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I wish this question got explored more; I think the fact that it doesn't suggests bad things. If you have money -- which is what btc is -- and you haven't thought about the uses to which money ought to be put to further your own flourishing, then there's something else going on that's probably not going to end well for you. But whatever. Go ahead and clutch the paper where you scribbled your unspent QR seed phrase in your bony hands as you go the grave. Hopefully it will be some comfort.
For people with a more expansive idea about money, here's an exercise that's relevant but that's surprisingly difficult: imagine your life 5 years from now if things go really well. Not ludicrously, sci-fi levels of well, but if every day you feel 80% satisfied that you've executed on the things you feel like you should be doing, whatever that is.
Where are you, after doing that for five years? The answer to that probably has bearing on where you can -- or should, one day -- allocate your money, whether it's btc or fiat. If that's who you want to be and where you want to be, money can help realize those aims. But in my experience, and in working w/ others, it's remarkably difficult to answer this question in concrete detail. Try it and see.
(A fuller version of this exercise can be had w/ JBP's self-authoring program, but the idea is well-supported in the literature beyond JBP. If you don't want to read a hundred papers or get a PhD, this is probably among the best $15 you could spend.)
I'll take this opportunity to also answer the OP's questions.
Is there any limitation in terms of the amount of characters that can be included in these messages?
I answered this above. Several hundred characters fewer than 1300, but the exact amount is variable and can be as low as 0 if your payment is very complex.
Could LN potentially serve as a complete substitute for emailing and messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Signal?
Most things are possible if you try hard enough, including this. But I personally think it's a bad idea. Lightning is designed for sending a specific kind of message: instructions for creating and redeeming HTLCs off-chain. You can use this system to send other kinds of messages, but most tools don't do a job well if they weren't designed for it, and lightning wasn't designed for routing general-purpose text messages. So even though it can do it, I recommend using something that was designed for that.
Is any of you using the apps i mentioned above in the post?
No. IMO they are neat as technical demos but not smart to actually use. Sending messages over the internet is a solved problem with many, many excellent implementations. If you want to know one I am currently interested in, look into briarproject.org.
What are the drawbacks of using LN for messaging purposes?
Every message is "attached to" a lightning payment which adds a point of failure to each message: if your payment fails, your message fails too. If your wallet runs out of money, your messages won't send. If your recipient uses an LSP, and they are down, your message fails. If your recipient uses a phone wallet and isn't online when you send the message, your message fails. (Well...zaplocker sort of fixes this...but not all the way. And not very well. A "real" async payments spec might fix this someday though.) In my day to day payments, lightning payments fail all the time, and I often have to keep switching wallets til I find one that works. It sucks, but since it's basically the only decentralized option, we keep working to improve it.
But this would be terrible with text messaging, where there are hundreds of excellent alternative options. Also, though it depends on your threat model, for most people it's NBD if a text message they created passes through one or more centralized intermediaries, as long as the end users' client software is responsible for encrypting and decrypting the messages. For most people, a threat model that allows corporations to know who you are messaging is not so bad if that corporation doesn't know what you told them. So I am fine with recommending tools like Telegram and Signal as better alternatives to Sphinx and Juggernaut.
How reliable are this messages when it comes to security and privacy?
They suffer from the limitations of lightning's privacy model, which you can read about here. Here is a key sentence from that essay: "Some of the top nodes on the network are capable of analyzing the source and destination of 50 to 72% of payments." If lots of people used lightning for messaging, those nodes could probably identify senders and recipients 50 to 72% of the time. (Not, however, message contents.)
If your threat model is one where you feel it is important to hide message "metadata" (that is, who is messaging whom, and when), it's useful to compare that with alternatives like Signal and Telegram. On those platforms, the companies who host the servers can read your metadata, but not your message contents (assuming you use their encryption features). And they sometimes reveal your metadata to their business partners and to governments. Do you trust them? If so, use them. Do you feel like a personal target? If so, look for something better.
If you're looking to lightning as a possible replacement, consider this: a government or corporation can request information from "top nodes" just like they can request information from Telegram or Signal. But "top nodes" might not comply. If they do, that doesn't necessarily mean you're just as worse off. Telegram can give them reliable information on who you're messaging 100% of the time you use them.
If you use lightning, the best they could get is 72%, with some limitations and caveats due to the imperfection of the heuristics (read the whole analysis I linked to earlier for more details). Also, since you pick your route, you can opt not to route through top nodes, further limiting the information available to them.
But can you do better than 50 to 72%? Earlier I mentioned Briar, which relies on the tor network as a transport and encryption layer for user messages. Tor's sends all traffic through at least 3 hops and therefore assumes that at least 1/3 of nodes on the network are "honest," i.e. not run by malicious entities. These assumptions improve for tor hidden services, which pass through 6 hops and are end to end encrypted. If only 1/3 of nodes are run by dishonest people, as tor assumes, and if you select hops at random, the chance that your message will pass through 6 randomly selected dishonest nodes is very small 1/729. (3 to the 6th power is 729)
So yeah, consider using a tor hidden service for messaging if you really need to hide who you're talking to. Briar makes this easy.
Agree that there's a lot of technological push rather than market pull Jimmy.
At the same time, the same thing could be said of the early internet in the mid 90s. I bet you they even said the same thing about telegraph. It took Heaviside rewriting Maxwell's equations to make them practical.
It takes time for general purpose technologies to get a foot hold and find applications. We will see how it plays out.
Personally, I'm trying to build AI applications in the most ethical, cypherpunk way possible that creates productivity gains & wealth for users.
Lyn covers the usual ground about how commodity money acquires its value. The story is that it starts as a collectible (cowrie shells is a famous example) that people value for aesthetic reasons; or perhaps they use a different commodity (e.g., wheat or tobacco) because people have need of those things, though those types of commodities also have their drawbacks, as she discusses. Eventually, the thing acquires an additional monetary premium on top of its commodity value.
In philosophical language, you would say that the value of the cowrie shell is grounded in its aesthetic appeal. The satisfaction you get bc something makes pretty jewelry, or because you can smoke or eat it, is the foundation that allows it to eventually take on a monetary premium. In terms more familiar to most bitcoiners, grounding is what Mises was talking about with his regression theorem. (Although note that many Austrians got wound around the axle whether btc could have value bc it violated the regression theorem.).
It makes sense to care very deeply about this initial process of monetization when the idea of money is new. But these days, we're obviously familiar with the concept of money. And practically speaking, this new money (btc) is grounded in an older kind of money (fiat) that happens when one is exchanged for the other. But this has always seemed precarious to me -- it's relatively easy for the government to squash formal exchange at scale. Not entirely, but to turn the fire hose off.
Given bitcoin's overwhelming grounding in fiat at this point of time, and its novelty and foreignness, what would it mean for the torrent to become a trickle?
Electrum has this since a while but slightly different:
https://i.postimg.cc/Fz9ZCjW6/2023-04-27-174238-514x401-scrot.png
Looks like this then;
https://i.postimg.cc/Pf2zrvFt/2023-04-27-174433-101x17-scrot.png
But I think how Peach formats it is better for BTC<>sat conversion, yes.
So 0.09 090 372 instead of 0.090 903 72