[kevin_b_er]

The 1234 part changes too and if you pay for the premium service, called Discord Nitro, you can set it it to whatever you want instead of a random value. Its only purpose is to prevent name collisions.

In many fashions, the account is identified by a "snowflake", a 64-bit ID space that every user, every guild/"server", every channel, and every message has.

Its described here and is the only permanent identity on the account, since everything else can be changed. The identity used to @ is transient and can change at any time, but the client, the API, and the myraid of bots written for Discord know the real identity is the snowflake ID.

https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference#snowflakes

At what point is it no longer an identity and instead a database identifier? That's a good question.