So in the beginning of the presentation Moxie brings up some valid cases where it's good that centralized services can rapidly iterate and improve such as WhatsApp being able to roll out end-to-end encryption with a single update, while email is still not encrypted despite the tools existing to do so for years. Basically centralized services can roll out changes quickly and decentralized ones are more or less set in stone.
However, I feel that maybe he isn't considering the downsides of being able to change quickly. Sure WhatsApp was able to add end-to-end encryption with a single update, but they can just as easily remove encryption with another update. Additionally, while I will admit that it sucks that email is not encrypted, knowing how many people and businesses rely on email every day, it should be incredibly difficult to make changes to it. I don't want a single person or company to be able too suddenly decide to change how email works.
One area where I am sympathetic towards Moxie and Signal is requiring phone numbers (mentioned at the end in the Q&A). Personally, I don't see it as being all that big of a deal and it does bring several advantages with it:
* Users get to store/control their own social network in their phones address book
* Users can switch easily between WhatsApp/Signal/etc.
Although I agree that requiring phone numbers does reduce the privacy of Signal users, I think it is a worthwhile trade off for making the app usable by the public.
Also, it seems like usernames might be supported in the future: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
However, I feel that maybe he isn't considering the downsides of being able to change quickly. Sure WhatsApp was able to add end-to-end encryption with a single update, but they can just as easily remove encryption with another update. Additionally, while I will admit that it sucks that email is not encrypted, knowing how many people and businesses rely on email every day, it should be incredibly difficult to make changes to it. I don't want a single person or company to be able too suddenly decide to change how email works.
One area where I am sympathetic towards Moxie and Signal is requiring phone numbers (mentioned at the end in the Q&A). Personally, I don't see it as being all that big of a deal and it does bring several advantages with it:
* Users get to store/control their own social network in their phones address book
* Users can switch easily between WhatsApp/Signal/etc.
Although I agree that requiring phone numbers does reduce the privacy of Signal users, I think it is a worthwhile trade off for making the app usable by the public.
Also, it seems like usernames might be supported in the future: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/