Shortcomings with Whisper

Briefly on some shortcomings with Whisper. The main positive about it is that it is default in Ethereum and in production. It suffers from lack of scalability, and it’s DoS protection mechanism is poor.

Anonymity claims not rigorous
Lack of machine-readable spec
PoW bad for heterogeneous nodes
no incentive to run a node
scaling difficulties

Whisper at Status in practice

Briefly on what Whisper looks like in practice with Status.

Cluster with bootnodes, nodes, mailservers
Partial relaying on mobile
Lower PoW (isolated network)
Mailservers: HA requirement and direct TCP
(Topics and chat)

Futher reading

Whisper vs PSS comparison: https://our.status.im/whisper-pss-comparison/