You are exceptionally polite speaking with lunatics like me (I've seen that multiple times from you). I'm [[grateful]] for your candid responses. In case it may be useful, I will continue thinking about it here: https://philosopher.life/#2021.11.17%20-%20HN%20Log%3A%20Ara.... You already know, but it is my duty to acknowledge that you work on behalf of Humanity and quite a bit may ride on your success. You have a difficult ship to steer without enough resources, and I wish you had military-level funding for what is ideally a military-grade project. If you ever directly need something from me, please let me know. Thank you again for your time and willingness to listen to me, sir.
Power usage is looking pretty positive so far; as long as we route the Matrix traffic over the routing topology rather than going full-mesh it should minimise radio usage (the main battery suck, other than screen).
For store-and-forward, honestly using P2P Nodes as intermediaries is an okay approach other than exposing metadata to them. Our plan in the longer term is to switch to loopix-style mixnets to obfuscate the store and forwarding, a la nym.
In terms of joining the network by deriving a private key from a passphrase... yup, that could be cute, although slightly terrifying in terms of the risk of weak passphrases :)
We're hoping to get the P2P network stable in the coming year (although we were also aiming for this year originally :P)