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Testing Bitchat at the music festival
- mikeodds 1y agoI like the idea, I’ve been wandering around soma and mission for a week but not found anyone online
- egypturnash 1y agoso is it Bit 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".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- flufluflufluffy 1y agoit’s fairly obviously bit chat, named most likely in homage to bitcoin, due to its decentralized nature, though there is no connection beyond that
- n12345679 1y agolol it's just a LARP project marketed by jack and his conman buddy calle. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Briarproject dot org already exists and is better. These LARPers will likely use it to steal someone's bitcoins using it.
- toenail 1y agoFor context, briar is android-only and bitchat was released for ios initially. Afaik calle did the android release on his own, vibe coded iirc.
- ragmodel226 1y agoCalle is a genius and is pushing this space forward, and Jack has the capital to get it there. Ignore the haters, we can have all the things we want now, it’s just going to take a few iterations and lessons learned.
- toenail 1y agoCalle is a decent coder, outside of that he has plenty of flaws.
- bigyabai 1y agoNeither Calle nor Dorsey can solve the adoption issue, that's something they both struggle with vis-a-vis decentralized projects. Knowing Jack this is more likely to end up as an NFT marketplace app than anything that someone might want to use.
- synesso 1y agoJack is very strongly bitcoin only & anti "crypto". He sees Bitcoin alone as the Internet's missing money protocol. There is zero chance of what you suggest might happen.
- ragmodel226 1y agoCorrect, Jack is even going to make double sha256 mining chips in the US. There will be no NFTs. Jack is Bitcoin (only).
- bigyabai 1y agoThis. Jack Dorsey had his "out" from the tech industry with Twitter, but he mismanaged it and started shilling crypto before he could turn it around. He's a wannabe white-hat incapable of monetizing good solutions and equally bad at improving upon free ones. If it weren't for his clout as "oh yeah the Twitter guy" then he'd be washed away in the sea of 0.1x engineers making the same AI-generated tinker-toys. You'd hope that a guy like him could see the writing on the wall, and complete the transition to a full-time celebrity asskisser like Sam Altman did. Nope, he wants to roleplay as Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic to fill the hole of ennui that's consumed his identity since selling Twitter. At least he looks like he's having fun.
- xorbax 1y agoIs a 'Bit' prefix now solely read as a bitcoin reference? I thought it existed before bitcoin as, like, some computer thing or the platonic ideal of information. Did I get that wrong? Does 'bit' just mean bitcoin?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoIt was popular for BitTorrent but torrenting isn't as popular these days
- egypturnash 1y agoNo, I’m explicitly wondering if it’s “bit as in Bitcoin” because there’s mention of sending a few satoshis.
- saghm 1y ago"crypto" as a prefix also used to refer to other things, not to mention the absolute absurdity of the term "web3" for an ecosystem that has yet to produce even a single key mainstream application... I'm going to go out on a limb here say that maybe the people using the prefix in that way don't particularly care about whether their terminology is informative as much as whether it conveys the narrative they want.
- andirk 1y agoBeen shilling crypto since 2016 and never heard "Bit" as a reference to bitcoin. Common are: Bitcoin, BTC, satoshis, sats, crypto, bitkorns, space cash.
- jrflowers 1y agoIt’s a nod to the song Where My B At by Esham
- synesso 1y agoIt's tangentially related through the theme of decentralization - It's trying to be a very decentralized chat application - The linked post is on nostr, which decentralized broadcast messaging protocol - Bitcoin is a decentralized money protocol - Nostr has the capability to send bitcoin between users via the lightning network via https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md It takes more effort to use nostr than it does anything relatively more centralized like bluesky or mastodon. So people there are the kind who are dedicated to decentralized technologies & support bitcoin.
- specproc 1y agoObligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
- teucris 1y agoThis 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. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat [1]: https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/
- willseth 1y agoThe FindMy network is already doing this at scale with location data. Offline messaging might be too niche of a use case for Apple but surely they’ve considered it.
- wslh 1y agoBut does WiFi Direct work on iOS so we can be on a music festival and mesh between your friends (Apple) mobiles? This would be much better than Bluetooth. I read about the MultipeerConnectivity framework but I am confused because in a recent discussion someone says that WiFi Direct has (development?) limitations? ELI5 please.
- brookst 1y agoApple uses AWDL, a proprietary protocol that predates WiFi direct. WiFi direct is kind of a mess, and then there’s WiFi aware. Last I heard when I was working in this space a couple of years ago there was supposed to be a WiFi direct 2 that would (as usual) unify standards and solve all the issues.
- willseth 1y agoAWDL isn’t FindMy. It’s mostly for Airdrop and also uses Bluetooth for the initial connection then switches to WiFi for high bandwidth data.
- cedws 1y agoI 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] [0]: https://github.com/positive-security/send-my https://github.com/positive-security/send-my
- diimdeep 1y agoJust 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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoYeah but the big networks never want you to connect on your own terms. POTS? Gotta pay to play. Cell network? Gotta pay and use a creepy spyware baseband.
- Catbert59 1y agoI 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.
- m-p-3 1y agoHave you experimented with Meshtastic and Reticulum? Not sure if a different comm stack other than bluetooth or WiFi would help.
- Catbert59 1y agoI work with raw LoRa a lot and it works great. 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.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoYeah, 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/ https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.
- mistyvales 1y agoRussFest is back baby!
- monster_truck 1y agoThat's odd, I used "Bitch at" and it told me where Jack's mom was.
- yobid20 1y agoYou'd have better luck using smoke signals than trying to do anything using bluetooth.
- nullc 1y agoIf anyone here is interested in creating more reliable mesh messaging, you might want to consider store&forward with efficient reconciliation as a primitive. I helped create a library for reconciliation which might be useful: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch 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.
- kawfey 1y agoBluetooth 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.
- cakealert 1y agoThis 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.
- godelski 1y agoSide 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...
- theknarf 1y agoWould 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.