How Bitcoin’s Lightning Can Be Used for Private Messaging

Bitcoin’s lightning network might have a use case beyond faster and more scalable payments.

Last week Lightning Labs developer Joost Jager revealed an experimental, new proof of concept: Whatsat, a version of lightning that can be used to send private messages.

Like bitcoin, it’s censorship-resistant. But, unlike encrypted apps that morph messages into unreadable, garbled text to keep messages from prying eyes, there’s no central entity to stop users from employing the network.

Jager told CoinDesk:

“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 hot topic in the digital age, as it’s easy for bad actors to intercept messages that aren’t encrypted. Apps such as Signal and Wire give users more privacy, but private messaging is still far from everywhere.

“I like to compare private messaging with talking…