Jack Dorsey Launches a WhatsApp Messaging Rival Built On Bluetooth (cnbc.com) 66
Jack Dorsey has launched Bitchat, a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that uses Bluetooth mesh networks for encrypted, ephemeral chats without requiring accounts, servers, or internet access. The beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub. CNBC reports: In a post on X Sunday, Dorsey called it a personal experiment in "bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things."
Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range -- even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on device, disappear by default and never touch centralized infrastructure -- echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.
Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong's 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns or surveillance. The app also supports optional group chats, or "rooms," which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store and forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline. A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey's vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.
Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range -- even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on device, disappear by default and never touch centralized infrastructure -- echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.
Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong's 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns or surveillance. The app also supports optional group chats, or "rooms," which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store and forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline. A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey's vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.
The "TestFlight"-link looks sketchy... (Score:2)
This Is A Nonstarter (Score:2)
This is not comparable to WhatsApp. This is dependent on a short range and unreliable local network.
So what's the application for this? Students in class? People in a movie theater? This is a nonstarter.
Re:This Is A Nonstarter (Score:5, Interesting)
People at a protest/rally.
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They probably have, but that hasn't occurred to Dorsey et al yet. Or maybe it isn't specifically meant for use in China per se. Unless he and his coders know of software switches to bypass those backdoors.
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China isn't the only authoritarian regime in the world that suppresses its citizens communications
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Oh he advocates for free speech so long as he agrees with it. And he isn't the only one . . .
Re:This Is A Nonstarter (Score:4, Funny)
People at a protest/rally.
Hence the name BitchAt. :-p
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Per the article, ad hoc Bluetooth networks have been used before as a way to dodge Internet restrictions. But you're right, the protocol itself isn't very secure. It's not clear what steps (if any) have been taken to prevent bad actors from interfering with the proposed Bluetooth mesh network.
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Not all the world is the US. In the US, you're relatively safe... well at least as long as you were born a US national, it seems we're deporting those who aren't. And we'll see where that trendline goes.
Other nations outside the US and EU? Safety varies a lot. There are plenty of governments happy to punish or disappear protest starters.
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I came here to basically say the same thing. I read over some of the white paper to see if I was missing something that would make this more viable or useful and I'm just drawing a blank. I suppose if you were a group of people sitting around a table or maybe a small room and wanted to text each other everything in a non-ip-network setup and didn't need a record or something.
So yeah, I still can't figure out who this is for or maybe it was just to say hey, look what we made!?
Isn't it the same tech as Apple Air tag? (Score:2)
Sure there are going to be gaps. The messaging might not always be real time like we get used to with IMs. But if it's more secure and less traceable I could see there being a market for it.
I mean sure criminals. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is a trillion dollar industry on the back of money laundering. But there are billions of people living in authoritarian reg
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I suppose if you were a group of people sitting around a table
According to the summary, the protocol is able to use connected devices to relay data past the range of a single Bluetooth connection, so in the case of a protest with 100 connected devices the range could easily be several blocks.
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The use case is situations where centralized chat infrastructure is either offline or undesirable. Emergency situations where cell and/or WiFi infrastructure is knocked offline for extended periods. Quick, informal group chats where not everybody needs to know each other (think: concert; sports event). Repressive countries with centralized control of the internet.
Re:This Is A Nonstarter (Score:4, Insightful)
This is dependent on a short range and unreliable local network.
This would not be a show-stopper if enough people made use of it, where statistically some of them always change locations and thus data could be stored-and-forwarded at times.
But I see a different show-stopper: The tragedy of the commons. If such network attracted a lot of users, it would also attract the scum of the Internet - advertisers, for example, who would immediately try to abuse this network for molesting people with endless SPAM messages. It would really take some very clever mechanisms to build a "web of trust" that on one hand would not prevent people to communicate with each other for the first time, while on the other hand preventing that advertiser scum from abusing the network.
BTW, "Swift" is a strange choice if Jack wanted developers outside of the Apple walled garden to take notice. The average Apple user is about the last person to switch from being parented by Apple to some anarchic new network protocol.
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Great insight, thinking about the advertising "advantages".
Yes, Apple only is also a poor choice and very limiting factor.
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There are swift compilers for Windows and Linux, and you can write Android apps in it.
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Can you show us a mainstream application that is coded in Swift and compiled on Windows or Android?
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a) I'm not your secretary
b) what does that have to do with anything?
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So what's the application for this? Students in class? People in a movie theater? This is a nonstarter.
Being in an area where the government is interfering with cell comms.
Re:This Is A Nonstarter (Score:4, Interesting)
Israel and Iran both shut down their internet during the ongoing conflict for multiple days. It's standard operating procedure to flip the "internet kill switch" as soon as a foreign bomb explodes on your soil. In a major city like Tehran, Tel Aviv, NYC, SF, London etc where you have 10,000+ people per square mile, you could easily have 20-30,000 people on a network like this with moderately low latency during a bombing situation.
But yeah if you live in the Houston suburbs where each house sits on a half acre of land and houses are 150' apart, ti would be useless, you're right. Very few people outside of the US actually live like that, though. So yeah it's useful for about 55% of the global population.
I dunno how you cache and forward messages for more than maybe a thousand people or so, encrypted data by definition doesn't compress hardly at all, that app might use a gb or more of storage if you're at the edge of two networks.
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It's standard operating procedure in dictatorships to flip the "internet kill switch" as soon as something happens where the government needs to control the media.
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On a scale of 1-10 what's your confidence level the following countries don't have this capability today? USA, Mexico, Canada, UK, France, German, Australia y? The US is allied with Israel. If Israel has capability that would imply to me our other allies do, as do we.
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Somewhere between 1 and 3.
Those are the kinds of moments where the population finds out if their nation is truly democratic or not. Any government that decides that turning off the ability to communicate is not doing so for the benefit of its people.
Re: This Is A Nonstarter (Score:2)
Snakes on a plane.
At least one interesting use case (Score:2)
It can be used for local messaging when people don't want to connect to the internet or be traced - protests or events of that nature.
I can imagine the routing considerations would get very complex with large numbers of people. My intuition is that discovery of routes to a particular user would be hard with non-persistent "server" nodes and could result in a lot of broadcast traffic. I presume he's thought about that, but I have to guess that the real world behavior will be hard to predict.
Another interesti
Link shorteners? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth would you have to use a link shortener here, BeauHD? Give us the real link, directly, so we can see where we're going (or choosing not to go).
Briar (Score:5, Interesting)
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One could easily argue that Briar is a much better system.
But, it lacks iPhone and Dorsey support so...
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The reason Briar can't work on iOS is because of the Wifi support. If it only supported Bluetooth, it could be ported.
Dorsey is going to run into the same problem - his app will be severely limited by the range of Bluetooth, and as soon as he tries to add Wifi, Apple will block him.
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Can be easily jammed with a $10 hardware (Score:2)
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The same can be said about anything using RF to communicate.
Per FCC, maximum allowed power is 2.4mW (Score:2)
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I thought a hammer was just $5?
[Fill in the blank] Spring (Score:1)
It sounds like a modern version of Fidonet / UUCP over Bluetooth or Wifi Direct (kinda cool actually), but what would be the commercial value of something like this?
Probably a project designed to preserve the CIA/State Dept's ability to foster revolutions in even highly-State-controlled Internet countries.
Also maybe somewhat useful in a crisis situation... like a Grid outage, war or other "Event". Yikes...
gee humans are so predictable (Score:2)
90% of posts so far are negatively critical of this. An although some of those posts bring vaguely technical reasons (most of which are either irrelevant of easily worked around), we all know the REAL reason for all the hate is deceptively simple:
Jack Dorsey.
Not onlike all the hate directed towards spacex and tesla; Elon Musk.
Am I the only one fucking sick and tired of human nature ?
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Re: gee humans are so predictable (Score:2)
Did you forget the /s ?
Finally, an app I can use! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm always wanting to bitch at someone for something. Now I can use Bitchat!
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Yeah, no one reads their product names before launch any more.
I don't see anything about OSS? (Score:2)
Is it OSS? Can I build it myself? Because otherwise, fuck that. Even that only means that it's less likely to spy on me.
I keep Meshenger installed on my android phone (Score:2)
FireChat did it first (Score:2)
FireChat would like their idea back Jack.
Great idea (Score:2)
Flood the local 2.4ghz spectrum with excessive Bluetooth traffic managing a giant mesh network in a crowd, blocking everyone from actually using Bluetooth, or 2.4g wifi
Contrived technology (Score:2)
solves nothing, adds nothing, does nothing
Messaging added to existing tech? (Score:2)
Apple tags
Those State-run covid spread apps?
Etc?
Seems like this just removes the upstream connection and uses it for chat messages.
FidoNet (Score:2)
This reminds me of FidoNet in the 1980s and 1990s, when telephone calls were expensive. You could post a message on your local BBS using a free call. It would relay your message to another BBS that was in its free calling zone, but not yours. And it would relay the message until it got to the destination.
Routing (Score:2)
It seems to me that routing will be a challenge.
You send a message from your cluster A, to somebody in a distant cluster Z. Your device sends it to B and then gets connected to C and passes it there too. B passes it to D and every other cluster it intersects with. Eventually, it gets to Z. But meanwhile J doesn't know Z got it, so it keeps passing it on to K and L and on and on.
This reminds me of UDP, which was once thought to be a way to broadcast data over TCP/IP, but turned out to be too glitchy and vuln
Tell me you're a city boy... (Score:2)
Also, messsages won't get stored on centralized infrastructure but will get stored on every device you come in vicinity with. It will be weeks, if not days before a hacked version appears that retains all messages it receives.
And the technology is not viable for communication along large distances. What will the latency between Europe and the US be? 7 hours at best.
It already exists (Score:2)
Is it possible that Dorsey has never heard of Meshtastic [meshtastic.org] or MeshCore [meshcore.org.uk]?