BLIP: Encrypted Chat on Bitcoin Lightning – Bitcoin Magazine
A new Bitcoin-based encrypted chat platform has been announced at the Adopting Bitcoin conference, BLIP.
The new app, which has yet to be released publicly, leverages Hexum, a proprietary multi-layer encryption method also created by the team behind BLIP, which promises more secure communications than popular end-to-end (E2E) encrypted apps.
“WhatsApp and Signal use one static private key. The Hexum encryption method gives you one private key per message or per interaction. So hacking is very difficult,” Alejandro Muyshondt, National Security Advisor in El Salvador and co-founder of BLIP founding company High Voltage, told Bitcoin Magazine.
Hexum’s multi-layered encryption approach utilizes base64, AES, SHA256 and the addition of randomly generated words.
Muyshondt explained two other key differences between BLIP and the now popular E2E app setup: everything goes through Lightning and a phone number is not required.
A new user can start using BLIP with an email address and a password. At the end of BLIP, Lightning nodes are leveraged and each new user is given an address along with a hash file that acts as a backup file for the account.
“So [text] goes from your phone with the Hexum encryption to the Lightning network, then to a Hexum decryption method, and then to your phone,” Muyshondt said.
Phase one of BLIP is text only in this “peer to Lightning to peer” fashion. Phase two includes video calls and voice messages, where the connection handshake happens on Lightning and the rest goes through the Tor network, leveraging BitTorrent technology.
The creators of BLIP explained that the idea behind the project is not only to provide antifragile means of unstoppable communication, but also to serve as a driving force for bitcoin adoption.
“We talk about bitcoin adoption, and mostly people talk about the price, whether it’s a store of value or a medium of exchange, but there’s not enough discussion about the power of the network itself,” High Voltage co-founder Rick Fisher told Bitcoin Magazine. “We may have two, three or four percent of the world that have adopted bitcoin, but there’s a much larger majority right now that can get their arms around protecting their speech and the privacy of their speech.”
The need for free speech will drive a need for Bitcoin, he continued. “And because a user needs to run the app at rate, there’s an inherent need to take that step to go and buy a couple of dollars worth of bitcoin. And for 50 cents or a dollar, you can turn on the BLIP app and have absolutely encrypted communication.”
To encompass these use cases, the team behind BLIP also announced other applications at the conference, including BLIP Freedom and a Lightning wallet – all of which also leverage Hexum.
BE Freedom
BLIP Freedom is a bot-managed app that enables the creation of gestures with large-scale dissemination of information. Focused on freedom of assembly, it protects the privacy of like-minded people who want to communicate freely in the digital world.
“To get from the point where we are today to a bitcoin standard, there’s a huge chasm in there that will require us to be able to come together, put together, create movements, create the revolution, and that will happen through communication protocols,” said Fisher.
At BLIP Freedom, the organization’s only mission is to kickstart and open a channel to let people join and crowdfund it. A user can only be kicked out of a channel with a majority vote (75%) of channel users, a process administered by the bot.
“Assembly begins in the digital domain,” Fisher said. “If you want to start a movement, to create a revolution, it will start on a phone. And if the overlords don’t like it, they just shut it down. They did it in Canada, they’ve done it in Iran.”
“So, really, if you can’t organize at that first-team level and you can be deplatformed and it can be shut down, then it makes it really difficult to assemble and create a movement,” he continued. “BLIP Freedom is basically a movement-oriented app where people can fund it, you can receive donations and we can create, for any possible or potential movement, a messaging platform where we can spread large amounts of data to people without it being shut down.”
2 Wallet
Hexsum and BLIP actually stem from the development of 2Wallet, a custody-based bitcoin and Lightning wallet aimed at banking the unbanked in developing countries worldwide. Fisher told Bitcoin Magazine that the idea was born after meeting Muyshondt at Adopting Bitcoin 2021, who was closely following the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender by El Salvador.
“We were talking about the challenges ahead for El Salvador and adopting bitcoin, and at the time Chivo had just launched,” Fisher said, referring to the state-owned Chivo Wallet. “There wasn’t a lot of information, but we knew adoption was going to be difficult because Chivo was rolling out without Lightning. And so for merchant adoption, these things were going to be pretty difficult. The wallet itself was also a pretty big download.”
The two partners then had an idea to create a small downloadable wallet that was simple, fast and secure, Fisher said.
BLIP and 2Wallet will be made available for download within a few weeks, but a waiting list is already available.
