Could you elaborate? I’m not very knowledgeable about cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin ATMs in Australia (I believe) fall under AML/CTF laws which require them to register and comply with regulation that compels them to establish a customer’s identity:

The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 requires regulated entities to collect information to establish a customer’s identity, monitor transactional activity, and report to AUSTRAC transactions or activity that is suspicious or involves large amounts of cash over $10,000.

I commented on decentralized exchanges like BISQ and how it can be risky. I wouldn’t be surprised if my bank froze/shut down my account if they learned I was buying cryptocurrency peer-to-peer.

While happy to be proven wrong, I don’t think it’s possible here.

I don’t know about where you are, but at least in Australia, there is no legal way to acquire cryptocurrency without handing over government ID, in my case both a driver’s license, passport, along with a photo of myself. Sure, there’s decentralised exchanges, but that’s a risky move for most people.

Well, in my opinion, it kind of does, since it doesn’t notify the user that their messages are being forwarded.

That’s more than Signal does. This is not a typical feature; I can’t think of an end-to-end encrypted messenger that does do this. If you want to make this argument, all end-to-end-encrypted messengers must be broken because the person who receives the message can then send it to anyone else without your knowledge, or take a photo. It’s trivial.

I use uBlock Origin on Firefox with Javascript, remote fonts, and all 3rd party resources blocked by default, and I also use Yomichan with several J-J and J-E dictionaries for quick, high-quality lookups and making Anki cards.

I have another profile with no extensions aside from cookies.txt to extract cookies so that I can use youtube-dl for those sites.

And, if you can call it an add on, I use custom search engines for a lot of sites. As for the extensions I don’t use, I’ve disabled and removed the EME and Widevine DRM modules that Firefox ships by default because it’s proprietary and…it’s DRM. DRM is ridiculous and bad, and it only ever punishes people who don’t pirate content. It also empowers monopolies.

I agree. But it’s worse than what you’ve said here; Signal is only accessible on Android/iOS and not on the Pinephone and its myriad OSes, for example. People have to develop their own clients for Signal, but Signal has said that they will deny these clients access to the server. But there’s no way they’re going to develop Signal for these obscure platforms.

Now, whether they’d actually do that is another thing altogether, but they’ve said they would, and they’ve done it before.

As I mentioned before, Signal’s servers are hosted on AWS and Azure, which, even if that doesn’t concern you from a personal privacy perspective, Signal is funding these anti-privacy actors, and continued use of Signal increases its popularity, which increases the number of servers it needs to support users, which increases the amount of money it has to pay to these companies. So, by using Signal, you are indirectly financially supporting Amazon.

That makes me a little uncomfortable.

While you could make the argument that Signal’s servers can’t access your message content because it’s E2EE, metadata is still accessible, and probably accessible to Amazon and Azure, as they host the servers.

And Signal is also making weird moves lately with MobileCoin, which seems directly related to withholding their server source code for over a year.

Worst of all, you need a phone number to get Signal working. You could use a landline, or a free phone number, or a VOIP number, but you still need to do this to use Signal. Thankfully, it’s not limited to mobile numbers, because SIM cards are tied to your identity in some countries, but you need a phone number. This barrier to entry exists for no good reason. It exists for a reason (Signal was meant to replace SMS), but it’s not a good reason. Being given the option to link Signal to your phone is a good idea. Being forced to link Signal to a phone is dumb and annoying.

Signal might be open source, but they’re doing everything they can to close it off, which really annoys me.

But Signal isn’t proprietary, like @SudoDnfDashY suggested.

What part of Signal is not open source? Both the signal clients and server-side code is licensed under GPL and AGPL respectively.

They hadn’t published the server-side code (which we can’t verify they’re running on their AWS/Azure servers anyway) for a long period of time, however, it’s now being released to the public again.