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Comment by Rjevski | Hacker News Reader

The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works - essentially the user ID is a public key.

However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server.

For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.

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> However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username

This is already the case, you can associate your ID with a user name. Perhaps their FAQ should be updated.

EDIT: It's mentioned in the announcement:

> Support of an Ethereum blockchain as a distributed public user database

So here we are again, using yet another obscure technology for a very simple problem solved years ago: a key value store.

Will I have to pay with ETH to have an username linked to my ID?

A decentralized key-value store that is tolerant to an active adversary is not a "very simple problem". A block-chain is actually a reasonable solution for this, see [1].

Not to say it's perfect, for sure.

[1]: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...

Thanks, was about to say. If there is a simple, non-obscure solution to this problem, I'd like to know what it is.

Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not very fair

The problem is, there's little market for "unbreakable privacy" and that market is already taken by Signal, Threema, etc.. - however since Skype turned to shit there's been a huge market for an easy to use and ubiquitous chat solution. For now the only thing that comes close to that is iMessage but it's Mac-only.

Facebook has video chat and lots of nontechnical people get how to use it. Google has had one for a while but the name keeps changing and they'll likely kill off whatever the latest one is in a year (and it probably works better on android somehow)

Sucks that we can't just revive the design of classic Skype (but open source) before MS ruined it (not that it didn't have wiretapping capabilities before as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security ). I guess the linked project is the closest thing to that.

was wondering the same thing, i.e. signal might be doing it already for most users?

I think it's extremely fair. "Unbreakable privacy" doesn't much matter if no one wants to use the system.

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