I'm not necessarily agreeing with his positions you mentioned, except to note that his focus on Signal was making an encrypted messenger that was easy enough to

I'm not necessarily agreeing with his positions you mentioned, except to note that his focus on Signal was making an encrypted messenger that was easy enough to use that normal people would actually use it, which is a different goal than being the most secure possible and that does inevitably involve compromises and tradeoffs. He has written extensively on the problems with decentralized systems and the added complexity that makes people not adopt them, and as someone that's done extensive work in the dweb space, his arguments are quite sound and not suspicious to me in the slightest. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html If someone wants to send encrypted messages in a decentralized way I suppose they can use PGP with Tor (a project that has also received US government funding btw) on top of a P2P network or something similarly strange, but good luck getting the non ultra tech literate friends to use any of it. They will just resort to going back to SMS because they can't figure it out, or because it's slow and doesn't work, or because a malicious actor figures out how to blast the entire network with spam messages, and then we're right back to the original problem with no improvements. As a thought experiment here to make this conversation more constructive, what is the actually most secure way to send messages between two parties, and how many of the non tech friends has someone convinced to actually use it?