Store Encrypted Username Hash in Database

Question

I'm currently working on basic user authentication for an app I'm putting together, and I don't have much experience with security.

This said, I understand the practice (and necessity) of salting/storing a (salted) password hash in a database as a blob, as opposed to the password (encrypted or no). I've already implemented this.

Is there anything to be gained by salting/hashing a user name and storing the hash in the database, as opposed to the username in plain-text (or encrypted)? It strikes me this would make it quite a bit harder to determine which users may access the system using the database for authentication.

Since it's vital to make it difficult for someone to crack the password for a user account, wouldn't it also make sense to increase the difficulty for determining which users are viable?

Edit: it's possible some of the language I'm using isn't 100% correct: feel free to correct :-)

Edit2: I changed one of my first points to indicate salting hashes -- thanks everyone for pointing out that I missed this :-)

Edit3: Removed wording indicating I am encrypting/decrypting a password. I'm using salted hashes and am storing that in the DB -- thanks Scotty for pointing this out.

Answer 1

If you salted & hashed the username, you'd leave yourself with a bit of a chicken & egg problem.

If you salted & hashed the username, how would you find it in the database? You'd need to look up the user's record to find the salt you used to hash the username...