Here’s What BlockStamp Communicator’s Sword-In-The-Stone Encryption Is All About
In recent articles we’ve given a technical overview how BlockStamp Communicator works. Check them out here and here.
Still struggling to wrap your head around it? Here’s a lighter, more mythological perspective based on the legend of the Sword in the Stone. You can imagine that you’re Merlin and King Arthur :)
The TLDR version of this legend is that Merlin put a sword in a stone as a test for the true king of England. Only the proper king would be able to pull it out.
When sending a message, you’ll be like Merlin putting the sword in the stone.
Instead of using magic, you’ll be using blockchain technology.
OK, it isn’t a perfect comparison. Your goal is slightly different than Merlin’s — to stay private as you send the message.
But think about it like this: nobody could effectively mess with the legendary Merlin. And nobody will be able to mess with you when you send a BlockStamp Communicator message. You have the option of sending
- a technically untraceable message or
- a practically untraceable message that probably won’t be worth anyone’s effort to try to crack.
You’re totally covered insofar as that
- the message itself is encrypted and
- the act of sending the message is also effectively obscured. As far as we’re aware, that’s unique among private communication apps.
The BlockStamp blockchain, like the stone, stays there forever.
The stone is obviously not the focus of the original legend. But it is worth thinking about in your own personal legend with BlockStamp Communicator.
Messages are placed into the BlockStamp blockchain forever. That means you’ll have access to it forever.
It might not seem like a big deal if you’re used to limitless Gmail accounts and so on. But in terms of secure peer-to-peer messaging, this perpetual access is a big improvement over other solutions we’ve seen in the past.
Practically, that means you can close your BlockStamp Communicator app for a week or even months and then open it up to receive all the messages that you have been sent in the meantime. A simple feature that we haven’t seen effectively implemented in other solutions based around similar principles.
Only you can fully “draw” your message from the blockchain.
Here’s where you’re like King Arthur.
Fully drawing your message from the blockchain means:
- pulling the message from the blockchain and
- decrypting it with the technical magic of your private RSA key.
In the original legend, everyone could see the sword in the stone. Many would-be kings tried to pull it out and failed.
Similarly, everyone can see that your message — specifically, data that could be a message — is sitting in the blockchain. It’s public.
But only you can identify that data as your message and decrypt it. Your destiny has arrived :)
You’ll be able to start using BlockStamp Communicator soon!
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a Bitcoin blockchain fork hosting an ecosystem of fair play apps, including a true-odds multiplayer crypto gambling platform, a decentralized marketplace listing optimizer, and a private messenger with sword-in-the-stone encryption (launching soon).
