake flow with a few options
   ```
   mkdir build
   cd build
   cmake -DBUILD_OPENSSL=true \
   -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
   -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=USER_INSTALL_LOCATION ../

Just FYI but those Stellar drops are worth over 500 USD right now.

There are also entirely anonymous cryptocurrencies with no readable public ledgers. Everything is still decentralised, no centralised control of any kind, but you can't see what people are doing (Monero and Zcash being good examples. Signal uses Mobilecoin, which still needs to stand the test of time).

There is still a long road to go before there is a fool proof anonymous, liquid, consumer friendly, usable cryptocurrency, but it is the last bastion of defense against complete total state and corporate surveillance. - One of the greatest threats to human life, on par with climate change.

Your use of the word "craptocurrency" is rather childish and naive. Eventually you will take a closer look at the situation and reconsider. Good luck

I will leave this https://www.theengineroom.org/dangerous-data-the-role-of-dat...