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Moxie has made it pretty clear through the way Signal operates than Moxie's worldview is one where our feudal lords know better than mere serfs can ever hope to. I'm not at all surprised that yet again trust roots are taken out of the hands of end users.

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Seems unnecessarily adversarial of you. I think Moxie has justified his standpoint relatively convincingly, even if you may not agree with it.

And to some degree, the success of Signal, or Signal's protocol as implemented widely used services in WhatsApp, supports his approach. If cypherpunk-purists had their way, encryption would still only be a thing exclusively used by a slim minority of nerds who are capable of managing PGP and all the complications that come with its fragile nature.

What success of Signal? I use To in Android for texting but only a small percentage of my contacts are even using it.

However I'm not really convinced Signal is all that secure in the Android ecosystem, and I trust Open Whisper Systems even less than bigger tech companies to not fold under pressure.

What I don't understand is why such a person resorts to a nickname, but does use a picture. The US government knows the real name of people like ioerror and moxie marlinspike. It seems pointless to consistently hide the real name to the public.

If your pseudonym carries more klout, and you have even more people in your social life knowing you by the pseudonym, it kind of becomes your 'real' name. Not any different from other persona names like Marilyn Manson, or Marilyn Monroe.

I used to use my online name enough that people were confused when they heard my legal name. Eventually, I decided to change my legal name to save the hassle of having a legal name that nobody actually knew me by, but that's easy in my country (doesn't involve courts or lawyers) and a pain in the ass in most other places.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Vertex Four.

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