• seneca@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    As I recall he was the one behind the decision (for the built in wallet) to go with a privacy coin he had a stake in and not the very obvious choice of monero. As far as I’m concerned he’s tainted goods.

    • alexland@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      To be honest, while crypto is probably the closest we have to an actually private payment option (Monero etc), I’m generally not a fan of it for this usage because unlike the rest of the app, it has a much steeper learning curve AND is a common target for scams, which makes it much less approachable for the average user. I love Signal because my mom can use it and I can trust that she’s protected, but I would not recommend she tries using the payment option within it regardless of what coin they use because the rigamaroll of going to some exchange to buy it is already a dicey proposition.

      • catacomb@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I never thought of that, that’s a really good point. I disliked anyway it because it was for one random currency where it’s easy to just send a wallet address over Signal for whichever cryptocurrency you like.

    • Trebach@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      He was also unwilling to allow other apps to interact with Signal servers, even if they supported a platform that he wasn’t going to support. Good riddance to him.

      • alexland@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I understand and value the idea of self-hosting or federation to decentralize services, but Signal is currently my most used chat app for the sole reason that I can tell a friend to go download it and it just works. Supporting self-hosted servers or federation doesn’t necessarily mean that the UX has to be bad, but for small organizations I think the radical focus on a specific experience is the best way to make a good product, and if this is the sacrifice that was made so that we could have a simple, reliable, private messenger then I’m happy with that tradeoff.

        As an example, chat protocols/implementations like Matrix have a lot of potential, but the foundational decisions around decentralization mean that it takes way more work to make it seamless to use. You can’t download a client and start chatting immediately, you need to think about what server to connect to, and that’s already enough of a barrier to make it a no-go for a lot of the folks I regularly chat with who just don’t care enough about privacy/FOSS to put in the effort.