Vitalik Welcomes Signal's Exploration of No Phone Number Registration and Points Out Privacy Limitations
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his support for Signal's recent announcement that it is exploring allowing users to register accounts without a phone number. He believes this move will help reduce reliance on a highly oligopolistic system of phone numbers, lower identity security risks associated with SIM card swaps, and make it more difficult for governments to pressure Signal to ban users based on nationality. However, he pointed out that this initiative only achieves "confidentiality" and does not reach true anonymity, as metadata such as message sending time, frequency, and recipients may still be used for identity correlation. With the development of AI, long-term persistent anonymous accounts have become outdated, and the only defensible form of privacy is "message-by-message uncorrelatability." This direction is being explored by tools like Session and SimpleX, with a focus on spam and DoS protection as the next priority. This marks a public commentary event by a thought leader in crypto regarding the evolution of communication privacy, shifting focus from account-level to message-level privacy technology upgrades. Signal benefits from discussions on reducing centralized dependencies, while more radical privacy projects gain from directional recognition.
Source: Public Information
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Signal's removal of mandatory phone number binding directly weakens the ability of telecom operators and governments to exert control through the numbering system. Vitalik further pointed out that metadata leakage in the AI era renders pseudonymity ineffective, shifting the discussion from "who is using it" to "who is communicating with whom is unknown."
In terms of capital pathways, the gradual improvements of mainstream applications complement the radical explorations of cutting-edge tools. The motivation is to find a practical evolutionary path between usable practicality and theoretical privacy limits.
Similar to the path of end-to-end encryption from the fringe to the mainstream, we are currently in the stage of "moving from account privacy to message uncorrelatability."
Essentially, this is a technological substitution: the privacy model based on persistent identity is partially replaced by the message-by-message uncorrelatability model, with the mechanism elevating metadata protection to a new core requirement.
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- Removing the phone number only reduces one point of centralized control.
- In the face of AI, long-term anonymous accounts are almost inevitably pieced together.
- True privacy is such that even "who is talking to whom" cannot be observed.