> It’s that adding a cryptocurrency to an end-to-end encrypted app muddies the morality of the product, and invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling: by the IRS, the SEC, FinCEN, and probably the FBI.
Personally I'd be most worried with the last part of that.
Being a purely communications application, governments (and their organisations) who want to interfere with it, regulate it, and track usage are clearly trying to interfere with/track speech.
They can block it, they can regulate it, but it's clear that it's about speech. There's still the issues around "Terrorists/Pedos might be using it", but so far that hasn't been hugely successful, at least to date.
With Signal adding cryptocurrency, well, now there's territory that governments can clearly stand on and say "No no, we're not trying to monitor/track/regulate speech... we just want to know that it's not being used to fund terrorists".
Australia, like the US and other countries, requires notification on large value transactions, or transactions that add up to a certain amount.
The Australian Tax Office treats cryptocurrency differently than cash[1], so you need to report your transactions and information on who the other party was.
Those are all things where Signal can be required to start reporting these things, and where Governments can start to impose regulation.
Sure, maybe Signal gives the Australian and US Governments a middle finger and says "We don't know, and we're not going to add capability to track it".
Non compliance will then result in Signal's application being removed from the appstore/google play store, and now your userbase drops to folks who can install an APK or like rooting iPhones. Effectively killing the utility of the network.
This is right on the back of Signal actually starting to gain popularity and having a chance of actually being able to use it to contact folks I know who I didn't directly tell to go install it.
Keybase was a passion project that always had very limited development time. They churned out a lot of proof-of-concept grade features, but never really polished any of them. And then some of the features only would be really useful if they either were backed by a proper commitment or had a selfhostable plan B.
The wallet is just one of many parts of keybases focus thrashing.
I just remembered that Keybase sent me random Lumens a while ago that I never touched, and when I just checked back right now, they're actually worth a significant amount? I am sort of shocked. How do I spend this?
