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The comment from the article echos my own sentiments: > Speaking solely as a person who is really into encrypted messaging, it terrifies me that they're going

The comment from the article echos my own sentiments: > 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.

rapnie 6y ago
Amen to all your points. I find this really disappointing. The "yeah, but they are a non-profit so you can be assured they are good custodians of the product" no longer goes for me.
- jdroe1211 6y ago
  Respectfully disagree, Sir.
takenpilot 6y ago
In a lot of ways, the transfer of cryptocurrency is the same as the transfer of generic messages. It's only when you're transferring them back to dollars/yuan/yen/etc. that it's suddenly currency from a government.
- amelius 6y ago
  You mean in the sense that it can be traced back to the originator, just like messages?
- guerrilla 6y ago
  I'll tell you one way it's not, is as soon as someone commits a crime who happens to use Signal and the media gets ahold of this. It'll be a circus with terms like "dark webv and wha not thrown arohnd. GPs point #3 is kind of important for their reputation and if we want to onboard more people into crypto messaging.
- gsich 6y ago
  So how do I get the cryptocurrency in the first place? Especially Mobilecoin?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > the transfer of cryptocurrency is the same as the transfer of generic messages 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.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Legally, yes. FinCEN distinguishes custodial exchanges with noncustodial wallets. It looks like signal is doing the latter. 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > FinCEN distinguishes custodial exchanges with noncustodial wallets. It looks like signal is doing the latter. 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.
sequoia 6y ago
> Early in Signal's development they would add privacy features. Lately they have been adding social features. 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.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Well, I guess that it can go both ways : you can have too many or not enough features...
- reader_mode 6y ago
  > a friendly, easy to use chat app with stickers & voice messages (also strong encryption). 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).
  - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
    > goes against easy to use 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".
guerrilla 6y ago
Yeah I agree. I wouldn't mind so much if this were a second app but this is kind of scary.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Money can be a message worth 1000 times more than words...
NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
The only thing Signal should be able to do with crypto is send it privately.
andremedeiros 6y ago
I would even say that it’s not a clean story of an encrypted messenger. Not when your phone number is associated with it.
demux 6y ago
Perhaps the onus is on you to change your opinion on crypto, regardless of whether it belongs in Signal or not.
gfxgirl 6y ago
I agree with all of your points. 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.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If that is their thinking, then they are quite naive. Comparing WeChat's success in tackling payments with a crypto-based attempt is laughable. WeChat is using real money, and it has explicit official endorsement by the state - an extremely powerful state at that in terms of internal control. 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.
sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Crypto integration was one of the things that arguably killed Keybase for a lot of users, and damaged trust. Given that trust is the selling point for these type of services, I really hope Signal don't lose it.
- po 6y ago
  Yeah, it was a disaster for Keybase IMO. My messaging tools are already valuable enough to me, the last thing I wanted was a reward on hacking it. When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. 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.
  - glenneroo 6y ago
    > When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. Just FYI but those Stellar drops are worth over 500 USD right now.
    - climb_stealth 6y ago
      Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?
      - glenneroo 6y ago
        Most of the big exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Kraken and even Coinbase support it now.
        climb_stealth 6y ago
        Ooo, you are right. Thanks for the tips!
arthurcolle 6y ago
Do you associate fiat money with "scam" as well?
- meowfly 6y ago
  I can accept a definition of scam that includes fiat. Though it definitely doesn't track the same way with cryptocurrency. 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.
TriNetra 6y ago
I don't know how will it play out for Signal in countries which have banned or are planning to ban crypto as a currency. RBI had issued policy to banks to stop providing banking services to people/organizations holding/trading in crypto. Though the blanket ban was invalidated by the supreme court after two years, but using it as currency is against Indian Law and the government is working on a new law to further restrict it (read legalizing RBI policy to a great extent as I understood) . In such cases, Signal could easily be banned in such countries outright.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Do we have a CVE for the regulator vulnerability yet?
- ironMonkey 6y ago
  Nothing really stops Signal from shipping a build w/o a crypto wallet to comply.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
And FBI associates "e2ee" with "terrorism".
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
What about using Wickr as an alternative to Signal. 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.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  Wickr is proprietary.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c ## 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 ../
cyphermoon 6y ago
The "scam" is using payment systems that allow their owners, controllers, or just hackers to spy on every single transaction on earth, accessing all your past present and future economical activity on demand. Not even the worst dictatorships of centuries past ever dreamt of such awareness and control. The promotion of pseudonymous and anonymous digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies is vital to a healthy and functioning society.
- antiphase 6y ago
  I can't really see how a craptocurrency attached to a messenger provides any sort of pseudonymity. If I can send money to you, I can later identify you in a ledger, which simply means I need to find some reason to converse with you and it's game over. If the ledger isn't public, you're back under corporate or Government control.
  - cyphermoon 6y ago
    Signal does not require KYC, so there is no direct link there. As far as public ledgers are concerned, pseudonymous activity offers reasonable privacy controls as long as you know what you are doing. 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-data-collection-in-genocides/ https://www.theengineroom.org/dangerous-data-the-role-of-dat...
jdroe1211 6y ago
I do not believe dev is relevant here, Sir. Let's dare to be different<3

rapnie 6y ago

Amen to all your points. I find this really disappointing. The "yeah, but they are a non-profit so you can be assured they are good custodians of the product" no longer goes for me.

jdroe1211 6y ago
Respectfully disagree, Sir.

takenpilot 6y ago

In a lot of ways, the transfer of cryptocurrency is the same as the transfer of generic messages. It's only when you're transferring them back to dollars/yuan/yen/etc. that it's suddenly currency from a government.

amelius 6y ago
You mean in the sense that it can be traced back to the originator, just like messages?
guerrilla 6y ago
I'll tell you one way it's not, is as soon as someone commits a crime who happens to use Signal and the media gets ahold of this. It'll be a circus with terms like "dark webv and wha not thrown arohnd. GPs point #3 is kind of important for their reputation and if we want to onboard more people into crypto messaging.
gsich 6y ago
So how do I get the cryptocurrency in the first place? Especially Mobilecoin?
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> the transfer of cryptocurrency is the same as the transfer of generic messages 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.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Legally, yes. FinCEN distinguishes custodial exchanges with noncustodial wallets. It looks like signal is doing the latter. 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > FinCEN distinguishes custodial exchanges with noncustodial wallets. It looks like signal is doing the latter. 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.

sequoia 6y ago

> Early in Signal's development they would add privacy features. Lately they have been adding social features. 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.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Well, I guess that it can go both ways : you can have too many or not enough features...
reader_mode 6y ago
> a friendly, easy to use chat app with stickers & voice messages (also strong encryption). 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).
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
  > goes against easy to use 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".

guerrilla 6y ago

Yeah I agree. I wouldn't mind so much if this were a second app but this is kind of scary.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Money can be a message worth 1000 times more than words...

NaturalPhallacy 6y ago

The only thing Signal should be able to do with crypto is send it privately.

andremedeiros 6y ago

I would even say that it’s not a clean story of an encrypted messenger. Not when your phone number is associated with it.

demux 6y ago

Perhaps the onus is on you to change your opinion on crypto, regardless of whether it belongs in Signal or not.

gfxgirl 6y ago

I agree with all of your points. 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.

tsimionescu 6y ago
If that is their thinking, then they are quite naive. Comparing WeChat's success in tackling payments with a crypto-based attempt is laughable. WeChat is using real money, and it has explicit official endorsement by the state - an extremely powerful state at that in terms of internal control. 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.

sammorrowdrums 6y ago

Crypto integration was one of the things that arguably killed Keybase for a lot of users, and damaged trust. Given that trust is the selling point for these type of services, I really hope Signal don't lose it.

po 6y ago
Yeah, it was a disaster for Keybase IMO. My messaging tools are already valuable enough to me, the last thing I wanted was a reward on hacking it. When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. 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.
- glenneroo 6y ago
  > When keybase did their Stellar drop, I didn't activate it and it was just a nagging option in the UI forever. Just FYI but those Stellar drops are worth over 500 USD right now.
  - climb_stealth 6y ago
    Is there a way of converting those into actual USD?
    - glenneroo 6y ago
      Most of the big exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Kraken and even Coinbase support it now.
      - climb_stealth 6y ago
        Ooo, you are right. Thanks for the tips!

arthurcolle 6y ago

Do you associate fiat money with "scam" as well?

meowfly 6y ago
I can accept a definition of scam that includes fiat. Though it definitely doesn't track the same way with cryptocurrency. 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.

TriNetra 6y ago

I don't know how will it play out for Signal in countries which have banned or are planning to ban crypto as a currency. RBI had issued policy to banks to stop providing banking services to people/organizations holding/trading in crypto. Though the blanket ban was invalidated by the supreme court after two years, but using it as currency is against Indian Law and the government is working on a new law to further restrict it (read legalizing RBI policy to a great extent as I understood) . In such cases, Signal could easily be banned in such countries outright.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Do we have a CVE for the regulator vulnerability yet?
ironMonkey 6y ago
Nothing really stops Signal from shipping a build w/o a crypto wallet to comply.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

And FBI associates "e2ee" with "terrorism".

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

What about using Wickr as an alternative to Signal. 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.

approxim8ion 6y ago
Wickr is proprietary.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c ## 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 ../

cyphermoon 6y ago

The "scam" is using payment systems that allow their owners, controllers, or just hackers to spy on every single transaction on earth, accessing all your past present and future economical activity on demand. Not even the worst dictatorships of centuries past ever dreamt of such awareness and control. The promotion of pseudonymous and anonymous digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies is vital to a healthy and functioning society.

antiphase 6y ago
I can't really see how a craptocurrency attached to a messenger provides any sort of pseudonymity. If I can send money to you, I can later identify you in a ledger, which simply means I need to find some reason to converse with you and it's game over. If the ledger isn't public, you're back under corporate or Government control.
- cyphermoon 6y ago
  Signal does not require KYC, so there is no direct link there. As far as public ledgers are concerned, pseudonymous activity offers reasonable privacy controls as long as you know what you are doing. 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-data-collection-in-genocides/ https://www.theengineroom.org/dangerous-data-the-role-of-dat...

jdroe1211 6y ago

I do not believe dev is relevant here, Sir. Let's dare to be different<3