Telegram and Keybase have been heavily involved with cryptocurrencies, which should be a huge red flag in terms of trustworthiness. That is an industry populated mostly by scammers, or at the very least people with very flexible morals.
I want to be able to share money in the same way and with the same people as we share cat pictures.
Eventually, some large corporate controlled chat system will partner with some large old school financial company and provide it in the west, but I would much prefer to have this done by open source software in a way that anyone can review and interact with. Crypto is the only option for this at present.
Also seems to be deeply distrusted by authoritarian states which to me is a green flag. e.g. it's banned in Iran and Russia
How is it inherently insecure when it provides encrypted chat?
Defaults are a powerful way to influence user behavior and there is good reason to have the chat not encrypted. It facilitates quick searching of keywords which for many chat users is an important feature. Many people chose to write things down or have discussion in text so they don't have to remember.
If users want E2E by default they are free to use another service or just coninually use Secret Chat.
Imagine if your internet banking worked the same way. By default anybody can take money out of your account. But if you jump through some hoops you can set up authentication.
Nobody would accept that and rightly so because it is the default security level that matters not the highest one.
WhatsApp is much more popular than Telegram and it has E2E by default, so any argument that users won't accept E2E by default doesn't hold water.
A bad workman blames his tools. Simply understanding about how it works would prevent this situation. This is all based on the assumption that "WhatsApp" is secure -- yet nobody is able to inspect it for themselves really.
I looked at the value on a whim - they're worth 700€ now. Traded them for BTC and I'm happy :)