Bitchat is Jack Dorsey’s internet-free messaging app

Jack Dorsey, known as the co -founder of Twitter, has put the public -free source code online for a new software called Bitchat. It enables digital chats via Bluetooth, without an internet connection and central server, initially for iOS and MacOS. In the case of Bitchat, the focus is on data protection and failure safety.

Users do not have to register or identify anywhere; There are no central servers or other instances that harvest metadata and through which the project could be corrupted or closed. The transmissions are compressed and end-to-end. In addition, dummy messages and random delays should make it difficult to assign certain news or username to individual users based on their usage behavior.

The transmission is initially only via Bluetooth Low Energy. Its range is limited to a few dozen meters, which is why BITChat wants to span mesh networks. Participants take over the encrypted messages within reach and forward them to other participants until the message reaches the addressed recipient. Up to seven transmissions are planned. The theoretically unlimited storage of the devices, they are particularly frequently contacted, they will be deleted on other devices if they could not be delivered after twelve hours.

Similarly briar

A commercial business model does not arise, which means that there are no spam filters for the encrypted messages. Whether Bitch will succeed depends on the participants alone. A White paper thinks Already to add transmissions to Bluetooth low energy using direct WLAN compounds and Lora.

The name may be unhappily chosen, as he tempted to pronunciation as “Bitch AT”, in German: snout. In any case, Dorsey’s name attracts attention, even if the basic concept is not new. For Android, there has been the Briar app for years, which leads encrypted messages between participants via Bluetooth, direct WLAN connections or the internet-based Tor network. In an emergency, Briar can even send messages on the trip as files on data carriers.

For Lora, the Meshtastic project (including French offshoot Gaulix) exists, which, however, also requires Lorawan gateways in addition to common smartphones. The idea pursued by Briar and Bitchat is also based on the Berty project founded in 2018, which wants to use the “WESH Network” specially developed with the transmission protocol IPFS (Internerplanetary File System). But it has become very quiet about Berty.

Lora and Lorawan

With Lora, small data packages (up to 256 bytes) are transported with little energy use over large distances. The radio-related trick: Lora as a physical layer consists of a narrow-band carrier that is opened or caught in a comparatively wide channel. These transfers called “Circums” are well recognizable in general and therefore very robust towards disturbances.

The procedure is optimized on user loads of a few byte and is used, for example, at Amazon Sidewalk. Lora is the physical transmission technology for the network protocol Lorawan, which is responsible for network structure, addressing, encryption and channel requirements.