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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

>One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS

oh my sweet summer child.

I hop countries and switch phones every few years. This entire assumption that my identity is tied to a phone number which I will have forever is patently false. Phone numbers are an anachronism.

I sure as hell don't trust an alleged privacy focused messenger that insists on a hard identifier (even if I know how to subvert said identifier for now). When privacy truly matters, signal runs on an emulated phone and a burner number.

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Snipped out of context from: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

"However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers."

Does he really believe that phone numbers are user-owned? My phone carrier owns my number. If I'm lucky, I might be able to take it to a new carrier. It's far more likely that I'd drop the number in favor of one in the area code in which I actually live, however.

I own my own domain, and I self-host my own email. I'm not likely to change it for geographical reasons. It has a much stronger tie to me than some string of digits used by an analog voice network from the last century.

The other user cost of switching between centralized services is network effects. If you want to switch from ICQ to AIM, you need to get all your friends to join you.

The ownership of a domain name is not guaranteed - even just in HN there are multiple stories of domains being taken away for questionable reasons.

Of course. Nothing in life is guaranteed. I'm sure the Buddha would tell me that "there ain't no such thing as permanent". Nevertheless, I've had my domain name longer than I've had my current phone number. I'm far more likely to put up a fight for that name than I would be to fight for the current string of digits that represents me in the phone system. Maybe the whole concept of user-owned identifiers is a myth, or a Platonic ideal. At least in my case, my phone number is pretty far from the Platonic ideal.

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