I'm pretty sure that's just a buzzword for "revenue model", which is to say a plan for how it will make money. The charitable interpretation in this case would be "how to keep devs on the job and not homeless", and the uncharitable case would be "how to make Moxie Marlinspike and his buddies obscenely rich".

It looks to me like either there's a lot of selling out going on here or there's a lot of great examples of how not to market a good thing to reasonable, aware, suspicious people (which is, in short, pretty much the core market demographic of privacy software users).

As for me, I'm starting to wonder whether Session is much better than Signal, and I think that if you want privacy in a cryptocurrency you're probably better off with Monero.

I love the dichotomy 'working vs homeless'. It's a sad state of a country if being jobless implies homeless. Also, I don't think someone working for a SV company can't just move somewhere cheaper and reduce spending until the next gig.

I don't understand this either. Does Signal need to compete with streaming services like Netflix next? What about Steam? I didn't choose Signal as a platform, I chose it because it is (supposedly) a secure and privacy focused messenger app.

I guess there are some users who expect something in this vein after seeing it in whatsapp or imessage? Still, bundling some unstable opaque cryptocurrency to it instead of just normal money seems a bit disingenuous.

Or they want to become WeChat.

I believe many apps are currently implementing this.