Ok, so this is really odd.. The circle of people that actually have a copy of Rival Messenger right now is VERY small, the circle of people that have participated in any discussion about Rival Messenger is pretty small too (aside from what I have exposed via blog posts/tweets etc). It came to my attention that there were a couple of Rival vs Tox threads on 4chan, even someone pretending to be me!

I am flattered, but honestly it is not Rival’s goal to dethrone Tox. I really like Tox, it has a well written portable library which a lot of client implementors all use, the benifit of using the same lib for all implementations is pretty obvious.

Rival Messenger for me is more of a reboot of my old Rival Messenger project that I started in 99, it is for me to write an app so that I can stop using Skype.  It is to provide another secure messaging alternative for people to use.  It is NOT for privacy nuts, who exclusively use the internet over TOR, or people who wear tinfoil hats.  Telehash is a great means to enable any type of application (not just limited to IM) to communicate securely (and with trust) over the internet, working around NAT issues, and providing some level of reliability in the process.

Hope that clears up a few things.