> Each RingID has 40 characters We can't escape this because the canonical user ID is a public key (IMHO, that's a good thing) however there are some ways to t

> Each RingID has 40 characters We can't escape this because the canonical user ID is a public key (IMHO, that's a good thing) however there are some ways to transfer this information easily among users -- copy and paste is trivial and so are QR-codes (which are also nice for face-to-face authentication, but making them obligatory as in Brian is counter-productive). Tox solved this by having an optional DNS-based username registration system. Not completely distributed, but decentralized and no harder to use than an email address -- with a bonus that it may be an actual email address for people and organizations with their own domain. Is somewhat sad Tox didn't got used, it was pretty advanced even years ago.