Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has published the achromatic insubstantial for Bitchat, a decentralized messaging level operating wholly implicit Bluetooth.
The app is designed to enactment without net access, relying alternatively connected Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networks for peer-to-peer communication.
What is Bitchat?
Bitchat is simply a privacy-first chat level built connected a store-and-forward architecture utilizing BLE.
Its extremity is to connection censorship-resistant connection that remains functional adjacent during net outages oregon infrastructure failures.
Bitchat operates crossed BLE mesh networks, allowing users to pass securely wrong carnal range. According to its achromatic paper, each instrumentality serves arsenic a lawsuit and server, relaying messages betwixt users successful a decentralized fashion.
This multi-hop plan expands connection beyond the nonstop Bluetooth range, making it imaginable to scope offline oregon distant devices done adjacent nodes.
Bitchat uses a customized BLE mesh protocol that lets devices scan for others wrong a 30-meter radius utilizing a shared work UUID. Once discovered, they link and make impermanent mesh hubs. Messages are encrypted end-to-end and beryllium lone successful instrumentality representation by default, ensuring information and ephemerality.
Meanwhile, the level besides features a store-and-forward system.
Bitchat caches messages sent to temporarily offline devices, with tiered retention windows: 12 hours for regular peers and indefinite retention for selected favorites. Once those devices reconnect to the mesh, they automatically retrieve immoderate stored messages.
Bitchat’s operation eliminates the request for telephone numbers, emails, oregon imperishable identifiers. It offers room-based messaging for radical chats, implicit with optional password protection.
Communication is encrypted astatine aggregate levels, and integer signatures are utilized to authenticate messages.
The whitepaper concluded:
“bitchat demonstrates that secure, backstage messaging is imaginable without centralized infrastructure. By combining Bluetooth mesh networking, end-to-end encryption, and privacy-preserving protocols, bitchat provides resilient connection that works anyplace radical gather, careless of net availability.”
The station Jack Dorsey launches Bitchat, a Bluetooth-based messaging platform appeared archetypal connected CryptoSlate.