[qwerty456127]

Very sad. I loved the fact I could change my username whenever I wanted. Ideally I would want no username as well as no phone at all, just a random numeric ID like ICQ had.

I really hate being forced to invent a nickname and be hard-glued to it forever.

[super256]

You can still change your username whenever you want. But the coolest ones are taken and being sold on the market.

Similar to how ICQ low digits used to be sold.

[EGreg]

Why have a numeric ID at all? Just have a ton of private keys or nothing at all so no one can track you across any messages and anything you write.

[grishka]

No, absolutely no. Private keys as a form of identity are flawed because they can't be recovered if lost and can't be revoked if leaked. In the real world, as opposed to crypto dreams, both these capabilities are not "nice to have", they are hard requirements. People lose their passwords — something they can remember — all the damn time, yet you're suggesting to use something that has to be stored as a file, but must be kept secret but at the same time stored reliably. And it's not just for authentication, it's the identity itself.

Private keys as a form of identity can't possibly work in the real world.

[EGreg]

And how pray tell will you authenticate with this numeric user id or username in the system? Is it like social security numbers where everyone just lets you input anything?

[grishka]

I have no idea how SSNs work as I'm not from the US. Usually you'd have a password. The username is for identity, the password is for authentication, possibly combined with additional factors.

[EGreg]

Oh you’d have a password!

Because you just said people lose their passwords all the time. So then what?

Unlike private keys they can also enter them in other sites, reuse them, and get phished and much more.

But yes, private keys bad! because they are cryptography and cryptography is crypto and crypto is scams and grift and there is a whole new cargo cult we have to be in now…

[grishka]

Passwords can be reset. There's always a manual override. For most online accounts, you can restore your access to them from absolute zero — i.e. when you find yourself naked on the other side of the world and your house has also burned down and you also forgot all your passwords. It'd take time and it won't be an easy process, but it is ultimately doable.

But if it's a private key, you lose it an it's game over. You have to create a new identity and start over with everything that was tied to your old one. Worse yet, if you leak your private key, you can't stop other people impersonating you.

[qwerty456127]

You have to spell your ID to people so they can contact you anyway and a number is the easiest to spell aloud when communicating to people from different countries because everybody (every language) calls the same letters a different way and almost nobody cares to study proper letter names as this is the most useless knowledge about a language otherwise.

[EGreg]

No need to spell it

Send a QR code or a link that can be used only once.

Why have an identifier that any number of people can use to contact you?

[qwerty456127]

> Send a QR code or a link that can be used only once.

I most often have to spell my contact details in a voice phone call because my primary job is to communicate to live people all over the world, not to code. Believe it or not but people actually call my office desk phone regularly (although I always prefer email if possible). Even in the IT sector (let alone administrative tasks, healthcare, utilities, etc), whenever you need a rack in a datacenter, new servers or whatever you often are meant to submit your phone number on their website and then they call you. Some very big Internet and datacenter operators don't advertise any ways to contact them other than by phone, some would publish an email or a contact form but ignore you until you call them.

> Why have an identifier that any number of people can use to contact you?

The same as the above.

[EGreg]

Well then you are a special case different than most. You might not need the privacy we’re talking about here. You’re giving out ways to contact you that, if abused, will result in irreparable spam to that account. But it’s just part of a job you do. So that’s fine.

[jrm4]

Not just that. Isn't disposable names a prerequisite for real security?

[nine_k]

I don't use Telegram for anything that requires "real security", and advise against doing so. I assume that 100% of what I say in Telegram would be accessible to whatever authorities there are. I only assume that low-skill script kiddies won't be able to read my encrypted chats. I use Telegram the way I would use Facebook, or post-it notes in an office coffee point: with no expectation of real privacy.

It still covers a lot of mundane communication cases.