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Comment by sarahj | Hacker News Reader

Reading over some of the specifications - I really like this approach - I think this is probably the closest I have seen to a truly distributed approach to IM at the protocol layer.

If anyone would like to try the chat interface my address is ricochet:qn6uo4cmsrfv4kzq

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Now that you associated this address publicly with your profile on HN you compromised anonymity already.

Why? It will still be private who has conversations with whom and especially the content.

so it's not like blockchain where if you know the realid of addresses you can follow where the coins go.

from first glance i was curious about this aspect. if a connection exists, the end points are known or unknown? if they are known and there is a db of endpoints to realids then these know endpoints are no longer anonymous...

i get that the content is unknowable due to encryption - that's fine. the endpoint identification though, seems pretty cool if this is truly anonymous.

There is no realid. When you are chatting with someone through Richoet you are connecting to a Tor hidden service that is running on their system. Tor goes to great lengths to hide the true identify of both the client and the service when your using hidden services.

i've obviously misread what a TOR hidden service is then (and how connection are established between two end points), will go read again later.

my current understanding is even though an IP Address might not be connected to me personally, all the routers in between me and the destination server know that my IP wants to connect to dest IP . Thus there was some communication between my IP & dest IP at some time, and is in a log if routers keep logs (or any other device that is physically connected to the same physical path that my packets took)

Sounds like TOR hidden services don't create breadcrumbs like this then.

Hm true, although everybody knows the identity, nobody can peek into the chats. Good point. That would then allow for generating addresses from speaking aliases, so we don't have to remember GUIDs. Wondering what the current base for the address is, hopefully just some random number persisted on the computer.

It's a TOR hidden service address

What is compromised is the disconnect from a real persona. There are times where you would like everyone to know they are talking to you, but no one to know who you are talking to, or what is being said. It's like publicly listing a pubkey that is linked to your real identity. You want people to have confidence in who they are talking to, sometimes. This is a valuable chat client even if you publicly announce an address. I'm likely to set one up myself, and announce it, if I like the platform, but I haven't really read into it yet.

Of course, if the Tor connection is live, and you are doing anything at all illegal on that connection, your endpoint is now linked to your real identity, so you are not quite as protected as you could be. If you're keeping a chat client like this live, you need to be careful how else you use the connection.

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