No, you always send a dummy message the appointed time.

If you have a real message, or a network maintenance message, that substitutes for a dummy message. You never send messages other than at the appointed time.

Delayed or dropped messages won't matter, since you only send a message at the appointed time. So the network is literally indistinguishable from one where you have sent no messages to all participants and to even someone with complete control of the network.

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mafuy 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Do messages have a visible receiver address of any kind? In that case, you're out of luck. The only way to do make this statistically sound would involve an insane amount of messages, rendering it impossible.

	▲	impossiblefork 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, of course there isn't a visible receiver address. You have a list of peers, P1,...,PN, every second, at a specific pre-decided time, slightly fuzzed to avoid timing stuff, you send a message to each of them. If you don't put one in, it's a dummy message chosen at random and encrypted. But if you have a message, you send that at the appointed time. Consequently, from the outside of the system, from the PoV of someone who does not have the keys, its behaviour is indistinguishable from a system where no one is sending any messagess at all.