It was a monumental year for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the most impactful developments and moments of 2019.

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Bitcoin 2019 in Lightning: What This Year Brought - Bitcoin Magazine

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Colin is an associate editor and staff writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He&#39;s proud to call Nashville his home, where he lives with his family and doesn&#39;t eat hot chicken as much as you might think.

Colin Harper

It was a monumental year for Bitcoin&rsquo;s Lightning Network. As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the most impactful developments and moments of 2019.

Read Part 1 of our series, Bitcoin&rsquo;s 2019 in Tech: What This Year Brought Us, here. Even as we entered 2019 in a bear market, the receding bitcoin price was matched by a rising tide of excitement for and development on Bitcoin&rsquo;s second layer payment protocol, the Lightning Network. Over the course of the year, we saw payment routing improvements, the introduction of mobile wallets, a flush of liquidity into the network and the emergence of Lightning fiat ramps. Oh yeah, and we also watched as a Lightning payment bounced around the globe over 275 times via Bitcoin Twitter, all started by an anonymous astronautical tomcat (this was one of many community developments that encapsulated the teeming excitement around the new technology). Here are our highlights for the Lightning Network in 2019. Wallets&nbsp; A dozen or so new Lightning wallets proliferated in 2019, overwhelmingly for mobile devices. One of the most anticipated, Lightning Lab&rsquo;s Lightning Wallet for iOS and Android, was one of the first to make use of Neutrino, a lightweight client that fetches data block-by-block so users can run a noncustodial Lightning wallet without having to run a full Bitcoin node. In its company is Zap, which also leverages Neutrino and launched a desktop and a mobile version this year, and Breez, the first Neutrino mobile wallet that is only available on iOS. All of the above were released in the summer and run on LND, Lightning&rsquo; Lab&rsquo;s implementation of the technology. For its own implementation, French Lightning development company ACINQ released Phoenix as 2019 was winding down. The Android-only mobile wallet runs a full, lightweight Lightning node on your device. We&rsquo;d be remiss if we didn&rsquo;t mention Tippin.me and the late Bottle Pay. Though Tippin.me technically launched in December 2018, the browser-based custodial wallet became a hit on Bitcoin Twitter in 2019 for sending and receiving tips. Bottle Pay launched halfway through the year and also became a favorite for social network micropayments before it shut its doors in response to new AML regulations. More than just a tipping app, Bottle Pay was an extremely user-friendly web wallet. It&rsquo;s in a class of custodial wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, another from the Lightning Class of 2019, that prioritizes convenience and a slick UX over self-sovereignty.&nbsp; On-Ramps&nbsp; Plenty of wallets proliferated in 2018, too, but none that offered options to purchase bitcoin on Lightning with fiat. In 2019, this is now a possibility thanks to a few new options. Two of these come from existing wallets, Sparkswap and Zap. Coincidentally, these onomatopoeic wallet providers both had the same idea: to integrate their products with a buy option. Sparkswap&rsquo;s desktop wallet was the first to offer this using atomic swaps; a user sends an ACH bank transfer to Sparkswap, and then it executes an atomic swap to transfer bitcoin from on-chain into the user&rsquo;s Lightning wallet. Zap&rsquo;s Olympus, which is actually still in development so it&rsquo;s not available yet, does something similar, except it uses what are called Turbo channels to &ldquo;push&rdquo; a Lightning channel to a user after they pay for the channel. &ldquo;If you want, you can buy bitcoin inside of Zap with a bank account, debit card, Zelle, whatever &mdash; and it will give you the bitcoins, from purchase to spending on Lightning, in less than five seconds,&rdquo; Zap founder Jack Mallers told Bitcoin Magazine in September 2019. Lightning also got its first major exchange integration this year. In partnership with Bitrefill, Bitfinex opened its coffers to Lightning bitcoin deposits and withdrawals in the final month of the year. Like trading regular bitcoin on a custodial exchange, Lightning Network balances are represented as IOUs, but they are paid out to a Lightning wallet upon withdrawal. It&rsquo;s not a fiat gateway, but you can also buy &ldquo;Thor&rdquo; channels on Bitrefill for bitcoin. Like with Zap&rsquo;s delivery method for Olympus, Thor channels are pushed to the user upon purchase, and Thor Turbo channels are instantly delivered without waiting for on-chain confirmations to lock the bitcoin into the payment channel. An added bonus: You can purchase these channels with cryptocurrency from your Coinbase account. As these options continue to develop, they&rsquo;ll be looking to solve one of Lightning&rsquo;s many UX problems: in this case, on-boarding. Channel Management, Routing and Payments&nbsp; As some teams look to enable smoother onboarding, others are focusing on making channel management, routing and payments frictionless. One of these channel management tools hopes to give users the option of moving bitcoin in and out of payment channels without closing them. When Lightning first came out, channel management was cumbersome in part because, if you wanted to lock more sats in a channel (or take a few out), you&rsquo;d have to close it and open an entirely new one. Lightning Loop opens this closed loop, so to speak. Using submarine swaps, the protocol by Lightning Lab&rsquo;s Alex Bosworth and Bryan Vu allows its users to move bitcoin in and out of channels without having to close the channels and broadcast their state onto the blockchain. This saves time, money and technical headaches. &ldquo;The vision for Lightning Loop is to allow users to securely move funds in and out of the Lightning Network using non-custodial Bitcoin contracts,&rdquo; Bosworth and Vu wrote in a blog post. &ldquo;With Loop, users, businesses, and routing node operators are able to keep Lightning channels open indefinitely, making the network more efficient, more stable, and cheaper to use.&rdquo; Currently, many wallets use a variation of Lightning Loop to the same effect. Lightning Loop makes lubricating channels with fresh liquidity easier, thereby relieving problems with inbound/outbound capacity. There&rsquo;s also the problem of payment routing, something another new feature, atomic multipart payments (also simply known as &ldquo;multipart payments&rdquo;), is trying to solve.&nbsp; This trick allows users to split a single payment into multiple payments; instead of piping one payment down a single payment channel, it can now be sent through several.&nbsp; &ldquo;This greatly reduces the headache of managing how many channels to open, and how to allocate funds to them, since you can now simply combine them as and when necessary,&rdquo; Christian Decker of Blockstream wrote in a blog post. Lastly, courtesy of Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun, sending Lightning payments is getting easier. Currently, you&rsquo;d have to receive an invoice for a specific saoshi amount to send a Lightning payment, but Sphinx Send promises users &ldquo;the ability to send a payment to a destination without first needing to have an invoice,&rdquo; according to Osuntokun. The feature is available now on LND but requires a user-activated update to install. It has yet to be introduced in a major LND release. Watchtowers&nbsp; This development gets its own section, partly because it&rsquo;s cool and also because it doesn&rsquo;t really fit into any of the other categories. Channel closing is perhaps the chief attack vector of the Lightning Network; that is to say, your bitcoin are only really vulnerable in a Lightning Network payment channel when the channel is closing. This vulnerability is largely subject to human error: If you&rsquo;re not paying attention when a channel closes, the party on the other side of it may try to swindle you by broadcasting an older version of the channel&rsquo;s transaction history, thereby claiming coins that aren&rsquo;t theirs. To protect you from rogue peers, Watchtowers monitor channels and their states so that you don&rsquo;t have to. These towers can act as an extra set of eyes and, in the case that one party is cheated in a channel closing, they have the ability to seize the contingent funds and return them to the honest party.&nbsp; LApps. Lightning Applications (or LApps) are like the cocky, reckless younger sibling of Ethereum-based DApps.&nbsp; Shortly after the Lightning Network&rsquo;s release, developers tinkering with Lightning began releasing LApps, either as side projects or full-time gigs, to test Lightning&rsquo;s use cases.&nbsp; Technically, Tippin.me and Bottle Pay count as LApps, but they&rsquo;ve already lapped up the limelight. So we&rsquo;ll focus on a few others, like Pollo Feed, the only place on the internet where you can use bitcoin to feed chickens (seriously, you pay a Lightning invoice and some chickens in Rhode Island are fed on a live stream right before your eyes). Another fun (and more relevant) application is LNCast, a Lightning-native alternative to Twitch that allows its users to accept micropayments (Marty Bent&rsquo;s &ldquo;Tales From the Crypt&rdquo; is featured, for example). Turns out Lightning might be a fit for monetizing others in the media landscape, too &mdash; particularly video game players. 2019 delivered the first Lightning-powered video games. One notable examples is Satoshi&rsquo;s Games, a hub for various titles (like the Super Mario clone Super Bro and the Agar.io copycat Lightning Agar) that convert in-game points into satoshis. In a similar vein, the Ledger of Szabo, developed by Neon District games, is a Legend of Zelda-inspired game that gives its players the option to purchase characters and gear with Lightning. Then there&rsquo;s Lightnite, a battle royale that includes satoshis as loot and has Lightning-purchasable gear, as well (Fortnite fever has gripped the international video gaming conscience, so this was probably inevitable). The game is currently in closed beta, but it will go live officially some time in 2020. Most of these examples stick to Lightning&rsquo;s core use case of payments, but a couple of other LApps push the boundaries into a new territory: messaging. Thanks to a recent software update, Lightning now supports more reliable and complex messaging, and two projects, Whatsat and Sphinx Chat, are leveraging this to power encrypted messaging with Lightning. Both utilize what are known as type-length-values (TLVs) to attach extraneous data (in this case, a message) to a Lightning payment. These messages can be routed through the network...

Colin is an associate editor and staff writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He's proud to call Nashville his home, where he spends his days shouting at peddle taverns and trying to find affordable parking downtown. If it wasn't already obvious, he holds bitcoin.

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Messaging apps are coming to Lightning, promising cheap, censorship-resistant and confidential transactions. But will people default to this “killer app” over traditional encrypted messaging platforms?

On Lightning, Messaging Apps Emerge as Growing Use Case - Bitcoin Magazine

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“Does instant messaging over Lightning have killer application potential?”



Lightning Labs developer Joost Jager asked his Twitter followers this rhetorical when he debuted a demo for his Lightning Network messaging application, Whatsat.



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Your average Bitcoiner probably wouldn’t think of messaging as one of Lightning’s killer use cases, at least not before micropayments, streaming payments and the like. For encrypted messaging, they’d likely default to options like Signal, Keybase or Wire.&nbsp;



These are certainly better than mainstream messaging apps, like Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp, whose encrypted options are thinly veiled save-faces that don’t offer much material confidentiality. But encrypted messaging needs to go further than privacy, Jager believes; they need censorship resistance too, and this is where Lightning-powered messaging comes in.



“The encryption part is similar, in both systems the message content is private,” Jager told Bitcoin Magazine. “The difference is that there is no central server involved. No single kill switch that could be used to shut down all communications. Or that is used more selectively to deny certain users to communicate.”



<h2>Whatsat: A New Approach to an Old Feature&nbsp;</h2>



The Lightning Network has supported messages from day one, same with Bitcoin’s base layer. The <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/messaging-via-blockstreams-satellite-lightnings-killer-app">Blockstream Satellite has been used</a> in experiments around Lightning-driven messages and <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/used-lightning-payments-private-sms-messaging-heres-worked">private text message services</a> have leveraged Lightning payments. But <a href="https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/pull/619">recent tweeks to the protocol</a> now make it easier to attach additional data to a payment and pass it on to other applications using type-length-value (TLV) payloads.&nbsp;



TLV payloads allow people using communication protocols to attach additional, extraneous information onto a data packet. For Whatsat, this extraneous data would be the message that is bolted onto a Lightning transaction.&nbsp;



The update that enabled TLV payloads paved the way for a concept like Whatsat which, alongside censorship resistance, could also make communications more private for end users, depending on how messages are sent or routed, Jager said.



“Chatting over Lightning also makes it much harder to find out who is communicating with whom. It is not required to have a direct (observable) TCP/IP connection between users and there is no central server either that could reconstruct the communication pathways,” he told us.



Lightning-powered messages (or transactions, for that matter) are onion routed, just like information passing through the Tor network. The messages are shunted from node to node, and each node can only identify the node that sent it the information or the node next in queue to receive it.&nbsp;



Now, if one entity runs the majority of the nodes in a pathway then they may be able to unmask the sender and receiver, Jager admitted.&nbsp;



“Privacy and security are relative concepts,” he continued.



In some cases, then, it might be better for users to set up direct payment channels with each other. For example, if a “spy” or “attacker” wanted to deanonymize a user via node surveillance, then onion routing the payment may offer significantly less privacy depending on the route, as described above. In this case, a direct payment channel would be more private. But if the surveilling party were an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and tracking TCP/IP addresses, then onion routing would be more private.



Direct channels could provide absolutely free messaging, however — something that some users might find a negligible benefit compared to potential privacy trade-offs. For instance, Lightning messaging is already a free-to-use service; when one user sends another user a message, they have to attach it to a payment, but the recipient can reject this payment after opening the message (for Whatsat, a return-to-sender message saying that the payment has been rejected serves as confirmation of the original message).&nbsp;



As with Lightning payments writ large, a fee market is likely to develop for this service to route messages when a direct channel is not open. This could be seen as one of the cons, Jager said, but it’s also a trade-off some might be willing to accept for censorship-resistant, confidential communication.&nbsp;



“There is the cost side, but also the benefit side,” Jager explained. “The weight of that is dependent on the awareness of users of the downsides of existing messaging systems. For most people, an imaginary world in which some authority can block two people from talking to each other in real life sounds like scary sci-fi. But it is where the vast majority of the users are at with the current state of messaging in the digital domain.”



Whatsat is currently in testnet, and its <a href="https://github.com/joostjager/whatsat">source code is on GitHub</a>. But don’t expect a beta from Jager anytime soon. In our conversation, he mentioned that Whatsat is “only a proof of concept,” a side project of his that isn’t associated with Lightning Labs, his employer. It’s his hope that the hobby project will “inspire other people … to start developing” it further.



<h2>Sphinx Chat, a Different Approach to the Same Effect</h2>



Some developers have begun toying further with Lightning messaging, though not from Jager’s source code, and they’re close to launching a private beta.



Sphinx Chat, for instance, has been in motion for about a year. Project lead Paul Itoi told Bitcoin Magazine that its team cobbled together a prototype for a Lightning hackathon in New York in 2018. At this year’s <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/scam-or-iteration-in-berlin-bitcoin-diehards-still-believe-in-lightning">Lightning Conference in Berlin</a>, it released “a very hacky version to a handful of users on TestFlight,” Itoi told us, but they plan to drop a new beta version in the near future (you can register for the private beta on its <a href="https://sphinx.chat/">website</a>). 



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The application takes its name from the <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-the-lightning-network-layers-privacy-on-top-of-bitcoin-1482183775">Sphinx protocol</a>, an upgrade that onion routes Lightning transactions over a Tor-esque network. Whatsat leverages the same protocol to achieve a certain degree of privacy, though it differs from Sphinx Chat in that it will offer free messaging within direct channels in addition to TLV payload messaging. Sphinx Chat is focusing solely on the latter.&nbsp;



“Both are similar,” Itoi told us. “But [Jager’s] is designed to avoid fees since it uses a failed payment to deliver the message. This is currently free on LN. Sphinx inserts the message in the [TLV] and uses keysend to deliver and standard fees will apply.”



TLV still has an extra step to go before it’s production ready for mass messaging, however. For LND, the Lightning instance that Sphinx Chat runs, the team still needs to enable TLV messaging from the receiver’s end; it can receive the data, but it has no way of processing it.&nbsp;



Lightning Labs is tracking and working on the issue <a href="https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/3670">on GitHub</a>, but until it is sorted out, Sphinx Chat will rely on specific nodes hosted by Nodl to relay messages (which have been customized to fully support TLV payloads).



“We’ll stay in beta on nodes we’re hosting until those features are officially supported,” Itoi told us.



Once out of beta, though, Sphinx Chat will be totally open-source, he continued. At this point, node operators can establish fee markets for relaying messages, same as with Whatsat. He also sees it as a complementary application to <a href="https://www.stakwork.com/">StakWork</a>, a chore app that allows people to complete tasks for sats. For example, workers can be notified and paid through Sphinx Chat



<h2>The Future of Encrypted Messaging?</h2>



Perhaps the first question that comes to mind with Lightning Network messaging: Why use any of these developments when we already have reliable, encrypted messaging apps?



Jager admitted that this is a definite “con,” since “Lightning is complicated compared to a centralized service.” Additionally, with a decentralized system like Lightning, “it can be difficult to deliver the same user experience that people are used to. An example of this — which is just as valid for payments — is how to deliver a message to a user that is offline.”



Still, there are reasons why someone may prefer Lightning-based messaging options to more centralized alternatives. Because the Lightning Network is decentralized, these options will be more censorship resistant and resistant to service outages that result from single points of failure. Itoi also views this development as indispensable for how it couples payments and communication as a single, permissionless entity.&nbsp;



“The key benefit is integrating the ability to pay and communicate under one identity,” he said. “Our core belief: the privacy and censorship resistance that Lightning provides for payments should apply equally to speech. Using Lightning for chat will accelerate the adoption of bitcoin as a medium of exchange.”



This also opens up avenues for Lightning-powered forums, which would theoretically reduce spam given that, in Sphinx Chat’s case, each message costs something. Chatting also need not be limited to humans, Itoi believes. In the future, he envisions APIs and Internet-of-Things devices sending messages and payments to each other via Lightning (sorry, <a href="https://www.iota.org/">IOTA</a>).



Like many other burgeoning applications and features being built on Bitcoin, Lightning messaging still has a ways to go. Another question to consider, besides usability, is whether users will be willing to pay to chat. This model is reminiscent of the old days of pay-per-message SMS, though it will certainly be much cheaper. Lightning messaging, depending on how hard it is to route messages, could cost as little as a sat or less.&nbsp;



Still, with the promise of cheap, confidential and censorship-resistant messaging on the horizon (far off as it may be), Jager is optimistic in the future of this incipient use case.



“It isn't said that a Lightning-based messenger can't eventually match the ease of use of existing services,” Jager explained. “There surely is a ton of work to do, but I wouldn't say it is impossible. At the moment, people generally have no problem with existing messaging services … but that is today. The future may be different. Perhaps the existing messaging services change their business model, perhaps some scandal happens in which huge amounts of metadata are leaked … I can't say how this all will develop, but I think it is good to explore alternatives.”

Messaging apps are coming to Lightning, promising cheap, censorship-resistant and confidential transactions. But will people default to this &ldquo;killer app&rdquo;?

Lightning Messaging Apps Emerge as Use Case page sep sitename

&ldquo;Does instant messaging over Lightning have killer application potential?&rdquo; Lightning Labs developer Joost Jager asked his Twitter followers this rhetorical when he debuted a demo for his Lightning Network messaging application, Whatsat. https://twitter.com/joostjgr/status/1190714028626251779 Your average Bitcoiner probably wouldn&rsquo;t think of messaging as one of Lightning&rsquo;s killer use cases, at least not before micropayments, streaming payments and the like. For encrypted messaging, they&rsquo;d likely default to options like Signal, Keybase or Wire.&nbsp; These are certainly better than mainstream messaging apps, like Facebook&rsquo;s Messenger and WhatsApp, whose encrypted options are thinly veiled save-faces that don&rsquo;t offer much material confidentiality. But encrypted messaging needs to go further than privacy, Jager believes; they need censorship resistance too, and this is where Lightning-powered messaging comes in. &ldquo;The encryption part is similar, in both systems the message content is private,&rdquo; Jager told Bitcoin Magazine. &ldquo;The difference is that there is no central server involved. No single kill switch that could be used to shut down all communications. Or that is used more selectively to deny certain users to communicate.&rdquo; Whatsat: A New Approach to an Old Feature&nbsp; The Lightning Network has supported messages from day one, same with Bitcoin&rsquo;s base layer. The Blockstream Satellite has been used in experiments around Lightning-driven messages and private text message services have leveraged Lightning payments. But recent tweeks to the protocol now make it easier to attach additional data to a payment and pass it on to other applications using type-length-value (TLV) payloads.&nbsp; TLV payloads allow people using communication protocols to attach additional, extraneous information onto a data packet. For Whatsat, this extraneous data would be the message that is bolted onto a Lightning transaction.&nbsp; The update that enabled TLV payloads paved the way for a concept like Whatsat which, alongside censorship resistance, could also make communications more private for end users, depending on how messages are sent or routed, Jager said. &ldquo;Chatting over Lightning also makes it much harder to find out who is communicating with whom. It is not required to have a direct (observable) TCP/IP connection between users and there is no central server either that could reconstruct the communication pathways,&rdquo; he told us. Lightning-powered messages (or transactions, for that matter) are onion routed, just like information passing through the Tor network. The messages are shunted from node to node, and each node can only identify the node that sent it the information or the node next in queue to receive it.&nbsp; Now, if one entity runs the majority of the nodes in a pathway then they may be able to unmask the sender and receiver, Jager admitted.&nbsp; &ldquo;Privacy and security are relative concepts,&rdquo; he continued. In some cases, then, it might be better for users to set up direct payment channels with each other. For example, if a &ldquo;spy&rdquo; or &ldquo;attacker&rdquo; wanted to deanonymize a user via node surveillance, then onion routing the payment may offer significantly less privacy depending on the route, as described above. In this case, a direct payment channel would be more private. But if the surveilling party were an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and tracking TCP/IP addresses, then onion routing would be more private. Direct channels could provide absolutely free messaging, however &mdash; something that some users might find a negligible benefit compared to potential privacy trade-offs. For instance, Lightning messaging is already a free-to-use service; when one user sends another user a message, they have to attach it to a payment, but the recipient can reject this payment after opening the message (for Whatsat, a return-to-sender message saying that the payment has been rejected serves as confirmation of the original message).&nbsp; As with Lightning payments writ large, a fee market is likely to develop for this service to route messages when a direct channel is not open. This could be seen as one of the cons, Jager said, but it&rsquo;s also a trade-off some might be willing to accept for censorship-resistant, confidential communication.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is the cost side, but also the benefit side,&rdquo; Jager explained. &ldquo;The weight of that is dependent on the awareness of users of the downsides of existing messaging systems. For most people, an imaginary world in which some authority can block two people from talking to each other in real life sounds like scary sci-fi. But it is where the vast majority of the users are at with the current state of messaging in the digital domain.&rdquo; Whatsat is currently in testnet, and its source code is on GitHub. But don&rsquo;t expect a beta from Jager anytime soon. In our conversation, he mentioned that Whatsat is &ldquo;only a proof of concept,&rdquo; a side project of his that isn&rsquo;t associated with Lightning Labs, his employer. It&rsquo;s his hope that the hobby project will &ldquo;inspire other people &hellip; to start developing&rdquo; it further. Sphinx Chat, a Different Approach to the Same Effect. Some developers have begun toying further with Lightning messaging, though not from Jager&rsquo;s source code, and they&rsquo;re close to launching a private beta. Sphinx Chat, for instance, has been in motion for about a year. Project lead Paul Itoi told Bitcoin Magazine that its team cobbled together a prototype for a Lightning hackathon in New York in 2018. At this year&rsquo;s Lightning Conference in Berlin, it released &ldquo;a very hacky version to a handful of users on TestFlight,&rdquo; Itoi told us, but they plan to drop a new beta version in the near future (you can register for the private beta on its website). https://twitter.com/murr/status/1190762999595720704 The application takes its name from the Sphinx protocol, an upgrade that onion routes Lightning transactions over a Tor-esque network. Whatsat leverages the same protocol to achieve a certain degree of privacy, though it differs from Sphinx Chat in that it will offer free messaging within direct channels in addition to TLV payload messaging. Sphinx Chat is focusing solely on the latter.&nbsp; &ldquo;Both are similar,&rdquo; Itoi told us. &ldquo;But [Jager&rsquo;s] is designed to avoid fees since it uses a failed payment to deliver the message. This is currently free on LN. Sphinx inserts the message in the [TLV] and uses keysend to deliver and standard fees will apply.&rdquo; TLV still has an extra step to go before it&rsquo;s production ready for mass messaging, however. For LND, the Lightning instance that Sphinx Chat runs, the team still needs to enable TLV messaging from the receiver&rsquo;s end; it can receive the data, but it has no way of processing it.&nbsp; Lightning Labs is tracking and working on the issue on GitHub, but until it is sorted out, Sphinx Chat will rely on specific nodes hosted by Nodl to relay messages (which have been customized to fully support TLV payloads). &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll stay in beta on nodes we&rsquo;re hosting until those features are officially supported,&rdquo; Itoi told us. Once out of beta, though, Sphinx Chat will be totally open-source, he continued. At this point, node operators can establish fee markets for relaying messages, same as with Whatsat. He also sees it as a complementary application to StakWork, a chore app that allows people to complete tasks for sats. For example, workers can be notified and paid through Sphinx Chat The Future of Encrypted Messaging? Perhaps the first question that comes to mind with Lightning Network messaging: Why use any of these developments when we already have reliable, encrypted messaging apps? Jager admitted that this is a definite &ldquo;con,&rdquo; since &ldquo;Lightning is complicated compared to a centralized service.&rdquo; Additionally, with a decentralized system like Lightning, &ldquo;it can be difficult to deliver the same user experience that people are used to. An example of this &mdash; which is just as valid for payments &mdash; is how to deliver a message to a user that is offline.&rdquo; Still, there are reasons why someone may prefer Lightning-based messaging options to more centralized alternatives. Because the Lightning Network is decentralized, these options will be more censorship resistant and resistant to service outages that result from single points of failure. Itoi also views this development as indispensable for how it couples payments and communication as a single, permissionless entity.&nbsp; &ldquo;The key benefit is integrating the ability to pay and communicate under one identity,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Our core belief: the privacy and censorship resistance that Lightning provides for payments should apply equally to speech. Using Lightning for chat will accelerate the adoption of bitcoin as a medium of exchange.&rdquo; This also opens up avenues for Lightning-powered forums, which would theoretically reduce spam given that, in Sphinx Chat&rsquo;s case, each message costs something. Chatting also need not be limited to humans, Itoi believes. In the future, he envisions APIs and Internet-of-Things devices sending messages and payments to each other via Lightning (sorry, IOTA). Like many other burgeoning applications and features being built on Bitcoin, Lightning messaging still has a ways to go. Another question to consider, besides usability, is whether users will be willing to pay to chat. This model is reminiscent of the old days of pay-per-message SMS, though it will certainly be much cheaper. Lightning messaging, depending on how hard it is to route messages, could cost as little as a sat or less.&nbsp; Still, with the promise of cheap, confidential and censorship-resistant messaging on the horizon (far off as it may be), Jager is optimistic in the future of this incipient use case. &ldquo;It isn&#039;t said that a Lightning-based messenger can&#039;t eventually match the ease of use of existing services,&rdquo; Jager explained. &ldquo;There surely is a ton of work to do, but I wouldn&#039;t say it is impossible. At the moment, people generally have no problem with existing messaging services &hellip; but that is today. The future may be...

Messaging apps are coming to Lightning, promising cheap, censorship-resistant and confidential transactions. But will people default to this “killer app”?

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Bitcoin’s 2019 in Lightning: What This Year Brought Us (Part 2)

On Lightning, Messaging Apps Emerge as Growing Use Case