Don't forget they now offer their own cryptocurrency ... to make us more secure and private, I guess.

This is confusing privacy and anonymity. He 100% delivered on the former; the latter was the trade off.

there was no need for the trade off in the first place

You're welcome to try and claim that, but the sheer success of Signal and Moxie's approach is proof you're arguing in bad faith.

Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing. Signal foregoes the latter to provide the former to a much wider range of people; foregoing the latter enables substantially better usability for non-technical people.

> You're welcome to try and claim that, but the sheer success of Signal and Moxie's approach is proof you're arguing in bad faith.

This makes no sense. If you wanted to prove that you would need to have a signal equivalent that does not use phone numbers. Where is that?

That is basically their point, that these alternatives are not successful because they chose not to use phone numbers.

Anyway here’s some alternatives:

Briar (no iOS client?)

Threema (not free as in free beer)

Wire

Matrix

XMPP

Telegram (can be used E2EE for 1:1 chats only and is off by default)