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Only phone numbers: your own contact list IS the social graph. You lose your SIM card, you lose your friends. Usernames: Signal needs to store your social grap
by 1_player 6y ago
Only phone numbers: your own contact list IS the social graph. You lose your SIM card, you lose your friends.
Usernames: Signal needs to store your social graph (in a privacy preserving fashion) on a central server.
So, paradoxically, phone numbers were the easiest and most secure option to start with.
- koheripbal 6y agoThis is the core routing issue. If you don't have centralized system to locate a "user", then the only alternative is to broadcast all messages to everyone, which is not a scalable solution. Actually, there must be methods for distributed routing. How does TOR finally map a hidden service to an IP address? Maybe there can be a dynamic DNS service for user accounts on an anonymous messaging network?
- qvtweqbvwe 6y agoDistributed Hash Tables