I made a presentation about an exciting new application of the goTenna Mesh SDK for sending Bitcoin transactions made by our collaborators at Samourai Wallet.
The people I talked to here in Prague were very excited by the idea of using goTennas for sending Bitcoin, but also generally about mesh technology and breaking free from centralized communication monopolies.
Hi,
I watched your speech at #HCPP18 and am so excited about this new technology. In my opinion it is great that the usage of the mesh network is not restricted to one single use case but open for all kind of developers.
I have one specific question. If I use Samurai to send my transaction over Tx-Tenna and the goTenna-device will the TX be relayed by every other goTenna-device or just by the ones that are linked to Tx-Tenna. And what is the case for other type of messages?
Thanks a lot for this great technology.
Regards,
Tobias
Sorry I didn’t make that more clear in my talk. The relay nodes do not need to run TxTenna, only the transaction sender and the gateway to the internet. The relay nodes can be stand-alone goTenna radios in stand-alone relay mode even.
TxTenna is not currently built for iOS but it’s open source and someone could certainly port it. Samourai Wallet is also only Android, but they are working on an iOS version. You could use it with an Android tablet also, it doesn’t have to be a mobile phone.
Does the Samourai Wallet app produce a file that could be sent via email?
If so how big would that file be?
I’d love to get this functionality on a device that could sent it over HF radio. The mesh is a great short range network but It needs a way to make long range hops. The winlink system is a was to send email over HF Radio.
I totally agree that to be a successful replacement for current centralized systems we will need to have gateways using different modes.
People are already talking about adding a satellite uplink to the TxTenna gateway node; HF would be another great addition.
The way I see it, goTenna Mesh can be a low cost easy way for mobile users in a city to communicate and then a smaller number of longer range gateways can connect cities and ultimately connect to the global internet.
One of the cool things about sending Bitcoin transactions around is that they do not need to be encrypted. They are only cryptographically signed, so restrictions about sending encrypted data over amateur bands should not apply.
Samourai Wallet generates a Bitcoin transaction (tx) that can be copy/pasted into an email. It will vary in size depending on the number of inputs and outputs. I just did a test with two inputs and two outputs and it was 836 bytes of hex. I didn’t use compression, but that should reduce the size somewhat.
You might also find this presentation by Elaine Ou and Nick Szabo interesting regarding HF broadcast of transactions:
I think it would be great to tie into the Winlink system as well.