And is it somehow connected to bitcoin? This post mentions buying beer in exchange for "sats" so perhaps it is.
The entirely-in-lowercase page of the actual project does not clarify any of these questions. Not that they're more than idle curiosity given that the conclusion of this review is "it didn't work".
This has been tried so many times[0][1]… heck even I made an app like this once using WiFi direct.
The idea is so solid and yet there are just enough pitfalls between Bluetooth reliability, platform differences, getting critical mass for effective relaying…it’s such a bummer that we can’t figure this one out. Decentralized message relays have the potential to work anywhere, be fully private, extremely difficult to block/censor, and (in theory) can scale indefinitely.
I really wish a "major" messaging service would adopt something like this, at least as a fallback. Don't give me two apps, give me one. This seems right up the alley for a project like Signal. Like a way to wade yourself into decentralization without necessarily needing to go all the way. Hell, it could save bandwidth just by file transfers alone and certainly it is up there with the mission of privacy.
I think it really will take a bigger platform to make this possible because you need an already existing network. I doubt Apple would ever do it, but hey, I mean text messaging and calls through Airdrop? Pitch it as for emergencies like when the phone lines go down? These are legitimate use cases.
I was initially optimistic about Bitchat but after investigating it does just seem to be an early hobby project.
We need more than individual apps meshing via Bluetooth. I’m doubtful Bitchat will ever be used outside of a group of nerds at a festival.
We need a standardised protocol commonly implemented by manufacturers. The closest we have now that I’m aware of is Apple’s Find My network in which it is possible to smuggle arbitrary data very slowly. [0]
Just a thought but would't it be a better world if we didn't had wifi and bluetooth chips in the first place and cellular modem would worked in user land and had API to build upon while not being separate black box hardware and os living it's own life, with capability to reach freaking satellite in space.
bluetooth chips is child's play compared to cellular chips, just saying.
I worked with BLE Meshing in industry products. With a lot of hops and a bit of traffic it becomes very unreliable quickly.
Introducing something like TCP o top most likely will kill it because of the network load over a very thin and unreliable connections just causes more mess.
Addendum: this "experience" is a few years old. Maybe newer BLE revisions improved this.
Reticulum is pretty much a one-man-show that got a lot of press. Never saw a real network with that thing.
Meshtastic is great for communication with up to two hops. But it can become very unreliable if people use configuring wrong roles like Router/etc. in wrong position.
Yeah, this mirrors my experience trying to get FireChat to work at Las Vegas EDC years prior. Unfortunate to see progress is about the same.
Going to Burning Man for the first time this year. Some of my campmates are keen on giving mesh networking another shot through https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.
If anyone here is interested in creating more reliable mesh messaging, you might want to consider store&forward with efficient reconciliation as a primitive.
One notion would be to divide time in to periods small enough to keep messages relevant, but big enough that all devices can be in sync well beyond that-- say an hour. Then constantly try to get every device it total sync over the last N periods. This kind of model can benefit from mobile devices... e.g. magnet a hub onto a trash collection cart and someone is magically ferrying messages from one side of the event to the other even if there are radio holes in the middle.
Use of efficient reconciliation keeps the traffic closer to O(devices + messages) rather than O(devices * messages) created by 'everyone repeats' messaging.
Unfortunately it hasn't really been an option open to the sort of devices that meshtastic runs on because they're extremely limited in memory.
Bluetooth and wifi messengers have been awful over the years, but pretty much every hardware messanger (Gotenna, beartooth, and now meshtastic/meshcore/TTN/lora etc) have been very effective.
Also FRS radios are still a thing.
Though it still would be nice for cell phones to be telecommunicators instead of *cell* communicators.
This would work better if you abandon the "connection model". However normal smartphones don't let you listen to packets while hopping channels and then injecting. Typically need root for that.
Side note: if you offer a dark theme and have a toggle "automatically switch based on system theme", make that the default option. And don't bury a dark theme under settings... I'm nearly certain that everyone that uses a dark theme wants to use it everywhere by default. And since we're kinda talking privacy here, don't rely on cookies... Everything is light theme by default, including the OS and browser. If users are using dark theme then they very likely made a conscious decision to do that.
Stop treating dark theme users as second class citizens. I'm also looking at you Wikipedia... There's like 30 browser addons, you can change the one line of code to solve all that...
Would have been interesting if Bitchat used meshtastic so that they didn't have to reinvent the whole meshing network part, that part is a hard problem to get right.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadBit Chat
or
Bitch At?
And is it somehow connected to bitcoin? This post mentions buying beer in exchange for "sats" so perhaps it is.
The entirely-in-lowercase page of the actual project does not clarify any of these questions. Not that they're more than idle curiosity given that the conclusion of this review is "it didn't work".
The idea is so solid and yet there are just enough pitfalls between Bluetooth reliability, platform differences, getting critical mass for effective relaying…it’s such a bummer that we can’t figure this one out. Decentralized message relays have the potential to work anywhere, be fully private, extremely difficult to block/censor, and (in theory) can scale indefinitely.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
[1]: https://briarproject.org/
I think it really will take a bigger platform to make this possible because you need an already existing network. I doubt Apple would ever do it, but hey, I mean text messaging and calls through Airdrop? Pitch it as for emergencies like when the phone lines go down? These are legitimate use cases.
We need a standardised protocol commonly implemented by manufacturers. The closest we have now that I’m aware of is Apple’s Find My network in which it is possible to smuggle arbitrary data very slowly. [0]
[0]: https://github.com/positive-security/send-my
bluetooth chips is child's play compared to cellular chips, just saying.
Introducing something like TCP o top most likely will kill it because of the network load over a very thin and unreliable connections just causes more mess.
Addendum: this "experience" is a few years old. Maybe newer BLE revisions improved this.
Not sure if a different comm stack other than bluetooth or WiFi would help.
Reticulum is pretty much a one-man-show that got a lot of press. Never saw a real network with that thing.
Meshtastic is great for communication with up to two hops. But it can become very unreliable if people use configuring wrong roles like Router/etc. in wrong position.
Going to Burning Man for the first time this year. Some of my campmates are keen on giving mesh networking another shot through https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.
I helped create a library for reconciliation which might be useful: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch
One notion would be to divide time in to periods small enough to keep messages relevant, but big enough that all devices can be in sync well beyond that-- say an hour. Then constantly try to get every device it total sync over the last N periods. This kind of model can benefit from mobile devices... e.g. magnet a hub onto a trash collection cart and someone is magically ferrying messages from one side of the event to the other even if there are radio holes in the middle.
Use of efficient reconciliation keeps the traffic closer to O(devices + messages) rather than O(devices * messages) created by 'everyone repeats' messaging.
Unfortunately it hasn't really been an option open to the sort of devices that meshtastic runs on because they're extremely limited in memory.
Also FRS radios are still a thing.
Though it still would be nice for cell phones to be telecommunicators instead of *cell* communicators.
Stop treating dark theme users as second class citizens. I'm also looking at you Wikipedia... There's like 30 browser addons, you can change the one line of code to solve all that...