You've probably already read about the Facebook phone number thing this week: 533 million accounts, scraped years ago, dumped for free on some forum instead of sold. Every tech site on my RSS list ran basically the same post about it (go check haveibeenpwned, yes your number is probably in there, no there's nothing you can really do about it now). I'm not going to write that post too. If you haven't checked yet, go check, then come back.
What I actually want to talk about is something smaller that happened the same week and got a lot less attention: Signal added crypto payments.
On Tuesday, Moxie Marlinspike put up a post announcing that Signal is rolling out a beta payments feature built on MobileCoin, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency I'd honestly never heard of until this week. It's UK-only for now, opt-in, tucked behind a flag in the app settings. You add funds, you can send money to another Signal user in a chat the same way you'd send a photo. That's the pitch anyway. I haven't been able to try it myself since I'm not in the UK and it's not live for the rest of us yet.
My first reaction, and I'll admit this is not a fully thought-through take, was just kind of a groan. Not because payments in a messaging app is a dumb idea in general — Venmo and Cash App have made that case pretty well already — but because Signal has spent years being the app that does one thing and does it extremely well. Encrypted messages, encrypted calls, no ads, no data harvesting, run by a nonprofit. That's the whole sell. The second you start bolting on a payments rail tied to a specific coin, you're adding a pile of new surface area: exchange rate stuff, KYC questions eventually, a third-party dependency on MobileCoin's own infrastructure, and a giant target on the app for regulators who've been itching for a reason to look harder at anything crypto-adjacent.
And there's a wrinkle that a few people flagged almost immediately: Moxie is reportedly involved with MobileCoin itself, not just picking it as a neutral technical choice. I don't know the details well enough to say anything definitive about that, and I'm not trying to accuse anyone of anything shady here. But when the guy running a nonprofit messaging app ships a feature that routes money through a coin he has some connection to, that's exactly the kind of thing that deserves a raised eyebrow, even if it turns out totally above board.
None of this means Signal is suddenly bad or that I'm switching back to Telegram (I will never switch back to Telegram, don't even ask). I've been using Signal daily since roughly 2016 and it's still the app I trust the most for anything I don't want sitting on a server somewhere getting scraped in three years and dumped on a forum, ha. The payments thing is opt-in and buried far enough away that most users will never touch it. I just think it's worth watching whether this stays a weird little side feature or starts creeping into the core experience. Feature creep is how a lot of great small tools turn into bloated ones, and messaging apps in particular seem to think they all need to become everything apps now (looking at you, WeChat, though at least WeChat committed to the bit).
If you want to actually read the source instead of my grumbling about it, Moxie's original post is on the Signal blog and it's a genuinely interesting read even if you end up disagreeing with the decision. He gets into why he thinks Venmo-style social payment graphs are a privacy nightmare in their own right, transaction history visible to friends and advertisers forever, and MobileCoin's whole design is built around not having that problem. It's a real argument, not just a crypto cash grab dressed up in nonprofit clothing. I'm just not sure it's Signal's fight to pick right now, not while half the internet is still trying to figure out how their phone number ended up on a hacking forum this week.
Anyway. Almost ten years of this blog now and I'm still writing posts titled "I have mixed feelings about a beta feature in an app I like." Some things don't change.