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Something that is interesting here is on-boarding new devices. Since all the encryption is done by each message being sent to the {all sender devices (M), all receiver devices (N)} you end up with M+N encryptions.

When onboarding a new device, it needs some amount of state in order for conversations to have a useful context. So the new sender device gets a bundle of recent conversations from who-ever onboarding it. I'm not clear on how you could control the amount of context or add more state, but that is off-topic.

What I'm wondering is: Does this have a race condition? Say that you have:

Sender A knows about receivers {B,C,D} Sender A sends message Foo to {B,C,D} Receiver E is onboarded at the same time Foo is sent. Is there no state where E does not receive the message?

I'm sure that this is accounted for and out of scope in a high level blog post, but I am curious how that part works.




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