The DHT feature of ring is useful in that it allows people to communicate in degraded network environments (as long as users can find the DHT, but that seems more robust than having one's own VPS up and reachable).. However, it has serious privacy issues.
Using SIP/ZRTP on one's own server has different properties. It's more vulnerable to blocking (or just failures during messy times). But, other than those who observe the user-device proxy traffic, the user's location is not exposed to the rest of the world at all times. (I realize SIP and IP address exposure is complicated. But complicated is better than publishing your address in a DHT 24h a day.) So, I wonder if ring should grow a mechanism where a user can run a proxy process that does the registration, so that a single long-term IP address is in the DHT, and call traffic is indirected through that. A user could turn that off, or use a different proxy, if the proxy fails, so the robustness should still be available. Perhaps I'm heading down the path of describing ring over i2p/tor (ignoring the udp/tcp issues).
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