Bitcoin’s LN Can Now Be Used For Private Messaging

Bitcoin’s LN can now be used in another use case further than scalable payments as we are learning today in our Bitcoin news now.

Last week, Lightning Labs developer Joost Jager revealed an experimental proof of concept dubbed Whaatsat, which is a version of Bitcoin’s LN that can be used to send private messages. Similarly to Bitcoin, the new mechanism is censorship resistant but unlike encrypted apps that make the messages unreadable, and make the text confusing for prying eyes, there is no central entity to stop the users from employing the network. Jager explained:

 “Lightning is a peer to peer network in which anyone can participate. There is no central entity that has the ultimate power to decide on [what] users are allowed to communicate.”

Private messaging is a very important topic in the digital age and it is easy for bad actors to intercept messages that are not encrypted. The apps such as Signal and Wire will provide the users will more privacy but private messaging is still far from everywhere.
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He added:

 “I like to compare private messaging by talking to someone in person privately. We can do this without asking for permission. It is a freedom that is so natural, that we hardly even realize how important it is. As we humans continue to digitize ourselves further every day, I think it makes sense to extend this freedom into the digital domain.”

Whatsat is a new project of ager and it is not something that he has been working on for Lightning Labs. The app is still in its early stages and not to be used with real bitcoin yet. Jager explained that it has always been possible to add some extra data to lightning payments but with a slight change to the specifications, the new built-in messaging system works so the LN software remains compatible. There are also other technologies that can be used to decentralize messaging but Jager argues that there are some advantages built into the system that other apps don’t have:

 “Lightning is not the only way to decentralize this, but it does have the advantage that it is also a payment network,” he said. “Running any sort of centralized or decentralized service costs money and with lightning, it is easy to pay for that on a per-message basis.”