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Comment by aeorgnoieang | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a company could allow paying customers to invite 10 of their contacts to use the app/service for free. Or is even the potential association of all of those people too insecure?

I otherwise can't imagine how to bootstrap a network.

Maybe users could pay to receive messages.

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I otherwise can't imagine how to bootstrap a network.

Facebook started with a narrow target: students of some uni. Look for another similar group of persons, that want privacy and don't mind spending a few dollars.

Edit: Whatsapp (everybody here in Spain has it) was a paid app at first. They gave one year away... eventually they made it free, around the time that Facebook bought it.

When it targeted a narrow band of uni students Facebook was free, and didn't have ads

Yeah, wondering how WhatsApp would be doing if Facebook wouldn't have bought them. It might have been much better for the market if they would still be independent.

One problem with bootstrapping a network of users of an encrypted messaging app/service is that info about the network of users itself arguably needs to be secured too.

But you're still probably right overall. Marketing to businesses or teams within businesses is probably the best bet.

> Maybe users could pay _receive_ messages.

Pay to recieve a possibly unsolicited message?!

That's insane.

Yeah, even requiring users to _send_ messages probably isn't enough to prevent spam. But that's assuming something like the example I imagined, someone wanting to received encrypted messages from anonymous others.

If a user's address is private tho, then asking them to pay to receive messages should be as sensible as the degree to which they protect the distribution of their address.

Unlimited texting as the norm is pretty new, carriers have charged for incoming and outgoing MMS since it became a thing. Same with minutes and received calls.

Getting charged to receive a message I didn't ask for was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. The difference is that people are even less likely to tolerate it now.

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