There have been some asynchronous secure messenger projects in the past (Pond and Secure Scuttlebutt come to mind). High latency is really important for defeating traffic analysis, but people are so unaccustomed to it now because of all the engineering work that's gone into successfully reducing the latency of almost all of our communication systems. Accepting high-latency messaging as a defense against traffic analysis might involve psychology even more than engineering: cultivating patience.
Latency stops being a technical parameter and becomes a side effect of interaction. What matters is not delivery speed, but how meaning accumulates over time.
There’s no single “correct” latency. It’s not a fixed parameter but a variable tied to the threat model and the economics of surveillance.
For low-risk, everyday coordination, minutes might be sufficient. For high-value intelligence, latency needs to be long enough to break the temporal correlation between input and outcome.
If monitoring a 24-hour window costs an adversary $X, the goal is to stretch the window until the cost of semantic inference exceeds the value of the information being inferred. Beyond that point, surveillance becomes economically irrational.
In that sense, latency functions like a currency: users “spend” time to buy lower observability. How much they’re willing to spend depends entirely on what they’re protecting and from whom.
