Signal Will Let You Sign Up Without a Phone Number — For $3

You mean they want to identify you from your credit card instead of your phone number? Bah.

Could possibly use a gift card?

I’ll call it right now and bet they wont 3DS supported cards. So no giftcards and no prepaid cards.

I use signal all the time but even I will admit some of the things they do don’t scream privacy conscious to me. This is one of those things.

For instance, no support for their shitty crypto no one ever uses? You know, the one they chose over an actual battle tested one like Monero? (Its basically a pump and dump, look at the all time chart on coingecko for Mobilecoin went from like $50 a coin to 0.07¢ now)

Nope. Just traceable cards or traceable phone numbers. Interesting choice. The lack of self hosting is also an interesting choice.

Way better than Telegram or Facebook or WhatsApp for sure for sure and I get all my friends to use signal but I do have doubts sometimes when I start to notice stuff like this.

People will get on here and say “only FEDS promote fud about signal!!” But honestly ask yourself if what you just read really aligns with privacy in any way. A lot of it does not.

Even the same people who hate crypto actively use signal which did its own pump and dump scheme. Its odd. And I wish an actual competitor would come out that isn’t based in another surveillance state like the UK.

Literally all the alternatives are from surveillance States. Every single one. All of them.

Idk man, I have doubts a lot.

And if it does support gift cards and prepaid cards?

This seems to me like a mild annoyance for someone using it legitimately, but a bigger barrier for scammers trying to get accounts in bulk. Sure they can get a lot of accounts still, but it’ll no doubt be lessened.

If they were going to do that they would not have just made an announcement about google pay’s “zero knowledge proofs” being the only way to pay it.

It becomes more than a mild annoyance it becomes borderline suspicious to be quite honest. None of the other private app competitors have ever needed a phone number or payment and a lot of them let you self host too something signal is vehemently against.

Idk man. The phone number thing I could kind of understand but now the only way around it is a google pay payment? What the fuck is that? The fact that they won’t even accept their “super private” shitcoin is a huge red flag here to be completely honest. Just gonna call a spade a spade. Its a very strange choice from a privacy oriented service.

Its like using the Tor browser or something but you have to do a “zero knowledge proof” payment through google pay to access it. Would that make you feel comfortable? No? Then why are we acting like its ok for signal?

It’s weird.