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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor.

Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons).

Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.

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Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps.

If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.

> are what are holding them back

No, integrating a get rich quick for the founders shit coin into their app is what is holding them back.

I don't really see how the demands of the core product - E2EE messaging to customers - can be compromised by accepting payment for one of the core problems of E2EE when legal entities are involved: establishing trust.

Signal aren't allowing accounts not tied to phone numbers because it currently serves a very useful spam mitigation problem for them. There's no real alternative there that's going to solve it without more work on the business side. Technically the phone number requirement right now means they do charge for "named" accounts, they just don't get paid for them - the phone providers do, since in many countries even prepaid phones require proof of identity to activate.

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