Well, he caused this himself in the end, he failed to deliver on the part of secure and private messaging because default chats are insecure and secret chats are a buggy joke. If he delivered in the promise of providing a real secure and private messenger and did real effort to fight against spam, then things mind have turned out differently. Decentralization should also have been part of it.
In the end, he chose for fancy features instead.
https://xmr.directory/ also a good source, and https://kycnot.me/
I’d vote against shift phones. Support is also a crucial part of what you’re paying for and most of their communication on their website is in German, which doesn’t tell much good about getting customer support in another language. Maybe they don’t offer support in English or maybe very limited with longer waiting times.
It’s based on unifiedpush standard https://unifiedpush.org/. So a central notification middleman like google firebase for all your apps (that support it). There’s messengers like mercurygram, fluffychat, Molly that support it and you can also send notifications yourself via a simple curl command.
- tacking of payments gives those in power (banks, [bad] governments,…) Mechanism to completely profile and manipulate you. Your spendings says EVERYTHING about you. You might not care because you’re living in peaceful and stable (e.g. not in economic crisis like Venezuela) times, but the world and many governments are visibly changing for the worst. It gives them unlimited power to introduce any kind of taxes and fines or means of blocking you from moving away with your money to somewhere else. You don’t agree? They can still get to your money.
- limiting cash or anynomous payments takes away your financial freedom and strongly increases your dependency on banks. Banks put limits on your money that you can’t fully control, they block your transactions for whatever they find suspicous. They can charge you whatever they want. There’s a lot of corruption and money laundering with banks, that are the the most regulated institutions in the world ( except for armies probably), proving that even with a lot of control and legislation, those in power can still do whatever the fuck they want. Banks also take risks with your money and there have been crisises caused by them before. Most of them invest in oil, war and other ventures that are profitable for them. They manipulate markets for profit and for the worse of the common man. There’s a lot you can read about those things. Becoming so strongly dependant on banks give governments limitless power on what to do with your money and block it whenever they want. Truckers protested against government in Canada => bank accounts blocked.
Whether or not some or all of these examples matter to you, one thing you have to understand and always defend is: you are the boss of your of money. Your ownership and control over your money is evenly linked to how much freedom you have.
Another thing you also have to understand, even if you think full visibility and control for governments is a good thing to solve crime, corruption and/or money laundering: there are and have ALWAYS been black markets. And the worse countries are off, the stronger these markets become.
You can also not use euro to pay for your federal taxes in USA. You can however convert your euros to USD in order to pay for them. If you think euros are more trustworthy and give you full self custody, then it’s a good reason to hold your money in euros . Plenty of people do that in the world; they store their money in USD rather than their inflated less reliable national currency.
Victim to speculation? Unfortunately yes, but same thing goes for stocks, even basic foods and raw materials nowadays. What do they give you? Whatever matters to you: full privacy? Full ownership? Freedom of movement for your money? Not one central entity deciding on the amount that’s printed? Voting power in the tech that’s being built? Most stocks nowadays don’t give you anything as well, but the fake belief on how much it’s worth and a lot of people agree nowadays they don’t represent true value of the company in many cases (Apple, Facebook, Tesla, etc.). You don’t get voting rights, you don’t get dividends. A lot of Cryptos do give those.
Having said those counter-arguments, of course there’s flaws too and frankly more with the majority of them. It’s those select few that could matter on long-term
“Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to”
I think that’s the biggest flaw in your thinking. Monero has this built-in from the start and everyone using it knows it and supports this approach. It affects how legislators can manipulate the coin because they can’t, it will keep on living. It already affects the true value of the coin with all privacy included, because you can see how exchanges are unwilling to list it or are delisting it if they already did so, so there are no (or hardly any) institutions or billionaires manipulating the price because of the high risk factor of losing their money. You’re forgetting that people in power nowadays are brainwashing us to accept that a wanting a fundamental right like privacy equals you’re doing criminal activity or have plans to do so. There are A TON of reasons why bitcoin will never include such strong privacy features, because there are so many factors that influence this decision to make it possible, and the dominant reason you see that matters to btc holders (or any other crypto token for that matter) is NUMBER GO UP. Privacy is not a number go up reason. So it’s not a tech issue, it’s a people issue
I don’t think that’s a good argument though. Any other email provider is as easy to set up an account with and is more privacy friendly: proton, skiff, posteo. If they made a big blunder like that, I can only expect them to use other big tech stuff in the background like google DNS servers etc. Unti someone points it out
I think it’s actually the other way around. BECAUSE phone numbers are linked to our accounts and identities, it makes us vulnerable to SIM swapping. They should only be used for calling and texting people, nothing more. But nowadays we need to link our personal details to them, our accounts, which introduces this vulnerability because then it creates this incentive for an attack
Functionality-wise it definitely is, but secure wise no. There’s probably same kind of tracking for profit going on in the background like with WhatsApp and signal. SimpleX is a better alternative privacy and security wise, but it’s still in heavy development