Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks

Who would you pay for sending messages? That's your centralization point. Alternatively if you allow "starting balance", how would you prevent from making a lot of accounts for spam sending?

imagine building a lightning client into this.

Lightning network depends on… the internet… so if both clients are on the internet why not just send messages over that?

You could have a way to earn credits which would allow your own messages to get sent. i.e. it wouldn't be about money.

Ontop of that, I think payment isn't critical. You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself - all you need then is to limit how much power you're prepared to spend on it. What does it matter to you if 100 people use your phone or none? ....other than power.

To put it another way, I think money would introduce a commercial motive which would end up gobbling up the system like bitcoin mining.

I think that money would only be used to send messages, as a way to prevent excessive spam. There needs to be some limitation. In whatsapp it's unique number or phones. Once you send too much spam from one number, it's burned. If you have anonymous network, how do you otherwise prevent from making new accounts for sending spam? If it is invite-only network, then it's pretty small problem.

I don't think relaying messages would require that much power and as you said, "You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself".

Privacy?

"Just encrypt things" might be your reply. TOR folks have been fighting an uphill battle for ages with that as their main weapon.

eCash would be better, but someone needs to be connected to the mint.

This is the same problem as bootstrapping a cryptocurrency. There are various ways, none very good. You could mine it with proof of work. You could distribute it widely to important figures, such as operators of big relays (as long as the internet stays up, there are going to be people sending messages inter-city through the internet instead of by plane). Perhaps you give half to big relay operators and half to their currently connected clients, that would incentivize people to get on the network early and try it out.

LN is an onion routed network, and has some privacy - notably, sender privacy, as the sender does not need to be known to the recipient. The recipient however is not private, but there have been proposals for rendevouz routing which could also anonymize them.

LN payments are based on Sphinx[1], but they don't leverage the full capabilities of it. Sphinx only allows for single-use replies.

The proposals for bidirectional anonymity involve using HORNET[2], which builds on Sphinx (specifically, it uses Sphinx's single-reply message to establish a HORNET connection), and enables sender-receiver anonymity and bidirectional transfer beyond single-reply messages.

It has also been proposed to include the use of TARANET[3] to prevent deanymization via traffic analysis.

[1]:https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/Sphinx_Oakland09.pdf

[2]:https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.05724v1

[3]:https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1802.08415

Yeah, it’d be horrible UX