I know it's supposed to be BitChat, but once you notice BitchAt, it's kind of difficult to unsee it...
Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
421–430 of 457 posts
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#422A bit different, as it's mainly for voice - but I made an app 'Murmur : Bluetooth Group Calls' - that lets you hold group voice calls and message via a mesh of Bluetooth LE connections. It's available on Android and iOS. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/murmur-bluetooth-group-calls/i... Doesn't really get any downloads, so not sure there's much demand for this - but I use it with some shokz bone conducting headphones fo…
This looks really cool. I'd see it being useful as a headset to talk to camera people and others during a live stream. We already have hardware for this, but if we didn't it would be great. For my use, I'd like to be able to join and monitor multiple groups at once (cameras, presenters, certain others individually), and select which I talk to (including being able to talk to several or all groups at once). Another fe…
Thanks! The protocol it uses does allow broadcasting to a subset of the group - I haven't hooked that up to the UI yet, but it's on the todo list (after CodedPhy and IP fallback).
Re. Messages - if you're not in range, as long as you don't leave the call, it'll send as soon as you reconnect. Messages are not currently persisted to a database though (- unsure if that's a feature or not?). I'd wanted to hold off on that until I was sure I'd covered everything I needed for the schema - they're currently encoded with ITA-2 (which is why some punctuation and emoticons go missing) - but I've made some improvements to the protocol, and intend to move to UTF-8 for broader character/language support.
The current protocol is very much designed to work around all the ways streaming audio really isn't a good fit for Bluetooth LE GATT. It does things which don't really make sense for messages, so I'm intending to separate messages from the live call.
The current focus is trying to make it play a little better with wireless headphones though. I started the app back in the days when phones had 3.5mm headphone jacks. If you've an Android phone and can use LE Audio headphones - they work much better, but wired headphones work best.
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#423I’ve been toying with a concept inspired by Apple’s Find My network: Imagine a decentralized, delay-tolerant messaging system where messages hop device-to-device (e.g., via Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi Direct), similar to how “Find My” relays location via nearby iPhones. Now add a twist: • Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the messag…
Music festivals or similarly congested public events would be good use cases
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lightning network depends on… the internet… so if both clients are on the internet why not just send messages over that?
Privacy? "Just encrypt things" might be your reply. TOR folks have been fighting an uphill battle for ages with that as their main weapon.
LN is an onion routed network, and has some privacy - notably, sender privacy, as the sender does not need to be known to the recipient. The recipient however is not private, but there have been proposals for rendevouz routing which could also anonymize them.
LN payments are based on Sphinx[1], but they don't leverage the full capabilities of it. Sphinx only allows for single-use replies.
The proposals for bidirectional anonymity involve using HORNET[2], which builds on Sphinx (specifically, it uses Sphinx's single-reply message to establish a HORNET connection), and enables sender-receiver anonymity and bidirectional transfer beyond single-reply messages.
It has also been proposed to include the use of TARANET[3] to prevent deanymization via traffic analysis.
[1]:https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/Sphinx_Oakland09.pdf
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#425I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#426I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Care for some more constructive criticism?
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#427I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Care for some more constructive criticism?
I'll ask more directly: What's the use case and/or value proposition for the average person?
I've heard about it a few times over the last 24 hours, and I'm relatively off social media, so that to me indicates a considerable buzz. But the only thing that gets headlines is "Jack did a thing!" And the readme is primarily jargon.
I can't speak for GP, but it's not clear to me _why_ it's a Really Big Deal.
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#428I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Care for some more constructive criticism?
Maybe I'm being overly critical. But it's nothing revolutionary or new, we've had Bluetooth mesh chat for a long time. In fact I vaguely remember seeing it as someone's a university masters project over 10 years ago.
I'm more interested in the lo-ra mesh, but that's probably because it feels more mysterious to me, as I have little understanding of radio networks.
Let's not even get started on the name (b*tch@).
But I must admit it is cool that it's open source. I'll keep a eye out for an android app
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#429I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Whilst there are alternatives, one being Briar and there are others whose names I can't recall, it's not a flooded market, so I think it's worth some discussion.
Additionally, tools that allow communication and coordination without relying on internet or cloud-based services seem to be of increasing pertinence to the direction the world is currently going.
Re hype: that's just human reaction to any well known person's new thing. Just don't get caught up in it, discuss "thing" for "things" sake and move on.
Re: Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care for some more constructive criticism?
I'll ask more directly: What's the use case and/or value proposition for the average person? I've heard about it a few times over the last 24 hours, and I'm relatively off social media, so that to me indicates a considerable buzz. But the only thing that gets headlines is "Jack did a thing!" And the readme is primarily jargon. I can't speak for GP, but it's not clear to me _why_ it's a Really Big Deal.
Bluetooth mesh chats were quite popular and effective during the Hong Kong protests.
Aside from protests, I'd also say they could be useful during festivals and other events where mobile networks can get quite congested.
Eventually fragments of groups will pass within range, forwarding messages to the rest, useful for coordinating rendezvous.
If built into an app for the event, it would be even more effective.