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Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

I hope mobile apps can ditch phone number logins altogether.

In telegram instead of using real mobile phone number you can buy pseudo-number on blockchain https://fragment.com/numbers. If you use tor and ton-wallet, that's not linked to your identity, this number will be fully anonymous

I guess they are not letting to use email because they will instantly be overrun by bots

What's the point of buying it from fragment (which is basically Telegram's way of using their scam currency) and spend at least €50 when you can just buy one for a few cents on websites such as smspva?

If only there was a way to use user identifiers other than phone numbers, and to accept payment for account creation without using the blockchain.

I thought that decentralized identity is one of the legit uses of blockchain. Why not? With that, you can potentially use same identity on different platform and don't worry about your identity being banned by your provider or just closing the whole platform (looking at you, google)

One of the purported use cases. I’m not aware of any successful implementation.

I don't think they can. User's contact list is such a sweet low hanging fruit.

I tried searching for anonymous chat app few years ago and the only thing I found was GG. Semi modern reincarnation of Polish chat app from times of ICQ.

It uses random numbers as your identifier.

So you didn’t find Tox, Briar, Jami, Session (just the first four off the top of my head that have been around since “a few years ago”. Not to mention anything XMPP)

Yup. I haven't found single one of those. And the last time I heard about XMPP was when google killed it in its communicator. And before that just Jabber on PC.

Out of the ones you mentioned Jami seems well done and full featured.

XMPP is alive and well and thriving, just not in the mass's consciousness. Google and Facebook dropping support for it, oh well. It works without them. It will work after the current round of commercial chat apps die off.

this would solve so many problems! emails are perfect for that.

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