[blake8086]

Wouldn't this still allow an adversary to build a social network of all participants?

They would know:

Who talked to who

How often they talk

When they talk

How much information they exchange

Their IP addresses

In fact, the only they wouldn't know is precisely what was said, but that's often a very small, non-critical piece of the puzzle.

[mahyarm]

Still a far greater improvement to knowing the content of your conversations! If your design removes performance in exchange for removing metadata, and nobody uses it, it might as well not exist then.

[XorNot]

This seems pointless when we have things like Off-the-Record messaging, which for all intents and purposes solves the content and trust problem, and even includes a legal defence against encryption cracking (cracking a message gives you everything you would've needed to forge the message in the first place, meaning it can't be mathematically proven to have come from you - something GPG and X509 do not).

Distributed chat systems only are advantageous because you get away from having centralized servers, but you still have a bootstrap problem to get everything up and running.

[mahyarm]

You are right, OTR already provides all of this.

The only 'unique' thing that Bittorrent can provide although is execution, delivery & a tendency to open source their work. They have shown they can deliver by implementing usable bittorrent sync clients for the major 4 OSs (Windows, OSX, iOS, Android). That usability alone would increase the amount of the internet using encrypted communications significantly, putting a major hinderance on dragnet surveillance.

Hell we might find out that bittorrent chat uses libOTR once your in an actual conversation, since they did all the hard crypto stuff already. They'll just be adding a P2P discovery layer, since that is what they are actually specialized in. That is what I would do if I were them.

There are no usable open source OTR or PGP clients for all 4 OSs still. ChatSecure for iOS still crashes a lot. Adium/Pidgin is pretty much the only usable OTR client I know of, and they are desktop clients.