Issue #718: WeChat, but without the surveillance

Last November, we covered the emergence of WHATSAT, a demo showing that individuals can use the Lightning Network as a P2P messaging protocol to communicate directly with each other. At the time we stated,

"After seeing the WHATSAPP demo, it's not hard to envision people building apps and user interfaces on top of these primitives that allow users to send payable invoices with messages attached in a P2P fashion."

Well, the Sphinx app is here to provide this exact product to the market. As you can see from the demo and description above, Sphinx users are able to send end-to-end encrypted messages to each other in an app that looks as sleek as Telegram. They are able to use video chat that leverages the open-source video conferencing project, jitsi. A great alternative to Zoom, which is proving to be an app riddled with spyware.

On top of all of this, Sphinx is allowing users to send payment request and sats to each other in a peer-to-peer fashion. This is a massive development and it gives me hope that we will be able to avoid a digital panopticon enabled by apps like WeChat, Whats App, and Ali Pay.

If the vision is executed, Sphinx will enable a peer-to-peer economy run on cell phones that preserves privacy and is censorship resistant. Users will be able to link the app to their full nodes, giving them full control of the funds they send and receive via the app.

The future is here, it's bright and very unevenly distributed!

Final thought...

I need sleep.