A messaging service baked into Bitcoin structure to provide maximum security and anonymityInspirationBitcoin plays a major partTwo Programs
Inspiration
The 25-year-old student’s graduation supervisor, Dr. Boris Škori?, hit upon the idea of using the bitcoin “blockchain”, the distributed database that acts as a ledger of Bitcoin transactions, to evade censorship – an idea that Okupski jumped on for his graduation project at the Eindhoven University of Technology. “Due to the humanitarian nature of the project, I immediately agreed that it was a good idea and went to work.” he told Coindesk. As Okupski describes in his thesis – titled (Ab)using Bitcoin for an Anti-Censorship Tool (PDF)- freedom of speech should be a fundamental human right, and is outlined as such in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In spite of that, a significant part of the world’s population is “deprived of this basic right,” he says. He cited China as the obvious example.
Bitcoin plays a major part
He has managed to weave his messaging platform into the workings of Bitcoin blockchain. Thus making the messages in built into the Bitcoin structure, not only making them untraceable but also un-erasable. So a country like China will be forced to allow this messaging platform if t wants to deal/deals in Bitcoins. Okupski says, since it’s the first virtual currency and laws haven’t caught up to it yet (which puts it beyond the reach of existing legal frameworks), but also because any country that bans it would be shooting itself in the foot, from an economic standpoint.
Two Programs
The first program works on the assumption that payments are encoded into a strings of messages. Thus a succession of payments are being transferred from one party to another, and both parties have agreed that a given amount equals a given letter. In essence, the service connects to a user’s local Bitcoin Core wallet and then recirculates the funds within that wallet. The development costs of this messaging system is also very negligent, approximately $0.25. In fact, the service chaining multiple messages together can also be used to send news blocks and not just instant messages. The trick is this: whenever a message is sent, the last transaction output is memorized by the messaging system and used as the first transaction input in the next transaction chain. This allows for transactions to be chained together and messages to be linked and, given a starting point, to be read chronologically. The program that posts the messages creates a million Bitcoin accounts, free of charge, after which money is transferred backwards and forwards between those accounts. The number of different accounts, and the fact that you can divide an amount of money into multiple parts, offers a lot of options. The currency itself is extremely small; one Bitcoin consists of 100 million ‘Satoshi’, and all amounts are expressed in Satoshi. The program that posts the messages converts them into a chain of transactions, and sends them out into the Bitcoin network. Although it sounds promising, the system is only a proof of concept as of now. But this has shown the door to build services that can evade government intrusion and censorship in case it becomes mainstream in future.
