I know, from watching Signal's development and public writings over the last several years, that their strategy is to bring privacy and security into as many people's lives as possible while matching the UX of the best for-profit surveillance capitalists out there. In HN threads like these, I usually find myself in the minority because I believe in this mission and how they've prioritized it over other goals e.g. decentralization, free software, etc.

All that being said, I feel like they're really unfairly dismissing a lot of real concerns by characterizing them as just saying "cryptocurrency is the worst". The Signal Foundation absolutely understands that the key to winning the competition against FAANG and surveillance-based tech is just as much PR as software development. It requires people trust the app and the foundation to have their best interests in mind. Cryptocurrency may be popular, but it's definitely not synonymous with "safe and trustworthy" by any means.

They also don't really answer the regulatory question. Governments, in particular the US government, really doesn't like unregulated finance. If there's a case to be made by some SEC or FBI busybody that the Signal Foundation is involved in financial crimes, they have a lot of resources available to bring the hammer down on them. And that's just the worst-case scenario. There are plenty of other avenues that the US government could use to kill this feature (or the app as a whole), including exerting legal pressure on Apple/Google to remove it from their App Stores, or simply making MOB next-to-impossible to purchase legally.

I am in support of their mission to make payments private and secure. And I think there is a universe in which I can see this working out for Signal. The last few years have brought news of several well-known powerful people using Signal. US politicians have been known to use it, and the latest Facebook data leak seems to indicate Mark Zuckerberg is a user as well. If Signal is widely understood to be so valuable that people in positions of power are interested in using it, maybe they're betting that no one will dare touch them because they're too big to regulate. Here's hoping!