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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

How does end-to-end encryption compares to tox? Tox uses TOXID - huge hexadecimal numbers as encryption key and DHT to find peers. Once you connect to a friend you know their IP, all messages, AV and file transfers are encrypted. I find a lot of documentation about it is missing. Would like to know which tox or matrix will be better for my next project. Tox also doesn't expose any metadata.

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End-to-end encryption is still in the draft phase in terms of the Matrix specification—there hasn't yet been a published version of the spec that includes it. Synapse, the reference homeserver implementation, and Vector, the premiere web client, are still developing the implementation and will be deploying it sometime soon, likely followed by a new version of the spec that formalizes it.

The documents I know of that provide details about it are here:

* https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-162 (the tracking issue for the feature in Matrix's issue tracker)

* https://matrix.org/git/olm (C implementation of the protocol formerly known as axolotl v2 developed for use in Matrix)

* https://matrix.org/speculator/spec/drafts%2Fe2e/client_serve... (draft of the spec for E2E)

Thanks, I will try to find some time and join your team and help with development. I lost hopes in tox despite being much more mature than matrix.

Depends on your definition of mature. The security was mature, but the UX was always garbage and there was never consensus in the ecosystem and huge swathes of critical features (like usable dns) have never been wholly adopted.

Matrix is lacking its E2E encryption but already has everything else. You can use Vector today to replace Hangouts or Skype completely.

encryption in matrix is still very much Work-in-Progress[0]. It will use olm for encryption, which is AFAIK, just an axololt implementation (the protocol behind Open Whisper System).

There's no concept of finding "peers" in Matrix. It's more akin to xmpp : each user is attached to a Homeserver, which can chose to federate to one or multiple other HSes. Users may then create rooms on their own HS (or the HS they federate to) and other users may join those rooms, similar to IRC.

[0] http://matrix.org/speculator/spec/drafts%2Fe2e/client_server...

It should be noted that rooms are not "on" a homeserver the way IRC channels are on a network. The server is just a convenient reference point. If it goes down, the room still exists and can still be used, and even given a new name.

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