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ETH Killer, Private Messaging and Change in BTC – 4 Crypto Experiments

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Bitcoin

Blockchain

Ethereum Lightning Network Smart Contract

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Sead Fadilpašić

Journalist

Sead Fadilpašić

About Author

Sead specializes in writing factual and informative articles to help the public navigate the ever-changing world of crypto. He has extensive experience in the blockchain industry, where he has served...

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Last updated:

June 25, 2023

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From coin killers, over private messages, to stacking sats. The Cryptoverse rests on innovation and innovative technology. It’s no wonder then that we often see interesting new gadgets or digital solutions to existing problems, or the problems we didn’t even know exist. Occasionally, we’re even witnesses to massive strides in the evolution of technology.

This time, however, we’re bringing you four particularly interesting recent developments / experiments in the Cryptoworld (in no particular order).

Ether Killer – dETH

Just recently we’ve talked about Ethereum (ETH) killers, and now we run into a seemingly simple one. It comes in the form of the aptly titled The Undead Ethereum Token (dETH) – a provably dead token, as the blog post says. It was created as a Halloween experiment on the blockchain by the co-creator of the famous Occupy Wall Street protest, Micah White.

White claims that any and all ETH sent to the provided smart contract, aka Hades, “is irrevocably killed and removed from the economy. It is not just burned, it is dead,” writes the creator of this destroyer. When ETH is burned, it’s actually sent to the 0x0 address, while in this case, ETH gets transferred to a contract that self-destructs and takes that ETH with it, White explains. Those who send ETH to this contract are rewarded in dETH, which functions like other ERC-20 tokens, and the price of dETH increases by 0.1% after a purchase. Furthermore, as 3 ETH is the block reward, destroying more than that in one transaction means destroying more ETH than is created through block rewards, and will bring the destroyer a 30% bonus.

Messages on BTC via ‘Whatsat’

Using a clever and effective play of words to name it, Lighting Labs engineer Joost Jager created ‘Whatsat’ – a decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P), instant messaging protocol, made for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. This effectively means that this experimental proof of concept can be used to send encrypted messages without the need to use any sort of a third party. This also means that it’s censorship-resistant as there is no central entity that controls it, and governments can’t exert any pressure or influence over it, its creators, or its users.

“Does instant messaging over Lightning have killer application potential?,” asked Jager, describing his protocol as “true end-to-end encrypted, onion-routed, censorship-resistant, private messaging,” and adding: “The world needs censorship-resistant chatting and with Lightning, compensating the network for message relay comes naturally.” He additionally explained that only the final recipient can decrypt the message, and that paying on the current Lightning Network is not a requirement, but that it may change in the future. “Price to be decided, could be millisats per message,” Jager says.

Self-Destructing Messages on Kumo.chat

Combining certain features of the two previous stories now for another interesting proof of concept – if you were thinking of private messaging using Lightning and paying with BTC, but you want your interactions to commit suicide when you’re done, this may be a solution for you. Kumo Chat allows its users to create an anonymous chat room, where messages are never saved to any database, the creators claim.

How does it work exactly? Well, the main – and quite an interesting principle – is that you rent a room for 24 hours. For example, a user says he paid 10,000 sats for a room. You can then share that room with friends, and the idea is that you can chat freely without worrying about third parties, or monitoring, government control, or personal and shared information being saved in a database and/or abused. The room will disappear after 24 hours.

Change in BTC via LightningCashback

Another curious Lightning Network solution in the form of a LightningCashback POS (point of sale) plug-in. Five people participating in the Chainhack (blockchain hackathon) 4th edition came up with a way for you to stack sats and/or avoid carrying around coins you got as change after paying for a service. User ‘21isenough’ shared this LightningCashback solution on both Twitter and Reddit, where it seems to have gathered a number of supporter who appreciate this idea.

The accompanying video shows how it works. It gives a seller the option to return the change either in fiat or in crypto. A person pays, gets a larger paper bill in its fiat form as change, but chooses for the seller to convert what-would-be coins into sats, printing a receipt with a QR code for the user to collect their BTC. It may also be technically possible for the “forward-thinking retailers or restaurant chains operating in countries with high awareness/adoption of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies,” to adopt this project.