Signal posted an update about the new cryptocurrency payment stuff.
My opinion is still pretty much the same. I'm not freaking out and calling them names, but taking on a project of this scale when they still have so much work to do on their original scope of messaging (like decoupling from phone numbers for one) does not seem like a smart idea. And the point about inviting regulatory and legal scrutiny still stands.
https://signal.org/blog/update-on-beta-testing-payments/
@be the crypto is separate from Signal. Marlinspike only serves as an "advisor". They have taken legal advice wrt regulatory issues which is why it is not available to US citizens for instance. The beta is UK only because they checked the laws allow for it.
I don't think it will distract much from Signal's goals because, as I said, MOB is a separate project run by a separate team. It's open source for any messenger to use.
Also look at Status. Messenger + crypto wallet. Been around for years.
@aspie4K I'm sure they consulted a lot with lawyers about this before rolling it out. But if this takes off the way they want it to, it could attract the ire of politicians wanting to change the law to ban it.
@aspie4K Signal could easily be shut down if the US government pressures Google and Apple to ban it from their walled gardens. As @pluralistic says, whenever companies build technology that gives them power over their users, authoritarian states will come asking to use it for their own purposes.
@be @aspie4K @pluralistic
Amazon has a single switch to shut it down as they did with Parler. I encourage people to have contingencies such as XMPP and Matrix accounts already setup and known to their contacts.
@krock @be @pluralistic Signal has far better technical and monetary resources backing it than fucking Parler lol, if AWS kicked them off they just restore their server stack to a new host and point the domains to the new IPs. Even if the US gov seriously tried to scare all US hosts from serving Signal (highly unlikely but possible) there’s plenty of webhosts outside of the USA. If even darknet drugs markets can get hosted so can Signal.
@aspie4K @be I only mention Parler as an example of what AWS can and has done. It was backed by the billionaire Mercer family, and they were not able to move to new servers very easily. Iran and China have blocked connections to Signal. I certainly expect that Signal has contingency plans in case things go bad with their host, and all of us should too.
@krock @be the problem however was although Parler did have that backing it didn’t invest much at all in technical architecture. This is evident from the hack. Same is not true of Signal. Much more professional technical team behind it. They probably have failover servers at different hosts ready to go tbh. Would be shocked if not.
And yeah China and Iran are notorious for censorship. Signal put out an open source Docker package to set up proxies.