[haffenloher]

> If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion

This has already been discussed at length many times. Perhaps uola hasn't seen this blog post yet:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

[acqq]

That post still goes from the starting point of "social graph" and "5000 users in the contact list." It's completely the opposite of what's the most reasonable need: say if I want to communicate using the encryption only with my girlfriend, I don't want any of other contacts be ever seen by any server, and I can agree with her how we'll identify each other, but we surely don't need real phone numbers transferred to any servers, and we don't even have to use always the same real numbers.