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On today\u2019s episode of Let\u2019s Talk Bitcoin! you\u2019re 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 \u2018Mobile Mesh Networking\u2019 technology and the open source LOT49 protocol built on top of lightning.

Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don\u2019t 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\u2019ll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.

According to Richard, Bitcoin\u2019s Lightning is a what\u2019s needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.

\u201c\u2026the 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\u2019re doing is saying \u2018Not only [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it\u2019d be a SMS message. So you\u2019re 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\u2019s what flows back through the network. In the Lightning sense, that\u2019s your pre-image. It\u2019s computed from the message, that\u2019s how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it.\u201d

But the way the Lightning network uses data natively isn\u2019t ideal for mobile mesh. The open source Lot49 protocol 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.

\u201cIn many ways we\u2019re not making a new protocol, we\u2019re literally using lightning. Lot49 is custom communication protocol that\u2019s optimized for mesh. For example, right now there\u2019s a 1300 byte onion that\u2019s used to route messages over the internet and that\u2019s very important because you lose a lot of privacy\u2026 you lose all your privacy\u2026 if you were to just send messages over the internet without onion routing.

We\u2019re sending over more or less a physical TOR network since it\u2019s going from node to node, not through a central ISP who can associate who you\u2019re trying to pay. We\u2019re also doing it over a low bandwidth network, so if you were sending 1300 bytes it may not sound like much in the age of the internet but we\u2019re talking about devices that [have a maximum data transmission capacity of] about a kilobyte a minute so that\u2019s a significant amount of the bandwidth that you have [tied up just in the web\u2019s onion routing]

So for example with LOT49, we take out the onion and we use the native routing at the mesh device [level] which is optimized for mesh communications. And there\u2019s a few other little changes we make like that in order to reduce the bandwidth by chunking up messages\u2026 the ultimate goal is to minimize the lightning protocol overhead so that there is more bandwidth available for data\u2026 For things like sending an SMS and as bandwidth increases there may be things like internet protocol\u2026\u201d

Credits

This episode of Let\u2019s Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Richard Myers. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.

Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash