While most Bitcoin fans are enthusiastic about how digital money can change the financial system, others are looking at how its Blockchain technology can change the world.

One of the ways it the Blockchain could do this is by serving as a means to verify the existence of files, and make them available from multiple sources. There’s also an initiative looking into utilizing the Blockchain to create a universal passport that will replace government issued passports, and therefore make it easier for people to validate their existence.

Now, a computer science student from the Netherlands has come up with a cheap and censorship-resistant messaging service built on top of the Blockchain.

Krzysztof Okupski related in an interview with CoinDesk how his Blockchain-based messaging service began life as a graduation project at the Eindhoven University of Technology. While looking for a topic related to Bitcoin for his graduation project, his graduation supervisor, Dr Boris Škorić, came up with the idea to use the blockchain for evading censorship – Okupski jumped on the idea and immediately began working to make it happen.

Okupski is hopeful that his software can one day help people to evade censorship.

“Binding a payments network like bitcoin together with an anti-censorship system forces any repressive government to either accept or abandon both. Abandoning it might not be very smart, however, since bitcoin is an active and growing currency that an economy could benefit from,” Okupski states.

How it works

Blockchaim messaging is a fairly simple concept. It rides on actual transactions being recorded in the Bitcopin Blockchain. The messaging service connects to a user’s Bitcoin Core Wallet and recirculates funds within it. To transmit messages, the software embeds data in the building blocks of each transaction such as signatures, public keys, and transacted amounts.

Okupski explained that since funds are being transferred between addresses that are always owned by the user, the funds will remain in his possession, which means no significant amount of Bitcoin is lost, aside from the minimal mining fee for transmitting messages.

The recipient of the Blockchain message needs the same client, or Bitcoin wallet provider, along with an ‘identifier’ which is provided by the author of the text or the sender. The identifier determines what part of the Blockchain should be read. This ensures that only specific parts of the Blockchain will be available to the recipient.

The downside

This software may offer a more secure and censorship-free exchange of messages, but if it catches on it this may result in ‘Blockchain bloat’ by massively increasing the number of transactions it records. This could lead to an increase in mining fees, as well as a delay in transactions, but Okupski believes this is unlikely.

“If my messaging system really catches on and becomes very popular this might indeed be an issue,” Okupski said. “But as long as it’s merely used by a handful of news services, it’s negligible. Besides, blockchain bloat is a problem with or without this software.”

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