Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies throughout a distant video listening to held by subcommittees of the U.S. Home of Representatives Power and Commerce Committee on “Social Media’s Function in Selling Extremism and Misinformation” in Washington, March 25, 2021.
CNBC
Block CEO Jack Dorsey spent the weekend constructing Bitchat, a brand new decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works fully over Bluetooth mesh networks, with no web, central servers, telephone numbers or emails required.
The Twitter co-founder introduced Sunday that the beta model is reside on TestFlight, with a full white paper accessible on GitHub.
In a put up on X Sunday, Dorsey referred to as it a private experiment in “bluetooth mesh networks, relays and retailer and ahead fashions, message encryption fashions, and some different issues.”
Bitchat permits ephemeral, encrypted communication between close by gadgets. As customers transfer by way of bodily area, their telephones type native Bluetooth clusters and go messages from system to system, permitting them to achieve friends past normal vary — even with out Wi-Fi or cell service.
Sure “bridge” gadgets join overlapping clusters, increasing the mesh throughout larger distances. Messages are saved solely on system, disappear by default and by no means contact centralized infrastructure — echoing Dorsey’s long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.
The launch builds on his assist of Damus and Bluesky and displays a broader marketing campaign to decentralize all the pieces from social media to funds.
Just like the Bluetooth-based apps used throughout Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to maintain working even when the web is blocked, providing a censorship-resistant method to keep related throughout outages, shutdowns or surveillance.
The app additionally helps non-compulsory group chats, or “rooms,” which may be named with hashtags and guarded by passwords. It contains retailer and ahead performance to ship messages to customers who’re quickly offline.
A future replace will add WiFi Direct to extend velocity and vary, pushing Dorsey’s imaginative and prescient for off-grid, user-owned communication even additional.
In contrast to mainstream messaging platforms akin to Meta‘s WhatsApp and Messenger, that are owned and constructed by massive tech corporations and depend on private knowledge, Bitchat operates fully peer-to-peer with no accounts, no identifiers and no knowledge assortment.
