Ryan Sean Adams

As long as anyone could remember, it had been number go down.

But Brian was always a good supporter and gave me the time to talk to me anyway.

And we were talking about regulatory risks.

This was under the Biden administration when we had the conversation.

What do we do?

How do we protect users from having their tools taken away by the government?

I really appreciate when people give me simple one sentence, one simple sentence answers that I remember.

He said, have at least 100 million users.

That was his strategy to solve regulatory risk, which is the same number that Moxie Myland Spike used in that other talk years earlier.

Hmm.

I hope it goes all the way because that's what people need and want.

And I think that would make a better world and a more stable and sustainable civilization for our grandchildren to grow up in.

And then something, something, something, something UX.

Like before Signal, there was a well understood notion among technologists and Linux hackers and cypherpunks and cryptographers of secure communication.

You know, it's encryption, like public key encryption.

It's probably one of the most important discoveries in the history of intelligent life.

And it was all about, originally, it was all about secure communication.

And so there was science and there was cypherpunk projects and like computer programming was done, like pretty good privacy, the email encryption program.

And they were all, like Moxie said, pretty much total failures, right?

They never got anywhere close to 100 million users.