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
Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.

>>supriy+L7
"Sign in with $Clearinghouse" could bring you to a page that prompts whether you want to share a user ID or the phone number, as required, with that service.

The clearing house verifies you only once, or once a year, instead of every time. If the clearing house were to be a nonprofit, perhaps even set up by Signal themselves to spread costs with similar services, that has to be cheaper.

It also gives users confidence that only a randomized user ID was shared, so it won't be used for cross-service correlation and tracking, if the service didn't actually need your phone number but only some identifier.