Samourai Wallet Launches Bitcoin Through SMS to Combat Censorship

The innovator of the Bitcoin privacy wallet, Samourai Wallet have announced a brand new proprietary app Pony Direct. It is a transaction payment method that also acts as a relay which is used to send bitcoins through SMS i.e short message service. SMS that is popularly used for texting can be used now creatively to combat the censorship.  

The Pony Direct App introduced by Samourai Wallet

Samourai Wallet boasts of building a software that Bitcoin deserves but won’t be built by Silicon Valley or allowed by regulators. T Dev D of Samourai Wallet told to a media source about this new development. He explained that even when the internet connections are shut down or blocked, one can use Pony Direct app to forward the bitcoin transactions via SMS. It has been mentioned that by specifically using this app to send the bitcoin transactions through SMS to an Android device which is internet connected and cooperating will route around any internet censorship practices in the sender’s location.

It has been further noted that Pony Direct was developed with the intention of open sourcing it. Hence, it was developed in-house as a proof of concept app that has an open invitation for developer participation in the Mule Projects as a whole. Following their open source code, Samourai wallet has made Pony Direct available on Github.

T Dev D explained in detail that governments make use of internet censorship to shut down the insurgents. Moreover, if bitcoin among other cryptocurrencies become a real threat, the first response of govt. officials would be just this. Talking about 2016 shut down of social media access by countries like Iraq, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Turkey and Bangladesh among many others, he mentioned that SMS might the way around such kind of scenarios.

According to a media source, when asked how exactly SMS operates within the Samourai Wallet, T Dev D clarified in detail that:

“The issue is that as SMS can only contain up to 160 characters, a way must be found to send as many SMS as possible to communicate the bitcoin transaction to the party capable of broadcasting it on the network. The first SMS in the sequence contains info on the total number of SMS in the series, the hash ID that must be matched at the end, a batch ID, a sequencing number, and a portion of the actual transaction hex. The following SMS contains a sequencing number, the batch ID, and more transaction hex data. Once the receiving device has accepted the expected number of SMS for the same batch from the same incoming number, the transaction data is extracted from each message and the entire transaction is re-assembled and pushed out to the bitcoin network.”

Commenting on the overall status of the project, he mentioned that they are moving ahead with their roadmap and plans to have its iOS version by the end of this year.

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