zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.

> Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.

> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.

> Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.

> Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.

Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

>>Duneda+Z
Phone numbers have become the de facto version of "Internet stamps" for identity verification.

They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.)

But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs when they verify _their_ users.

There are a number of businesses out there that are trying to act as clearinghouses, where they verify the users once, then allow the users' verified profiles to be confirmed by multiple services.

I wonder if any of those could be used to reduce these "registration" costs.

>>jawns+w7
A service that requires a telephone number simply shouldn't be called an Internet service. It can't be used purely over the Internet.

Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.