> We’ve only been testing this in beta in one country, so lots of people haven’t seen this yet and are imagining the worst. Don’t worry, it’s an opt-in feature, so if you don’t ever want to use payments in Signal, you never have to.
"Bad guys" will use the anonymity of Signal to do the usual stuff: Phishing, collecting ransom etc. etc.
Signal will get a bad image, no matter whether it's opt-in or not.
Whether you should be able to transfer money in a private manner is a political choice. Signal is mostly showing that it's technically feasible. I don't see braving regulations to provide this feature to everyone, but time will tell.
Signals now integrates all of this right into the app.
That's much easier than before!
So... Big win... But for whom?
Users would either have to already have the attacker in their contacts list or enable sealed sender. Enabling and funding a cryptocurrency wallet is going to be difficult. Even for WeChat who's payment service is popular it only captures 40% market share and as a result generally people are more educated about the risks.
Even my non technical relatives know not to install another app that some stranger tells them they need. Trying to explain what cryptocurrency is and how not to fall into that trap if using signal sounds like a nightmare.
This sounds pretty unlikely, as long as signal does not integrate a payment processor (and they've made no indication they will) the majority of users will not have enabled or funded their cryptocurrency wallet(s) (whichever cryptocurrency they settle on).
Funding MobileCoin requires steps of non insignificant difficulty, not to mention Signal's trust model of using your contacts by default.
I fail to see how, care to explain?
It's opt-in as any other feature which is not the core of the app. You don't have to send stickers or GIFs. If you don't want to receive messages at all, you shouldn't install Signal because it will be hard to avoid, it's a core feature, it's not really opt-in.
b) opt-in features that are very profitable have a funny habit of transmorphing in to opt-out