The Juggernaut Messaging App Will Allow Confidential Chats on Top of Bitcoin
June 3, 2020 by Jeff Fawkes
The new Juggernaut Messaging application built by a developer John Cantrell is presented on Medium. It allows people to communicate using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
Also Read: Ai-Blockchain Issued Groundbreaking Patent for Cryptographic Digital Asset Ledger Solutions
The new app is for tech-savvy gigs who want absolute privacy and want to support Bitcoin. Messages within the app are going via the Tor network. They also equipped with end-to-end encryption layers. The messages are fully encrypted, and not connected to your phone number, bank card, e-mail, or else. Also, there is no special token that represents the app.
What you need to jump on board is the LND node and some Bitcoin to top up the account. The author of the app is happy that, by some moment in time, LND devs have added support for custom data fields. This will allow the users to send out data and attach payments to it, all in one request.
Per the design of the app, it looks like any other messenger. The official screenshots featured here, it looks pretty much like Telegram. But the icons are not round. Well, and it’s minimalist, not bright, and full of windows like the Viber or another one.
Juggernaut allows you to send and receive messages, scroll quickly, search, delete and preview messages with timestamps.
Juggernaut: A Messenger With Native LN Support
The messenger allows you to send money to people using direct contact. With Juggernaut, you don’t have to put trust into shady Telegram or Viber bots. Juggernaut was hard to implement, as the developer writes because it has high privacy standards.
You won’t be able to send messages in case your wallet is empty. And you will have the ability to create, top-up, and close Lightning Channels. Also, all the rates and payments per conversation are adjustable.
The chats will allow creating simple invoices for the counterparty. You specify the amount in satoshis, add information about the payment if needed, and send it over like a normal message or approve someone’s request.
Costs Of Messaging in Satoshis
One of the most interesting features of the app is that all of the messages have satoshis attached to them. For instance, when you send a message to someone, you send 1 satoshi to this person automatically. In case you receive a message from someone, you also receive a minimum of one satoshi.
Since the conversations will be routed via LN nodes, there are additional fees. You will have to deduct a small fraction of your coin reserve to pay to the relays. The financial part of the problem seems like smart, but needs testing:
“Ideally you will open channels with ‘message-friendly’ routing nodes. A node might be considered message-friendly if it advertises low fees for low valued payments. This means you could pay as little as 1 millisatoshi per message. At current exchange rates that would allow you to send over 13,000,000 messages for $1. Talk about unfairly cheap.
If you’d like to avoid routing fees entirely you could instead pay a one-time on-chain fee and open a direct channel with your chat partner to enable unlimited free messages.”
The developers are following the crypto space traditions and have promised to improve the messenger even more. The app author claims that Joost Jagger, Alex Bosworth and Jack Mallers were helping him very much.
What do you think about Lightning Network apps and development? Share the opinions below.
Image via David Andrade , PixaBay