Is it bad to quote yourself twice in the same thread?
"... success of literally ever other attempt to bring e2e to the masses."
Attempt to bring e2e to the masses. How many actually using it is that metric.
Before open whisper & signal: how about number of people I knew with whom I could communicate securely with using pgp. 1. Total number of people in the world who could do it. A few thousand tops? You reckon it got to 10k, 100k. I can't imagine it got anywhere near a million...
Today: Number of people doing it everyday without thinking about it. Over a billion.
Sometimes metrics are so overwhelming that you have to tip your hat to it. This says nothing about any other dimensions of analysis other than "Number of people actually using e2e." It's a hell of a metric we can give credit to Moxie & co. for. That /one/ dimension is just wow. People tried before, for decades. It just didn't work out on that one metric. Something would have to be pretty bad to make that metric not dominate the discussion of overall success. But yeah, this is just the success of getting people using e2e and it's a massive achievement.