Et Tu, Signal?

> of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply.

[citation needed]

> This token then floats on a shady offshore cryptocurrency exchange hiding in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, where users can buy and exchange the token. The token is wash traded back and forth by insiders

[citation needed]

> insiders are free to silently use information asymmetry to cash out on the influx of pumped hype-driven buys

[citation needed]

> Did I mention that the exchange that floats the token is the primary investor in the company itself

[citation needed, the linked article doesn't seem to say anything like this]

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if all of this were true! But Stephen Diehl's increasingly hysterical anti-cryptocurrency rants are becoming less and less informative (talk about insider information...), and possibly, less and less grounded in reality. It's a shame, because he used to be a good, persuasive writer.

It seems any platform/app/software moving forward has the "risk" of incorporating a cryptocurrency variant to their platform and I can't totally blame them for it since they want to get funded one way or another. But why not open avenues for donations as well? Wikipedia managed to do so, Khan Academy is doing it, WhatsApp used to do it.

Someone here mentioned Keybase, which I would have gladly donated to as a heavy user back before the Zoom buy out. They instead tried their own crypto integration, then Zoom bought them, leaving that platform in a questionable state.

I get the excitement of wanting to integrate or even create your own crypto but after the fiasco a few years ago where everyone and their parents spun a new variant it seems to have left a bad taste to most people while causing a major issue: how to get people to actually use it? Especially through a chat app where chat in itself is fragmented.

I feel the biggest concern is about focus shift for Signal since doing one shady thing usually means other shady things will be done.

You can ignore it for now but how much will they push it over time to make it harder and harder to ignore? Will grandma accidentally buy tokens due to some dark pattern UI and then call you about it? Will you get constant messages from scammers trying to get you to send them tokens?

This might not happen but I feel it is a valid concern for a platform you wish to stay on longer term.

edit: And since the CEO of the token company has said he wishes to make future monetary donations to Signal they have an incentive for making the token do well.

No one wanted Google+ either, but these things are a sign of a company with misguided or missing focus, a misunderstanding its own product and the core competencies of its team, and which may be chasing trends in search of growth, perhaps a sign that current revenue streams are not sustainable.

None of this bodes well for the future of Signal, either the app, the service, or the company.

Moxie seems to think that they need to do this to keep up with the Joneses, as they try to build some kind of decentralized alternative to WeChat. I guess we should have seen this coming when he got involved with MobileCoin. I'm not a psychic and it might turn out okay but it still seems like a bad idea to me.