Taler is not ment to be completely censorship resistant. It takes the side of dealing with goverment, law and other things and is expected to be used in areas with working democracy.
A private alternative to MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, etc. not a new currency or completely different banking system. And we need it.
Why do we even need relays in the first place? Like, if only someone could create a network that could enable computers to send messages to each other on the layer below apps so apps would just be to display and format those messages, not pass them (ツ).
The choose is:
Apple iOS: Propably being spied by manufacturer, can be spied by NSA, can’t do anything to improve this.
Google Android: Know you’re spied by Google, know you’re spied by manufacturer, know you’re spied by third-party, can be spied by NSA. But most of times you can cut them all (except NSA) off.
And guess what? You don’t need blockchain for that.
Torrents exists, IPFS dropped dependency on block chain. What blockchain do is that if your literal neighbor has the file you want, you must first connect to the global super inefficient network to sync your chain. And if you have censored Internet? Well…
Layer torrent on top of Yggdrasil on top of I2P and you’ll get faster, more decentralized and more resilient network than any blockchain ever done. Such network would continue to work from friend to friend even if your whole town get cut from global net.
There is no one best, as we wish there would be. Depends what you want.
XMPP and Matrix are definetly the most based ones, because you are not tying yourself to one particular app and server, they’re the common languages. And this is what I would want to use for mass communication and as a base, default.
Signal is nice if those above are not enough developed yet for you. Easy to switch friends into and discover contacts with it’s phonebook based nature. But there is no open API for thrid-party apps, only reverse engineering from open source code.
If you don’t need calls Matrix has a bridge so you can use both at the same time.
There are also the most anonymous ones, like Briar, SimpleX or Session, there is a lot of them. For me their usage is when two or more people want really private chat and both agree on the app. I really can’t and don’t want to see them as the default.
High resource usage
That’s Synapse being bad and already having a tech debt. Matrix is surely more expensive to run than other protocols, but not much considering federated nature.
slow syncs
Being worked on with syncv3. New sync is crazy fast.
About encryption, it is also being worked on heavly.
The one bad thing I can say about Matrix is just how much is being “work in progress”. But I would choose a protocol that is going to do my checklist than others that would never do.
Was a fan of Bitcoin, until found out about this.
At least it’s not the other way around.