Vitalik: Signal's registration without a phone number is a good thing, but true privacy requires achieving "unlinkability of individual messages"

TechFlow reports, August 7, according to Vitalik Buterin's post, Signal is developing a feature to register accounts without a phone number. He welcomed this and listed three positive implications: reducing reliance on the highly oligopolistic phone number system, lowering SIM card hijacking risks, and preventing governments from blocking domestic users via phone numbers.

However, Vitalik also pointed out that one should not be overly optimistic regarding privacy. He believes that by 2026, "pseudonymity" (decoupling long-term persistent accounts from real identities) will actually be a "dead concept"—behavioral patterns such as message timing, contact frequency, and message size, combined with AI's powerful analytical capabilities, create too many channels for identity identification, making it difficult to truly evade.