goTenna, the mesh networking company for decentralized communications technology has announced that TxTenna is now available to the general public on the Google Play Store. TxTenna is a platform that allows for truly decentralized bitcoin transactions, allowing users to send bitcoin without an internet connection, cell signal or any other sort of centralized connectivity.
The app was built by the makers of Samourai Wallet, the advanced and secure bitcoin wallet, and leverages goTenna’s Aspen Grove mesh protocol and goTenna Mesh devices. TxTenna enhances the privacy, accessibility and censorship-resistance tenets central to the global Bitcoin network.
While lauded as one of the most private and secure types of currencies available, the majority of bitcoin transactions are all still routed using traditional Internet ‘broadcasts’ that travel through centralized carriers and ISPs that can censor or record metadata for every transaction.
In the United States and Europe, these carriers and ISPs are consolidated to just a few major providers, who control consumer access to those services and do so sometimes at the peril of public safety. In other countries throughout the world, these networks are often state-controlled and subject to censorship, surveillance or even being shut off.
“Bitcoin transactions are not as private or unstoppable as many think. The reality is that local carriers or ISPs can associate subscribers with their transactions or censor Bitcoin transactions altogether. TxTenna provides an answer to these problems by decentralizing the critical transport layer to enable truly decentralized bitcoin transactions.”
Here’s how TxTenna works:
- Download the Samourai Wallet and TxTenna for Android and pair the app to a goTenna Mesh device
- From there, you can create and sign an offline transaction to send bitcoin to anyone in the world and broadcast it to the Bitcoin network
- Depending on the distance to an online mesh node running TxTenna, the bitcoin transaction will relay across other goTenna Mesh devices until the transaction is received by the final online, Android phone
- While the online gateway node must have an Android device that is also running TxTenna and paired to a goTenna Mesh device, intermediate relay nodes do not need to run TxTenna
- Once the online gateway node receives the bitcoin transaction, their phone will send that transaction to an open source pushTX server which sends back a confirmation to the online gateway node via the internet
- Once the gateway node receives confirmation, it returns that information to the original bitcoin sender, again via the mesh network
The news follows on goTenna’s recent release of Push for Help, a first-of-its-kind emergency beacon system that leverages mesh networking to create a digital safety net in times of distress. The free app is available now for Android devices via the Google Play Store, with iOS functionality expected in 2019.
