Signal needs to be reliable, safe and have a low barrier of entry to achieve its goals of allowing widespread private communication. I thought that when I recommended that my peer group use it (at this point, all of my normal contacts use it extensively), I could trust that it would remain clearly focused on its mission- now I'll need to recommend it with a caveat to just click through the scam marketing, ICO offers and "airdrops".

You’re being really cynical in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation. This doesn’t entail scam marketing, ICO offers, and airdrops just because that’s something that happens in a lot of the rest of cryptocurrency space.

You missed the point. Even if Signal doesn't do the typical cryptocurrency scam behaviour, I now somehow need to try to explain to people why it is different to every other thing in the space that does act like that. On the face of it, if we assume that the inclusion of MobileCoin in Signal is completely benign, it's something that's never happened before.

Smoking causes cancer, but smoking these specific cigarettes won't. Do you see the problem with trying to describe such an absurd situation to somebody?

> You missed the point.

You're making a different point now though, you're saying that people will associate it with scams which will hurt adoption. You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway.

I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough.

In terms of reputation, this is a long-term battle. Signal used to be quite unreliable in a lot of aspects, and hurt adoption. Now it's much better, making the migration from other messengers way smoother. If they're able to implement safe, private and convenient payments, that's one feature other messengers won't have to lure users away from signal.

> You initially wrote that the UX would be so bad that you'd have to convince users to bear with it anyway. I don't know how they implemented it on the client side, but it's possible they kept it light, as they've been doing since the beginning. We'll see soon enough.

I think you're confusing UI and UX. Yes, the UI could be kept light but the user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising. Why would a messaging app come with a payments feature if not to make money and exploit the user?

Not saying that this is happening here but this is what people think, i.e. the emotional experience.

OP wrote:

> just click through the scam marketing, ICO offers and "airdrops"

That's what I meant by UX.

> user experience can still be confusing because a payments feature is… surprising

Everything new is "surprising", that's a low bar. Chat apps in China have had this feature for years now, and it's also a feature in WhatsApp, a direct Signal competitor.

If you're that concerned about third party processors, most banks and credit unions provide their customers a way to send money between people fairly simply.

Signal providing this functionality is scope creep.

Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things.

Yet, those features have almost become synonymous with messaging apps. The market and consumers seem to want these services combined, so here we are. My point was that sending money is a feature that more and more messaging services have. Hangouts (or whatever the hell it is called these days), Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.

Personally, I would have liked it more if this wasn't tied to some no-name cryptocurrency, but oh well.

> Scope creep? Perhaps. But then so are voice calls, video calls, sending pictures, GIFs, etc. None of those things are core to the experience of sending "lol" to a friend. Despite the very correct statement that there already exist services which do those things.

I think those would all be considered in scope for a chat platform--theyre all various ways to share and communicate.

But they're not adding a "money" transfer option, they're adding a "MobileCoin" transfer option! For the overwhelming part of society, these are not interchangeable terms.

When people want to send "money" to other people, they usually imply that they want to send units of the local currency, like USD or EUR. And they usually imply that the value of these units should stay the same during transfer. If I want to pay my share of a restaurant visit to my friend who covered the check, I'd like the 30$ I'm sending to still hold enough value when they arrive in his bank account to actually cover my share. A cryptocurrency intermediate that swings +/- 20% in value within minutes (and that we both have to pay conversion fees in order to acquire/redeem for $) is of exactly no use at all for such a use case.