Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies throughout a distant video listening to held by subcommittees of the U.S. Home of Representatives Vitality 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, cellphone numbers or emails required.
The Twitter co-founder introduced Sunday that the beta model is dwell on TestFlight, with a full white paper obtainable on GitHub.
In a post on X Sunday Dorsey known 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 units. As customers transfer by means of bodily house, their telephones type native Bluetooth clusters and move messages from system to system, permitting them to succeed in friends past commonplace vary — even with out WiFi or cell service.
Sure “bridge” units join overlapping clusters, increasing the mesh throughout better distances. Messages are saved solely on-device, 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 support of Damus and Bluesky and displays a broader push to decentralize every thing 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 technique to keep related throughout outages, shutdowns, or surveillance.
The app additionally helps optionally available group chats, or “rooms,” which will be named with hashtags and guarded by passwords. It contains store-and-forward performance to ship messages to customers who’re briefly offline.
A future replace will add WiFi Direct to extend pace and vary, pushing Dorsey’s imaginative and prescient for off-grid, user-owned communication even additional.
Not like mainstream messaging platforms like Meta‘s WhatsApp and Messenger, that are owned and constructed by huge tech corporations and depend on private knowledge, Bitchat operates fully peer-to-peer with no accounts, no identifiers, and no knowledge assortment.
