A Google account is required?? Well that's just dumb..

This is a red flag.

Agreed. They should not have tied it into a Google account, literally ruins the whole point of being anonymous on there. I get they needed to implement some sort of easy payment method, but this isn't it.

Only thing I could think to do is create a burner Google account, buy a Google play card in cash, and add those funds to your burner account to pay the 3 dollars.

This trust is also needed for sealed sender. It's fundamentally impossible to make such a system actually anonymous

Fucking

You can only reach a few people before an account is banned due to reports.
And most people won't fall for scams.
And you also wanna pay the remaining operation not spend most returns on signal accounts.

Because of that there's a massive difference in the kind of spam you get when it costs cents vs a few bucks per account.
I definitely get more spam on discord than signal for example.

3 bucks is also a lot more than it takes in some places to get numbers, so maybe long-term signal will try to also limit those number spaces with a fee? Either way this is enough to keep numbers as the weak link not numberless signups.

I don't think the same credit card can be used for multiple accounts.

So it is not about money but hoops one needs to jump through to pay that money.

Why Simplex over Molly?

Simplex have different design and does not cover the same use case. For me I just want a middle ground between the two.

definitely a comparative turd to use in my. expernce and mine just sh! the bed and froze solid, losing everything with a decryption error, while attempting to do that most boring of things, a backup

Looks like it currently requires Google play. Not sure how it works on iphone.

Can I buy an account on a device that has no Play Services?

Not yet. We have plans to add more payment methods, but currently only offer Play Store in-app payments, which requires Play Services.

TL/DR: You can read about it in detail here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1416.pdf

According to PrivacyGuides, regarding this announcement:

The payment uses the same zero-knowledge proofs as Signal's donation system, so they won't be able to correlate your payment info to you.

According to Signal's support article:

Is my payment information linked to my Signal account?

No. Your payment information is not associated with your Signal account. Using the anonymous credential scheme that we introduced for Signal private groups, clients make payments and then associate a badge to their profile such that the server can authenticate the client is in the set of people who made a payment, but doesn’t know specifically which payment it corresponds to.