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

Oddly enough, once you make that three fiddy payment signal will now potentially have a payment method linked to your account.

If this is true that payment method can essentially be tied to a identity.

I suppose the reason they are choosing to do this is to prevent a influx of bot accounts and spammers/scammers.

And if you are worried about Google’s involvement in this, Greyson Parrelli of the Signal team points out that the payment runs through the same zero-knowledge proof setup it uses for donations.

Looks like there is some way of decoupling the payer identity from the signal user