
GNU Ring 1.0 released - kilburn
https://ring.cx/en/news
======
kilburn
I've been testing it out, and it does not seem like an 1.0 release by any
stretch of imagination.

\- On a mac, the client crashes regularly. I've been able to register an
account and make a video call, but there are several GUI issues (cut labels,
missing text fields, etc.) and the name registration didn't seem to work.

\- On android, the client acted really weirdly in the beginning. After a while
it seems to have stabilized a bit, and I've been able to make a video call (to
a mac). The video quality was fine, but the client did not handle screen
orientation changes well (my own video feed ended up distorted).

\- On linux I haven't been able to make a call, even though text chat worked.
It may have been because I don't have a webcam...

All in all, the experience was far from what you would expect from an 1.0
release nowadays. It had major warts on all platforms I tested.

Also, if anyone is curious, you can login with the same account from several
devices at the same time. Calls ring on all devices, but text messages are
less reliable (they don't always reach all devices). Also, off line devices do
_not_ get the messages they missed when you fire the client later on.

I would love and push hard to replace skype/xmpp with a solution of this kind,
but I just cannot in the current state of affairs :(

~~~
csomar
It's made by French! /joking

This has been my experience with most of the GNU/Free projects. They suffer
from terrible UI/UX although they solve the core problem (P2P for example).

Imo, this is why private startups can out compete those free projects. The
private startups focus on delivering a great UI/UX and this matters most to
customers/users. Most users don't care privacy anyway. Usability comes first.

~~~
idoubtit
> It's made by French! /joking

I did not understand the joke. I suppose it goes with the view that outside
the USA there are no good software developers, well, because these are all
second-class countries.

My friends (most of them are French) and I often joke about French people, how
they dislike law and order, how they think their country is the best and the
worst at the same time, etc. They're often boastful or xenophobic, but I can't
see how they are different on programming, computer science or technology.
BTW, the usual "joke" portrait of an American is a fat, uneducated and
religious guns-lover. Please don't feel offended if you are from the USA; of
course, this is far from the individual reality, but each feature is
(statistically) over represented in this country, so joking about it make
sense.

~~~
mintplant
You shouldn't assume everyone online is American. csomar is from Tunisia [0]—a
country which was, for what it's worth, colonized and exploited by the French
until 1956. I imagine that might color perceptions.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160626074252/https://omarabid....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160626074252/https://omarabid.com/)

~~~
csomar
Oh my site is down :/

------
Rjevski
Every time I see "GNU" I fear that it'll be more about "freedom" than actual
functionality. Is the product actually any good (or at least on par with
Skype, Hangouts, etc) or is this just something for free software fans to brag
about with no productive use-case?

~~~
corobo
You've been downvoted but what you've said isn't wrong. For example

> Each RingID has 40 characters

picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like.
Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you.

> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.)
> to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage

Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to
save your contacts.

> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to
> discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.

It can take _minutes_ to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s
were faster

> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked
> the Allow UPnP setting

So no corporate use then.

~~~
Rjevski
The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works -
essentially the user ID is a public key.

However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which
allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID
mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of
raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server.

For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P
protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people
still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more
important than UX so screw it.

~~~
bigato
Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not
very fair

~~~
Rjevski
The problem is, there's little market for "unbreakable privacy" and that
market is already taken by Signal, Threema, etc.. - however since Skype turned
to shit there's been a huge market for an easy to use and ubiquitous chat
solution. For now the only thing that comes close to that is iMessage but it's
Mac-only.

~~~
seanp2k2
Facebook has video chat and lots of nontechnical people get how to use it.
Google has had one for a while but the name keeps changing and they'll likely
kill off whatever the latest one is in a year (and it probably works better on
android somehow)

Sucks that we can't just revive the design of classic Skype (but open source)
before MS ruined it (not that it didn't have wiretapping capabilities before
as well:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security)
). I guess the linked project is the closest thing to that.

------
djezer
This is the brainchild of one the the founders of Savoir-Faire Linux. I was an
employee of theirs and had to use this software for internal communications.
It rarely works, crashes a lot and employees would crack jokes everytime we
were told to use it. The idea is good. The current state of the app is barely
useable. They just fired around a third of their employees (after promising to
double in size).

~~~
we39i
I was an employee there too. They have really low salary standard and say that
"you get to do open source so it's fine". The best programmers get out of
there quick and that's why you don't get high quality software from them.

Their business model is based on using people with temporary work permit
(coming from out of Canada, mostly France) who are stuck with them if they
don't want to go through the process of obtaining another work permit and have
to go back to their country in the meantime.

------
Galanwe
Disclaimer: ex Skype employee.

Looks like a Skype clone from 10 years ago to me. I cannot see this working in
the long run. Many people naively think that Skype switched from full p2p to
partially p2p to server centric because of some evil plot designed by
Microsoft. This is all wrong. Skype abandonned full peer to peer because it
does not work if you want something fast, reliable, and feature rich.

1\. Asking users to enable upnp is a joke. I would never do that, and anyone
doing so should consider the security implications of doing so. Unfortunately,
since they want to stay pure p2p they have no other possibility to solve the
"both clients behind a NAT router" problem. This is why Skype relies on STUN
like protocols => not possible in pure p2p.

2\. Peer discovery in pure p2p is SLOW. Skype understood that and switched to
hosted "supernodes" with their IPs hard-coded in the client. It's the only way
to have reliable peers to introduce you to the network.

3\. You WANT dedicated peers with good connection and 100% uptime.

4\. You cannot efficiently have shared states in pure p2p without an identity
server. That would require the clients to bring their keys with them on every
device, not very practical.

5\. In case the network collapses, there is no way for it to go up again
without supernodes.

~~~
eleitl
You can automatically promote real servers with good uplink and public IPs to
be supernodes. This eliminates the whole NAT penetration brain damage (going
IPv6 is a possible workaround).

~~~
Galanwe
Skype did that, Windows (lol) nodes with good up times and bandwidth were
autopromoted as supernodes. This makes the network unfair tho, and encourages
these users to use alternatives clients to prevent being a supernode (wasted
bandwidth and cpu: who wants this?)

~~~
Rjevski
You could refrain from becoming a supernode by disabling "Allow direct IP
connections" in the Skype settings - but personally I didn't mind.

------
rvern
Unlike so many communication platforms created in this day and age, Ring
provides something more than reinventing the wheel and following the latest
trends. It is peer-to-peer, which XMPP and Matrix aren't. This is a step
forward.

Edit: As some comments note, I previously wrote _decentralized_ while meaning
_peer-to-peer_.

~~~
tFXR89qo
You mean Ring is distributed. Matrix and XMPP are decentralized.

~~~
the8472
An image illustrating the different concepts:
[https://a.doko.moe/ubvuak.png](https://a.doko.moe/ubvuak.png)

~~~
flashdance
That link is giving me problems.

> Secure Connection Failed

> The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

> The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of
> the received data could not be verified.

------
chriswarbo
From
[https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...](https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview)
I see the following under "Ring archive (export.gz)"

> Contains private account data.

> It's a JSON compressed and encrypted file.

> The JSON byte-stream is compressed using _gzip_ algorithm.

> Then the gzip-stream is encrypted using AES-GCM-256 symmetric cipher with a
> 256-bits key.

Does this compress-then-encrypt combination introduce a security weakness?
It's certainly a problem on the Web, since attackers can learn what's in an
encrypted response by getting the server to insert their own strings; e.g.
trying the same request many times with different query strings, and seeing
which ones result in smaller responses, indicating that the given query string
matches somewhere in the document.

It would require the attacker to be able to get their own strings in the
payload, but since this JSON contains things like contact info that might be
possible.

~~~
yorwba
I'm not completely sure, since "Contact Request" is currently listed as _TBD_
on the wiki, but since the JSON data is apparently limited to _trusted_ user
contacts, I assume that they have to be manually confirmed, which would limit
the bandwidth of an attack. If the export also requires manual initiation (as
the part about manually copying the PIN seems to suggest), this is likely not
an issue.

~~~
mnarayan01
There might not be enough to get e.g. one of the private keys, but you could
probably use it to check for someone else in the contact list.

The CRL also seems like it might be possible to at least pivot off of, at
least if the signing wasn't checked when _writing_ the archive.

------
onli
Does someone have that running and would share its current state? I tested
ring at the beginning of this year and it was a disaster. Does it work now?

~~~
javitury
First, make sure that you have enabled upnp and nat-pmp on your router and
that your machine firewall allows both. The distributed design of ring makes
finding peers slow, from 1 to 20 min. Regarding the issues, this is what I've
encountered:

1) Text chat works unreliably. Sometimes messages are not delivered even if
the other peer was found.

2) Even if upnp and nat-pmp are both working, sometimes you need to open all
tcp and udp ports to get ring working.

3) Migration of accounts to ring beta 2 on linux was a total dissaster. It
always failed so I had to create a new account.

4) On some computers during a videocall ring makes pulseaudio crash and freeze
the system.

Ring has a lot of potential but it's still not ready to replace skype. It
works better than qtox though.

EDIT: It was ring beta 2, not ring 2

~~~
onli
Hey, thanks for the response. Upnp is no problem, but my router has no
settings for nat-pmp. It does not matter, unreliable chat messages are a
dealbreaker, and the same goes for not getting messages sent while the client
was offline, as described in a comment above.

I also do not run pulseaudio, if that is a requirement (and it looked like it
back then when I looked at it) the linux-client is useless to me.

~~~
javitury
> I also do not run pulseaudio

Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer.

> but my router has no settings for nat-pmp

Maybe I exagerated a bit. Ring comes by default configured to use TURN and you
can also setup STUN. The problem with this is that they are not distributed.

If you want true P2P, you have to use upnp or nat-pmp, Ring can use any of the
two. I don't know if it is because I get impatient, but it takes forever to
connect. Just upnp should suffice but I get paranoid and think, maybe it's
upnp that is not working. Then I enable nat-pmp in the router and open the
nat-pmp port in the laptop. Sometimes I get so impatient that I also open
(temporarily) every port in the laptop just in case.

~~~
onli
> _Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer._

That's great to know :)

I'll keep an eye on Ring. Something like this in a working state would be
great, But it should not take forever to connect and should be stable (more or
less). According to this thread the project still has a lot to do, and it
might be that the p2p approach is just not a good one for the problem at hand.
Riot/Matrix looked more promising in that regard.

------
nannal
Is there somewhere we can dump bug reports, this feels so unready for 1.0.

------
kk_cz
from the tutorial:

> Please note that you shouldn't forget your password as long as you are using
> the current account. If your forget it, you won't be able to change it or
> get another one.

I can already see it being mass-adopted by non-tech users. /s

~~~
chriswarbo
Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal? There are plenty of FOSS
projects out there, like Apache, GCC, etc. which are presumably unusable for
non-tech users (by definition: if you can use Apache and GCC, you probably
count as technical). It doesn't hinder those projects at all, and there are
also a bunch of "user friendly" projects which rely on those as key pieces of
infrastructure (e.g. many Web sites, and many native executables like games).

Also, as always, the nice thing about FOSS is that anyone is Free to
contribute or fork/contribute their own improvements and services, either
within the project or alongside, either to scratch an itch or to commercially
exploit a niche.

~~~
Filligree
For a social network, anything less than mass adoption renders it mostly
useless. So if that isn't already a goal, then someone isn't doing their job.

~~~
pferde
I don't see it as a social network at all. It is a tool allowing you to
communicate and collaborate with people you already know.

~~~
darkstar999
If you communicate and collaborate with people you already know, you have
formed a social network...

It's hard enough to get people in your network to switch to a _polished_
platform (like Telegram), let alone a mess like this one.

~~~
pferde
Sure, definition of "social network" is vague enough to allow for semantic
massaging into any form anyone wants. The point is that this is not a
necessarily a tool to keep up with your social network, but rather a
work/collaboration tool. And there is very little competition among those.

I don't need to keep up with my "friends" and their
statuses/photos/events/feeds, or "IM" back and forth with someone using cutesy
emojis. I need to be able to hold conference calls with presentations
displayed to all participants, or shared whiteboard to discuss some design.
Stuff like that. And I want to be able to host all this outside of dirty paws
of third party corporations and governments.

I'm of course disregarding the abysmal quality and stability of Ring, so all
this is just academic anyway. :)

------
whoami_nr
This seems extremely ideal in a scenario where everyone has switched to IPv6
and punching through the NAT's is no longer a problem.

------
kwhitefoot
Does anyone know how to install this on Linux Mint 18.2? It seems to depend on
packages that are not available. As there were no instructions for Mint I
tried the instructions for Ubuntu 17.10 but it fails:

Reading state information... Done

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an
impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some
required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

ring : Depends: libebook-1.2-19 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable

    
    
            Depends: libedataserver-1.2-22 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable
    
            Depends: libqt5core5a (>= 5.7.0) but 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.2 is to be installed
    
            Depends: ring-daemon (= 20170724.1.2088f8e~dfsg1-1) but it is not going to be installed
    

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

------
amingilani
If you're trying to check this out and don't have anyone to talk to, like me,
here's my contact info:

Contact me using 'gilani' on the Ring distributed communication platform:
[https://ring.cx](https://ring.cx)

BTW, on Android, I had to setup my username after creating my account.

~~~
jhasse
I've sent you a message, still shows as "Sending …". I guess offline messages
aren't supported?

~~~
amingilani
Hmmm, I see no indication of an incoming message or contact request.

------
fulldecent
Is it just me or does anyone else think this will be a lame project just
because it of GNU stewardship?

~~~
jrs95
Or does it have GNU stewardship because it's a lame project?

------
gboudrias
> Savoir-faire Linux

Love these guys! They're based in Montreal, definitely the biggest Linux-only
player I know around here.

> Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

That's a really bad name for a release. I speak French natively but... Nah.

The criticisms about missing features seem pretty reasonable as well, BUT I'm
not afraid of this project being more ideological than practical. For one
thing, SFL is in the money business, they are not a charity. For another,
sometimes it takes someone to take the extreme "free" approach for someone
else to approach the middle ground of "maybe not that free but still
distributed".

------
anw
I am unable to create a public account. I get a spinning wheel when I input a
public name, and it doesn't do anything else. The create button is disabled
until (seemingly) I get a response back telling me my chosen name is okay or
not.

Unfortunately, their Web site didn't seem to have any clear way to register an
account.

Another point is that searching for contacts only works if you type in their
last name. If you try searching for a contact by first name, then they won't
show up.

------
scrumper
For those in the dark who don't want to do the digging I just did, Ring is
"some sort of Skype or Hangout," to quote one of the project leaders.

~~~
pferde
Digging? Just reading the linked announcement is enough to figure that out.

~~~
scrumper
Ah, thanks I know what happened: I was using an iPhone app to read HN and
accessed the link through its built-in browser. I checked again on desktop and
you are indeed right, there is info available at the top of the page that I
didn't see at first. No digging required.

------
out_of_protocol
Could anybody point me to docs? Can't find any explanation how it works
exactly, the only explanation i can find is <list of buzzwords>

~~~
mikekchar
I don't know about it, but I speak a little VOIP Buzzword, so I'll do my best
to explain.

Essentially it's a SIP phone. SIP is a protocol that is used to initiate
sessions. So if I want to talk to you (usually using Voice Over Internet
Protocol), I can use the Signal Initiation Protocol to send a message saying
that I want to talk to you. You respond by saying that you would like to talk
to. SIP then sends some configuration information about how we're going to
talk than then hands everything over to another protocol (usually something
called RTP).

Now, one of the problems with SIP is that while it is peer to peer, you have
no real way of discovering your peers. Enter Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). I
don't really know how this works, apart from it's how bittorrent clients
discover each other without a centralised tracker. But essentially, I think
you ping out to the internet saying "I want to talk to X". Someone near to you
sees it and says, "I'm not X, but I can get you one step closer to X. Talk to
my friend Y". And so you repeat that process until your discover where X is.

Another problem with SIP lies in the peer to peer nature. Normally we don't
put out computers right on the internet. For one thing it's really hard to get
IPV4 addresses any more. So nobody can actually talk directly to you. Instead
we are behind routers that have an external address on the internet and map
requests to an internal address on your local network. This is called Network
Address Translation (NAT).

So, when we are trying to discover where our friend is, not only do we need to
use DHT to inch our way towards them, but we have to traverse NAT as well
(what the person thinks their address is, is not the address we see because of
NAT). Not only that, but we usually add firewalls on our routers because we
don't want just anybody to send traffic on our local area networks.

ICE, STUN, and TURN are ways for a client to discover their external address
on the internet as well as the port you need to use to talk to them (the port
is the most difficult part to figure out). Once they do that, when they send a
request to you, they can tell you what address and port to reply to. In many
cases this won't work (and I'm informed by very reputable people that this is
because router manufacturers fail to follow the specs... I believe this). So
instead of jumping through hoops to discover the port that you need to talk
to, there are some standards in place that allow a client to talk to the
router and say "I'm expecting my buddy to talk to me on this port. Would you
please open a big gaping hole and let the traffic through. I promise I know
what I'm doing." Now, sensible people do not allow their routers to do this
kind of crazy thing because malware is really good at sending requests to
routers and promising to be good. So basically, if you know what you are
doing, and have control of your router, you can poke holes in it and make this
work. If not, then there is a good chance that you won't be able to
communicate to people. This is why all the VOIP services out there use a
centralised server (because if you carry all the traffic with a centralised
server, both ends can contact the server and it can act as a mediator... the
downside is that the server has to physically move all the traffic to ensure
that it works).

Now what they are saying is that they have hacked the SIP protocol to discover
the other peer using DHT. This is possible because SIP is the most under-
defined protocol in the world, except for perhaps HTTP (on which is is based).
So you can add whatever the heck extensions you like, and nobody cares. Then
they use their NAT traversal techniques (which will work most of the time if
you know what you are doing and have control of your equipment) to get to the
other side.

I am imagining that for messaging they are simply using one of the many SIP
messaging extensions (or they have made their own ... which is cool, because
SIP is a free-for-all, like I said).

Not sure what else. It seems that they are probably using RTP for the VOIP
protocol because they don't say. They are using pretty standard libraries for
the codecs for audio and video. This stuff works exceptionally well these
days. If you get connected and the ports are all aligned so that you have 2
way audio, chances are you will have extremely good audio/video. The codecs
they are using are standard for SIP phones, but if you haven't experienced it
before, I think you will be surprised by the quality.

Anyway, even though I probably sound quite negative, I'm actually a pretty big
SIP fan (I've written an implementation from scratch before). It's just that
I'm not sure that the slowness of DHT combined with the witchcraft that is NAT
traversal is going to meet the needs of the average person. One day if we all
go IPV6, then we can get rid of NAT and open a single, well defined port so
that we can forget all this nonsense. But before that happens, I don't think
we'll see a p2p application that will challenge the big services.

~~~
ololsolol
You have it pretty much sorted out, the only part missing is that the
messaging transits through the DHT directly, when you are not passing a call

~~~
mikekchar
Yeah, also I realised that I didn't talk about encryption and TLS. I suppose I
can say that it sets up a secure connection in the same way that HTTPS does
;-)

------
random3
It's a bit unexpected not to post the binaries signatures along with the
downloads, given the motivation of the project..

------
mempko
Seeing this makes me really want to add video support to my Firestr
([http://firestr.com](http://firestr.com)) project. Also a DHT so I can store
public keys and have shorter payloads to share. Alas I am only one man.

------
coo1k
Is this similar to bitmessage?
[https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page)

------
cyborgx7
I've been reading the site and can't figure out what differentiates it from
tox.

------
dna_polymerase
Apparently there is no release for Debian 8 Jessie. Is everyone on 9 already?

------
rufugee
For something that's free and not foisted upon anyone, there seems to be a lot
of negativity here. Okay, so it's not as good as you want it to be. Roll up
your sleeves and make it happen.

~~~
s73ver
This idea that open source is somehow immune from criticism is old and tired.
If they want to pretend like they're targeting normal people, they need to act
like it. This means putting work into things like UX.

~~~
bm5k
This site isn't called "normal people news".

------
ivcha
Will this be available in Pidgin?

------
kodfodrasz
Its not there yet, but seeing that skype is repositioning itself as a shitty
wanabe snapchat/instagram, instead of the conferencing and telephony app, I
hope it will mature and become a thing. (Hey microsoft, what will the
office365 customers do with skype minutes, when you finish the repositioning?)

They could sell SIP minutes and make it simple to set up, and that could
provide a revenue for them.

------
jonstokes
A friend told me that if you use the Ring then 7 days later all your files
will be deleted.

------
yebyen
The Mac version warns me that I won't be able to run Ring because of my
security settings and directs me to the Mac App Store to look for a newer
version. Quite literally rolling on the floor laughing! (No, not literally)

In the Finder, locate the app you want to open. Press the Control key and
click the app icon, then choose Open from the shortcut menu. Click Open. I
have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Apple
thinks it should warn me that I might have downloaded malware.

Does this mean that GNU did not pay the Apple tax?

~~~
ReverseCold
> I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this.

Really? Everyone I know with a Mac (even the non technical people who don't
code/do any professional work on their Mac) know how to do this.

I may do it more than weekly, even.

~~~
yebyen
What other apps? I have only been using a mac for about a year, but I have
literally never seen this.

~~~
mattl
It's pretty common with lots of free software applications.

~~~
yebyen
Ok but why does nobody want to name any other specific one app that does this?

I feel like I was justified in calling this out, because nobody will actually
name an app that does this.

It looks wholly unprofessional to release a 1.0 with this identity warning,
unless you're GNU! Then it's fashionable and people will come to your defense,
for sticking to free software and libre as in freedom only, like the great St.
Ignucius intended. :-)

------
fiatjaf
There is a GNU cryptocurrency project that aims to give the State the power to
tax the users of the currency. How can you trust anything with the GNU label
after that?

~~~
Karunamon
? What does that have to do with anything? The idea behind Taler is that
unlike bitcoin, it doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities. That
makes it a lot more palatable for regular people and greatly curtails the
amount of undesirable elements using it that are associated with Bitcoin.

Most people don't go out of their way to be tax cheats.

~~~
al_chemist
Bitcoin doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities - it just
doesn't give backdoors for authorities.

Building currency taxable-first is like building messenger invigilation-first
or building social-media censorship-first. Do you imagine Skype selling their
software with main feature being that every conversation you have is being
sent to authorities "for your protection" or "to fight terrorists"?

~~~
Karunamon
That's a massive false equivalence since taxation is an accepted law of the
land and is a price you pay for government services.

There's no good way to tax bitcoin given how it works.

~~~
fiatjaf
Mass surveillance is also the accepted law of the land.

I know you haven't accepted it, but the government you appear to endorse has,
and apparently that's all that matters, because I haven't accepted taxation in
any form, nor have I accepted the form of law making that creates the power to
tax, but I'm taxed anyway.

~~~
Karunamon
I'd really rather not relitigate the legitimacy of taxes on HN, but the reason
why the currency was created in the way it was has been explained. If it truly
bothers you that badly, there are many others.

