NIP-04 is absolutely nowhere near what Bitmessage did. A major goal of Bitmessage is to provide anonymity and hide almost all metadata. NIP-04 does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata, the metadata is completely public to everyone (unlike almost every other communications protocol/platform where this is usually only visible to some centralized third party).
In Bitmessage, messages do not have any address label. Apart from a timestamp, every message is an opaque blob to everyone except the sender and recipient. All messages are broadcast through the peer-to-peer network to every participant, who each simply tries to decrypt every single message they receive with their private key. This means the recipient of a message has the full anonymity set of all Bitmessage users.
In comparison, NIP-04 DMs is Babbys First Crypto Project (and was AFAICT not meant to be much more):
- Metadata like sender and recipient is provided in the clear in each message. The messages are public. Everyone can see who DMs whom when and how long the messages are.
- Sender sends the DM directly to one or more relays, recipient receives DM by asking relays for messages matching their pubkey. Relays may be able to learn some extra information about the sender and recipient, such as IP address, browser, operating system, and usage patterns.
- The encryption itself has issues like non-uniform AES key.
shafemtol /
npub1mh…anahj
2023-02-20 20:05:09
in reply to nevent1q…zfa9
Author Public Key
npub1mh94j7j7nwvzl7kwcg70fhxe67kdy50fccakmueq9jjf77zmc25svanahjPublished at
2023-02-20 20:05:09Event JSON
{
"id": "c09ebb99ad35925630210cf67e47cdad8800605b9f6a48ac4ae78d62d7a95000",
"pubkey": "ddcb597a5e9b982ffacec23cf4dcd9d7acd251e9c63b6df3202ca49f785bc2a9",
"created_at": 1676919909,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"60791c9f7e24e6f1ca2fd24347d20bf6e7fa196b86fae8670ab77395f82f06d3",
"",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"7b3f7803750746f455413a221f80965eecb69ef308f2ead1da89cc2c8912e968"
]
],
"content": "NIP-04 is absolutely nowhere near what Bitmessage did. A major goal of Bitmessage is to provide anonymity and hide almost all metadata. NIP-04 does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata, the metadata is completely public to everyone (unlike almost every other communications protocol/platform where this is usually only visible to some centralized third party).\n\nIn Bitmessage, messages do not have any address label. Apart from a timestamp, every message is an opaque blob to everyone except the sender and recipient. All messages are broadcast through the peer-to-peer network to every participant, who each simply tries to decrypt every single message they receive with their private key. This means the recipient of a message has the full anonymity set of all Bitmessage users.\n\nIn comparison, NIP-04 DMs is Babbys First Crypto Project (and was AFAICT not meant to be much more):\n- Metadata like sender and recipient is provided in the clear in each message. The messages are public. Everyone can see who DMs whom when and how long the messages are.\n- Sender sends the DM directly to one or more relays, recipient receives DM by asking relays for messages matching their pubkey. Relays may be able to learn some extra information about the sender and recipient, such as IP address, browser, operating system, and usage patterns.\n- The encryption itself has issues like non-uniform AES key.",
"sig": "7276b76bf775af63adeef0b5ee9b914ee37678bce80b7718582766b53d5e050ad4b30506180e279cc26d2414523dd9886f43a6a1681fc485bc7ad8cddf44fdcb"
}