While you can add your number to be searchable by others, it doesn't let strangers with your number know you signed up automatically, either.
Full disclosure: I work on the infrastructure behind it.
As an example, one of the next applications I am working on with it is voting (a continuation of my PhD research). You can do things with this that you can't do anywhere else because you've got hundreds of untrusted, uninterested nodes, changing the threat model in a very important way. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other way to incentivize that without some form of payment system, which is why it is intrinsic to this chain.
It is fundamental to safe and fair commerce to be able to not be tracked in the ways we care about folks not being tracked. I want to do things like read my news subscription without them being a data vampire that tracks how long my eyes hover over each paragraph of every story then sells that to some advertiser. I also don't want my credit card company selling my purchase history to some government that then uses that information to decide if I am allowed to enter their country 15 years from now.
In other words, the project is not trying to be a slower, less private version of a credit card. We do not want to be just another privacy coin or utility for some pre-existing internet service and, unlike other mixnet projects, our goal is a much more ambitious resistance to global adversary threat model. We want to enable folks to do things over the internet with similar properties and experience as buying milk from the corner store with real money. We might not get there, but that's my vision for what we are trying to achieve.
> Full disclosure: I work on the infrastructure behind it.
Oh cool... I ran a node for many months during the beta (from home, fiber optic at home). I'm busy atm so I'm not running anything anymore but I do really hope that a real secure messenger that doesn't leak metadata left and right, and which uses advanced cryptography, shall eventually prevail.
No idea what's going on with that site but I can't check out your project. I'd be interested in a ~two-sentence description of what it's like and how it's different. E.g., is it using the Signal protocol without phone numbers? It so, how's it different from Wire? If not, what does it use, custom protocol? Does it have a description I can look up elsewhere?
I'm not having issues with the website, but I will raise it with the web developers to see if they know what's happening.
It protects metadata using a mixnet and the E2E encryption for authenticated channels uses post quantum cryptography(SIDH) to establish symmetric keys. The infrastructure is run by 3rd party node runners and there's an open source API for other applications in addition to the messenger being open source.
It's the project of David Chaum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
Which makes that messenger very interesting. It's also quantum-resistant from the get go. I think the beta just went live.
I'm also curious about scaling and collisions. Not only do you have a birthday problem with normal usernames, but what about special classes? Why do I not take all "nyt" and similar usernames to honeypot the actual NYT's contact?
It's not fully baked, but my expectation is that it will work similarly to how the .eth, namecoin, and other systems work, where you'll be able to register a user discovery service on a blockchain which the clients will recognize and use for searching. In this model, NYT registers "nyt.xx" and "rcarback" pops up in the interface as "rcarback@nyt.xx". As it stands, we've rolled out a basic version with a single central user discovery point for now.
That's a useful feature. Others (above) are telling me this is useless (I disagree). Are these identities separate?
The discovery service sounds useful