> Many of the security design flaws in signal have had little to no direct impact on usability. By far the biggest complaint I read about Signal is "It uses ph

> Many of the security design flaws in signal have had little to no direct impact on usability. By far the biggest complaint I read about Signal is "It uses phone numbers, and I don't like that". While I agree that I'd prefer to be able to make up my own unique/random identifier, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the downside of phone numbers was far far outweighed by the benefits of usability. Most of my friends use Signal, I seriously doubt I'd have been able to help make that come true if the contact discovery features - along with their side channel privacy leaks - didn't work as well as they do. In retrospect, if I were trying to kickstart a global-scale network of secure messenger users - I'd make exactly the same choice today as Moxie did back then. > users aren't effectively notified that the contacts keys have changed That's just not true. Its become a running joke amongst my friends that Signal Safety Numbers changing is how we know when people broke or upgraded their phones.