@vitalikmi pinxe lo crino tcati

Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number.https://aboutsignal.com/news/signal-is-working-on-registration-without-a-phone-number/That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish.The good #1: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself.The good #2: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time.The good #3: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens.Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4, but...In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints.As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide that with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors.And so the only defensible form of privacy is message-by-message unlinkability - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are.A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2:* Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y"
* Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this]
* Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability]
* Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???"Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties)This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability.Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat.Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here github.com/dmarzzz/reputation-gated-onion-egress for one direction (which complements https://ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage-credits-llms-and-beyond/24104 nicely).So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.

@justinahnbuilding @quidli

enjoying working with hermes so much that i had to wire nous portal into my DiscoCentaur & TeleCentaur builds too 👧🤖🦑set up your own environment for your discord or telegram bot, bring your own api keys (nous, in this case), pick from any of the 200+ models they have baked in and enable everyone in the chat to access their own agents publicly & privately (powered by @quidli)!

@justinahnbuilding @quidli

have been a bit heads down working on @quidli but wanted to share a few updates:* connect api is now "agent native," available through mcp: https://mcp.connect.quid.li/* to showcase, i built & open sourced 2 locally hosted agent harnesses (BYOA - bring your own agent) that enable "multiplayer" environments: * DiscoCentaur for Discord (see video): https://github.com/justinquidli/discocentaur * TeleCentaur for Telegram: https://github.com/justinquidli/telecentaur* imo, both work best with claude but you can also use cursor, openai, gemini and minds (ymmv!)* by linking your socials to quidli, you can render yourself/your social reputation machine readable to agents without having to rely on any centralized "authority" to validate on your behalfif you're interested in playing around with any of this, feel free to check out what we've built so far!

@justinahnbuilding @quidli

have been a bit heads down working on @quidli but wanted to share a few updates:* connect api is now "agent native," available through mcp: https://mcp.connect.quid.li/* to showcase, i built & open sourced 2 locally hosted agent harnesses (BYOA - bring your own agent) that enable "multiplayer" environments: * DiscoCentaur for Discord (see video): https://github.com/justinquidli/discocentaur * TeleCentaur for Telegram: https://github.com/justinquidli/telecentaur* imo, both work best with claude but you can also use cursor, openai, gemini and minds (ymmv!)* by linking your socials to quidli, you can render yourself/your social reputation machine readable to agents without having to rely on any centralized "authority" to validate on your behalfif you're interested in playing around with any of this, feel free to check out what we've built so far!