Blockchain Commuication Could Replace Email, IM, add Trustless Security Government surveillance has become a fact of life for anyone communicating digitally these last few years, and it’s been a bumpy transition for those that value privacy. Even with the adoption of PGP keys and VPNs, options for secure day-to-day communication are scarce. End-to-end encryption is a clunky mess for email and IM, and the commercial services that automate the process rely on the assumption that they won’t be subpoenaed or broken into.
Enter BitMessage, an open source project that has re-implemented Bitcoin’s block-and-transfer system to decentralise and automate encrypted communication. This protocol solves the biggest problem in secure communications: trusting a third party to safeguard your data.
If you’ve used a bitcoin wallet, PyBitMessage (the default BitMessage client) will feel eerily familiar to you. You generate a key and passphrase on your first startup, instead of a transactions page you have an inbox, and your contacts have unique strings that look like bitcoin addresses. Everything is encrypted end-to-end on the network, and messages are handled like transactions on Bitcoin’s blockchain. The main departure is that transactional mixing is a natively implemented feature – meaning that even capture of the encrypted data you send is incredibly difficult for potential eavesdroppers.
http://bitcoinist.net/blockchain-could-replace-email-im-encryption-with-trustless-security/
