This repo is a fork of lnd that demonstrates how the Lightning Network
can be used as an end-to-end encrypted, onion-routed, censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer chat messages protocol.
Recent changes to the protocol made it easier then before to attach arbitrary data to a payment. This demo leverages that by attaching a text message and a sender signature.
A Lightning payment delivers the message, but no actual money is paid. Because the sender uses a random payment hash, the receiver is not able to settle the payment. The failure message that is returned to the sender serves as a delivery confirmation.
This means that chatting is currently free. However, there is a future in which 'free failures' don't exist anymore. Nodes may start charging a prepaid relay fee and/or start rate limiting sources that produce too many failures. In that case, chatting over Lightning may switch to actually settling the messaging payments and dropping off a few millisats at every hop.
A version of whatsat that does pay for messages is located here.
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Set up a Lightning Node as usual and open a channel to a well-connected node.
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Run
lncli chat <pubkey>to start chatting with your chosen destination.If running
lncli chatwithout a pubkey, a pubkey to send to can be set by typing/<pubkey>in the send box.
This code only serves to demonstrate the concept and doesn't pass the required quality checks. Use with testnet sats only.