LTB #438 Bootstrapping Mobile Mesh Networks with Bitcoin Lightning

<p>On today’s episode of Let’s Talk Bitcoin! you’re invited to join Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murpy and special guest Richard Myers for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of ‘Mobile Mesh Networking’ technology and the open source LOT49 protocol built on top of lightning.</p> <p>Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don’t rely on static infrastructure and professional providers, mobile mesh networking allows the creation of inexpensive, high range, low bandwidth and power consumption ad-hoc networks that’ll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.</p> <p>According to Richard, Bitcoin’s Lightning is a what’s needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.</p> <p><em>“…the Lightning network currently sends payments from A to B to C and then all those intermediate nodes can connect a small fee if the payment is delivered at the end. All we’re doing is saying ‘Not only [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it’d be a SMS message. So you’re sending an SMS message along with a Lightning payment from A to B to C to D, and when D receives that message they return proof that it was delivered and that’s what flows back through the network. In the Lightning sense, that’s your pre-image. It’s computed from the message, that’s how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it.”</em></p> <p>But the way the Lightning network uses data natively isn’t ideal for mobile mesh. The open source&nbsp;<a href="https://globalmeshlabs.org/files/Lot49%20Protocol%20Whitepaper%20-%20DRAFT%200.8.5_20190611.pdf" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Lot49 protocol</a>&nbsp;is another layer on top of lightning that Richard says is necessary to make it work at scale while using mesh devices as an extremely low-bandwidth TOR-like privacy layer.</p> <p><em>“In many ways we’re not mak