In the book 48 Laws of Power from Robert Greene, Law 13 addresses this. If you held them by past deeds people will feel that they owe you something and nobody wants to owe anything to anyone. It is better instead to show them what they have to gain from now on.
Also, the author did not spend two days. he spent 17 minutes and then did the math to calculate the block hash rate.
> Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds. At this rate, hashing a full Bitcoin block (128 rounds)[3] would take 1.49 days, for a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day
This ruling was one the the landmark rulings in recent times, and a true David vs Goliath story - where a small group of privacy activists won against mandatory Aadhaar.
While it is true that right to privacy implementation remains patchy, there is growing awareness around privacy - both from government, and against large corporations. For example, half of my contact list is now on Signal and last week I had more chats on Signal than on WA.
My understanding: If you verify the safety numbers in person, then I believe you can be confident that it's E2E encrypted for that conversation. If the safety numbers are different, then there could be a nefarious actor listening in.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Edit: That being said, I believe they could still record IPs, as well as the destination and timestamps of each message.
It only helps verify what data the client sends to their servers, not what fraction of that data is stored on their servers. They could be (but probably aren't; see other comments) storing e.g. information about how often you connect and the volume of data that passes through their servers.
There are geo based account bans. I have seen a few from India with a message similar to "This account has been withheld in India due to a legal request"
