Thanks for starting this thread @Ethernian sounds like you are looking for something like a standards body that is between academic research and individual (business) use cases.
I know I’m late to the party, but I’m investigating the use of Whisper to coordinate private trading of securities for a current client, and I’d like to pitch it to future clients in creating a decentralized exchange of encrypted assets (using AZTEC Protocol) or coordinate voting on DAOs such as https://alchemy.daostack.io/daos. These tx’s would otherwise be expensive / prohibitive to new users.
For private trading, these messages require encryption to conceal the price of the trade, but are ephemeral (expire after a few days / weeks). The client wishes to use a conventional database to store these trades, as metadata concealing is not important for this particular use case.
From a dapp developer / business perspective, here are some improvements and concerns from me and my client, that would help me recommend Whisper with fewer reservations:
- Most importantly: storage of keys on nodes gives node operators an ability to eavesdrop and forge, so each user would have to run their own server (like Secure Scuttlebutt), and it’s important to support browser-first implementations (like Status’s
murmurorethereumjs-client) - Unclear incentives to mix routing with other whisper nodes at the moment. Running our own private node will allow our own users to coordinate their on-chain trades.
- Map of Whisper nodes and key performance indicators (KPI in business speak) like uptime, dropped messages, etc. using Grafana graphs, to see the community’s support of the infrastructure, like ethstats.net
- Better documentation, specs, and education, on a single website. Status has made great progress on user-friendly tutorials (that’s how I first got started a few months ago), but more different perspectives and companies collaborating together yield better ideas. As a much simpler example, RadarRelay has made a great resource available at weth dot io and EF about Rinkeby at rinkeby dot io
If anyone is interested in collaborating on the above in an open source-like / standards body way, please reply here, or DM me, or find me on ethereum/whisper Gitter (I’m @cryptogoth everywhere).
I could use some help in proposing a grant from Web3 Foundation, as it’s most closely aligned to their mandates
Cheers, looking forward to the future.