Sparrow Messenger PoC met with skepticism over bloat and fees

dvd280¹ recently proposed a new utility for Monero, as a censorship resistant private messaging platform².

Today he announced³ Sparrow Messenger⁴, a proof-of-concept C++ barebone module for enabling private communication through the Monero blockchain:

Alice and Bob want to communicate privately.
Each of them has their own primary address.
Both want to establish a private way to communicate.
Each of them creates a secondary Monero address, and shares it only with the other.

For every character the user sends, a transaction fee is claimed by the networks miners.⁵

The community reacted with skepticism, pointing at several issues that might arise, mainly:

• blockchain bloat
• high fees
• no forward secrecy
• impractical for everyday use

rbrunner7⁶ pointed out the recent Monero transaction flood incident⁷:

Somebody made nearly 400,000 transactions, paid around USD 1,000 for it, and produced around 600 additional MB in the blockchain. For basically a joke, as the analysis seems to hint at. Now thousands of people have to store that half gig on their harddisk as long as they use Monero, i.e. maybe decades. And everybody who syncs from scratch has to go through those 400,000 nonsense transactions.⁸

HoboHaxor⁹ commented:

I prefer my encrypted communications to be ephemeral, not last until the end of the universe.¹⁰

AnarkioCrypto¹¹ urged the community to defend the status quo:

Please keep Monero as private, financially inclusive, KYC-free money. That’s why it exists.¹²

You can share your feedback for the dev in the discussion thread³ or by engaging with in the code repository⁴.