6 ms·

Bitpost – Private decentralized messaging

64 points by draegtun 12y ago

JetSpiegel 12y ago
> centralized services such as email Stopped reading right there.
- id 12y ago
  Email is centralized to a great extent. Think of gmail, yahoo mail or outlook / hotmail.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Bitcoin is centralized to a certain extent. Think GHash, etc See how silly this sounds?
    - kaoD 12y ago
      Your counterargument sounds silly because it is silly. Email is a federal system. Even if it's more decentralized than having a single point of failure, it still has authoritative nodes and just a few points of failure (maybe 4-5 instead of a single one, not much of a difference here). If your system has servers on which clients have to rely, it's not fully decentralized. A fully decentralized system is peer-to-peer only and does not rely on anyone else. You just join the network as a peer and that's all. There's no single point (or a few points) of failure because everyone is authoritative. If, for example, GMail is taken over your email is gone and any email sent to you thereafter is lost. Your mail address is owned and controlled by GMail, they just allow you access. Even switching from GMail to Yahoo is a burden! All your contacts have to update their address books and all non-updateable media (think printed, downloaded or out of your control, like some whitepapers I published which feature my email) is stuck with your old, unusable address forever. My Bitcoin address is working, regardless of who joins or leaves the Bitcoin network. Your GMail/GHash simile is misleading. GHash users can leave the pool and they'll still have their coins in their wallet, operating normally. If GHash is closed or DDoSed users could carry on normally, or even switch to another pool if they want to do so. GHash is external to Bitcoin (a service to gather peers for convenience), while GMail and other massive email servers are critical parts of the system. Even if you set up your own email server, other servers could refuse to relay email to you, or perhaps DNS servers might choose not to handle your domain... and you're gone. In a federal system, other authoritative nodes have to acknowledge you, which they might not. And even if they acknowledge your existence, your server is still a single point of failure for yourself! And you're still relying on other single-points-of-failure for delivery. Even if your server is fine, you might not be able to deliver messages to your friend in GMail if it's gone. We've already seen this happening. MtGox is gone, but Bitcoin (the system, not the community) didn't even notice.
      - paulasmuth 12y ago
        All your points seem to focus on DNS. Nobody would argue that DNS is a decentralized system. And in fact neither is IP. As far as I understand nothing in SMTP makes it inherently more centralized than any piece of software that relies on IP (and for that matter, the web itself). Isn't the internet the poster child of a decentralized system? Does bitcoin/bitpost not rely on IP?
        kaoD 12y ago
        > All your points seem to focus on DNS. Not at all. How did you get that impression? DNS is just one of the many ways email is centralized (email relies in a centralized third party service to resolve domain names and find mail servers for them) but I just mention it near the end in a single sentence. Remove the sentence and my point still stands. Please read again and understand my comment! > And in fact neither is IP. Actually IP is neither centralized nor decentralized. Our current largest scale implementation (which we call the Internet) is centralized, but it's a side-effect, not a requirement. > As far as I understand nothing in SMTP makes it inherently more centralized than any piece of software that relies on IP Re-read my comment. Perhaps you don't know how Bitcoin works? In Bitcoin there are no servers... or rather, everyone is a server. The cool thing is I'm still receiving coins whether I am connected to the Bitcoin network or not. It just works, regardless of who is or isn't connected to the network! In email, I'm still tied to a provider (even if I'm my own provider) which is a single point of failure. I'll say it again: if your systems has clients relying on servers (which Bitcoin does not), it is not decentralized. Come on, this is actually what makes Bitcoin so revolutionary! > Does bitcoin/bitpost not rely on IP? It does (remember IP is not inherently centralized), but it does not rely on the Internet. Even if we're using IP (the protocol), Bitcoin is transport-agnostic. In fact it is a goal for the community to use other transports (such as radio or satellites) to avoid the problem of relying on the centralized Internet. Even then, IP (the protocol) will probably be used for addressing and such, but in a decentralized manner. It's not a requirement, but IP is a useful protocol and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel.
        paulasmuth 12y ago
- billpg 12y ago
  > Stopped rea I stopped reading right there.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
heliumcraft 12y ago
that's a great interface for bitmessage!
- davidcollantes 12y ago
  Is that what it is, a BitMessage client? The package is not signed, so I am reluctant to open it.
  - awt 12y ago
    Yes. This is a bitmessage client. It is also opensource.
integricho 12y ago
I automatically open all posts where I see the words "distributed", "decentralized", "fault-tolerant", and similar catchy ones, and now I'm feeling like I'm a victim of clever marketing.
- awt 12y ago
  Disclosure: I contributed (in a small way) to this project. I agree. I'm not sure who posted this link but the title should say something about Bitmessage in it.
  - draegtun 12y ago
    I posted this link after seeing Steve Dekorte's twitter post this morning - https://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/493947090507014145 https://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/493947090507014145 The posted title simple copies the title/heading verbatim from the webpage. PS. Sorry for not replying till now... been out all day since posting this.
- stevedekorte 12y ago
  Are you saying you don't think Bitmessage is not decentralized or that you don't think the word should ever be used?
motters 12y ago
I'm also working on database encryption for Bitmessage, such that the data at rest always remains encrypted, regardless of whether the underlying file system is.
Maran 12y ago
Not sure if the poster is also the author but why is the application connecting to a server? Is it using a centralised point to connect to the Bitmessage network? Edit: It also appears to connect to Tor. Perhaps a quick overview of what's happening under the hood could be useful.
- awt 12y ago
  Collaborator here. Good point. Thanks.
- stevedekorte 12y ago
  It's not connecting to a centralized server. The UI launches a local pybitmessage node in the background which uses tor to connect to the Bitmessage network.
johnchristopher 12y ago
It requires macos X 10.9. Really frustrating not being able to try out the app (it seems to have a better interface) while bitmessage runs on 10.6.8. I suppose it uses bitmessage as a daemon and the app is a UX layer over it.
flixic 12y ago
The text is super-hard to read, field spacing needlessly big: http://cl.ly/Wnhs http://cl.ly/Wnhs If the whole idea of this is to have good UI over BitMessage, it's not that good of a UI.
- awt 12y ago
  I collaborated on this project. The color scheme is completely configurable. there's a file in the app wrapper named theme.json that you can use to customize the fonts and colors.
  - sspiff 12y ago
    Manually editing a json file is not what most users will do. Perhaps a more sensible default colour theme would be useful?
- oriste 12y ago
  I like the minimalism in the UI. Don't know how to get any use out of Channels though. Is it broken?
  - awt 12y ago
    It looks like it's broken. We will fix ASAP. Message me here for an update: BM-2cVsnhcfNkU1D87u4hy7SfYw3qZ9m7Su55
  - stevedekorte 12y ago
    Fixed. Thanks for the bug report.
wcummings 12y ago
So is BitMessage like alt.anonymous.messages on top of a blockchain?
- awt 12y ago
  There is no blockchain. Messages are broadcast (encrypted) to everyone on the network. The biggest similarity to bitcoin is the use of a "Proof of Work" concept. The mechanism for this is different, however.
  - tree_of_item 12y ago
    What do you mean by "there is no blockchain"? Are you saying Bitmessage doesn't work on top of Bitcoin?
    - awt 12y ago
      Correct.
    - oleganza 12y ago
      Bitmessage uses similar p2p messaging as Bitcoin (all messages are broadcasted to everyone on best effort basis), similar binary protocol, Base58 encoding for addresses which are hashes of EC pubkeys and per-message proof-of-work to combat spam in Hashcash-manner. But there's no currency and no blockchain.
hisabness 12y ago
every time i see a service promising privacy i laugh. no company can guarantee privacy, and most companies don't know what they don't know.
- okso 12y ago
  BitMessage is a pretty neat idea, and this service is only a GUI on top of it.
- awt 12y ago
  Bitmessage is not a service. There's no central server. Also, it is opensource -- as is the Bitpost app.
danesparza 12y ago
Information is a bit sparse on the page, so here is more information: Source is available here: https://github.com/stevedekorte/Bitpost https://github.com/stevedekorte/Bitpost This is a client based on the BitMessage protocol. Here is a whitepaper that describes BitMessage: https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf What I would like to know (since it seems that the original developers are reviewing comments made here it seems): How is this different from PGP? (Wikipedia article in case you're reading this and haven't heard of PGP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy)
- awt 12y ago
  PGP AFAIK is simply encrypting the content of an email with the public key of the person you're going to send it to. The address is public. PGP is a bit of a hassle in terms of exchanging public keys and integrating with legacy email clients/web clients. Bitmessage has additional features, such as the ability to broadcast messages from a public address to all subscribers. Especially with this client, Bitmessage is actually much more user friendly and powerful. To simplify, PGP hides: content Bitmessage hides: content, recipient, sender.
  - danesparza 12y ago
    PGP isn't just for email. "PGP is a bit of a hassle in terms of exchanging public keys" this is true, but it's a bit of a necessary evil. How do you accomplish this in a secure and transparent way?
- autodidakto 12y ago
  BitMessage uses private/public keys, but it isn't built on top of email like PGP. It's meant to replace email. It is its own network and protocol, intended to be private at every level.
  - danesparza 12y ago
    PGP isn't built on top of email.

64 points by draegtun 12y ago

JetSpiegel 12y ago

> centralized services such as email Stopped reading right there.

id 12y ago
Email is centralized to a great extent. Think of gmail, yahoo mail or outlook / hotmail.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Bitcoin is centralized to a certain extent. Think GHash, etc See how silly this sounds?
  - kaoD 12y ago
    Your counterargument sounds silly because it is silly. Email is a federal system. Even if it's more decentralized than having a single point of failure, it still has authoritative nodes and just a few points of failure (maybe 4-5 instead of a single one, not much of a difference here). If your system has servers on which clients have to rely, it's not fully decentralized. A fully decentralized system is peer-to-peer only and does not rely on anyone else. You just join the network as a peer and that's all. There's no single point (or a few points) of failure because everyone is authoritative. If, for example, GMail is taken over your email is gone and any email sent to you thereafter is lost. Your mail address is owned and controlled by GMail, they just allow you access. Even switching from GMail to Yahoo is a burden! All your contacts have to update their address books and all non-updateable media (think printed, downloaded or out of your control, like some whitepapers I published which feature my email) is stuck with your old, unusable address forever. My Bitcoin address is working, regardless of who joins or leaves the Bitcoin network. Your GMail/GHash simile is misleading. GHash users can leave the pool and they'll still have their coins in their wallet, operating normally. If GHash is closed or DDoSed users could carry on normally, or even switch to another pool if they want to do so. GHash is external to Bitcoin (a service to gather peers for convenience), while GMail and other massive email servers are critical parts of the system. Even if you set up your own email server, other servers could refuse to relay email to you, or perhaps DNS servers might choose not to handle your domain... and you're gone. In a federal system, other authoritative nodes have to acknowledge you, which they might not. And even if they acknowledge your existence, your server is still a single point of failure for yourself! And you're still relying on other single-points-of-failure for delivery. Even if your server is fine, you might not be able to deliver messages to your friend in GMail if it's gone. We've already seen this happening. MtGox is gone, but Bitcoin (the system, not the community) didn't even notice.
    - paulasmuth 12y ago
      All your points seem to focus on DNS. Nobody would argue that DNS is a decentralized system. And in fact neither is IP. As far as I understand nothing in SMTP makes it inherently more centralized than any piece of software that relies on IP (and for that matter, the web itself). Isn't the internet the poster child of a decentralized system? Does bitcoin/bitpost not rely on IP?
      - kaoD 12y ago
        > All your points seem to focus on DNS. Not at all. How did you get that impression? DNS is just one of the many ways email is centralized (email relies in a centralized third party service to resolve domain names and find mail servers for them) but I just mention it near the end in a single sentence. Remove the sentence and my point still stands. Please read again and understand my comment! > And in fact neither is IP. Actually IP is neither centralized nor decentralized. Our current largest scale implementation (which we call the Internet) is centralized, but it's a side-effect, not a requirement. > As far as I understand nothing in SMTP makes it inherently more centralized than any piece of software that relies on IP Re-read my comment. Perhaps you don't know how Bitcoin works? In Bitcoin there are no servers... or rather, everyone is a server. The cool thing is I'm still receiving coins whether I am connected to the Bitcoin network or not. It just works, regardless of who is or isn't connected to the network! In email, I'm still tied to a provider (even if I'm my own provider) which is a single point of failure. I'll say it again: if your systems has clients relying on servers (which Bitcoin does not), it is not decentralized. Come on, this is actually what makes Bitcoin so revolutionary! > Does bitcoin/bitpost not rely on IP? It does (remember IP is not inherently centralized), but it does not rely on the Internet. Even if we're using IP (the protocol), Bitcoin is transport-agnostic. In fact it is a goal for the community to use other transports (such as radio or satellites) to avoid the problem of relying on the centralized Internet. Even then, IP (the protocol) will probably be used for addressing and such, but in a decentralized manner. It's not a requirement, but IP is a useful protocol and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel.
        paulasmuth 12y ago
billpg 12y ago
> Stopped rea I stopped reading right there.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

heliumcraft 12y ago

that's a great interface for bitmessage!

davidcollantes 12y ago
Is that what it is, a BitMessage client? The package is not signed, so I am reluctant to open it.
- awt 12y ago
  Yes. This is a bitmessage client. It is also opensource.

integricho 12y ago

I automatically open all posts where I see the words "distributed", "decentralized", "fault-tolerant", and similar catchy ones, and now I'm feeling like I'm a victim of clever marketing.

awt 12y ago
Disclosure: I contributed (in a small way) to this project. I agree. I'm not sure who posted this link but the title should say something about Bitmessage in it.
- draegtun 12y ago
  I posted this link after seeing Steve Dekorte's twitter post this morning - https://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/493947090507014145 https://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/493947090507014145 The posted title simple copies the title/heading verbatim from the webpage. PS. Sorry for not replying till now... been out all day since posting this.
stevedekorte 12y ago
Are you saying you don't think Bitmessage is not decentralized or that you don't think the word should ever be used?

motters 12y ago

I'm also working on database encryption for Bitmessage, such that the data at rest always remains encrypted, regardless of whether the underlying file system is.

Maran 12y ago

Not sure if the poster is also the author but why is the application connecting to a server? Is it using a centralised point to connect to the Bitmessage network? Edit: It also appears to connect to Tor. Perhaps a quick overview of what's happening under the hood could be useful.

awt 12y ago
Collaborator here. Good point. Thanks.
stevedekorte 12y ago
It's not connecting to a centralized server. The UI launches a local pybitmessage node in the background which uses tor to connect to the Bitmessage network.

johnchristopher 12y ago

It requires macos X 10.9. Really frustrating not being able to try out the app (it seems to have a better interface) while bitmessage runs on 10.6.8. I suppose it uses bitmessage as a daemon and the app is a UX layer over it.

flixic 12y ago

The text is super-hard to read, field spacing needlessly big: http://cl.ly/Wnhs http://cl.ly/Wnhs If the whole idea of this is to have good UI over BitMessage, it's not that good of a UI.

awt 12y ago
I collaborated on this project. The color scheme is completely configurable. there's a file in the app wrapper named theme.json that you can use to customize the fonts and colors.
- sspiff 12y ago
  Manually editing a json file is not what most users will do. Perhaps a more sensible default colour theme would be useful?
oriste 12y ago
I like the minimalism in the UI. Don't know how to get any use out of Channels though. Is it broken?
- awt 12y ago
  It looks like it's broken. We will fix ASAP. Message me here for an update: BM-2cVsnhcfNkU1D87u4hy7SfYw3qZ9m7Su55
- stevedekorte 12y ago
  Fixed. Thanks for the bug report.

wcummings 12y ago

So is BitMessage like alt.anonymous.messages on top of a blockchain?

awt 12y ago
There is no blockchain. Messages are broadcast (encrypted) to everyone on the network. The biggest similarity to bitcoin is the use of a "Proof of Work" concept. The mechanism for this is different, however.
- tree_of_item 12y ago
  What do you mean by "there is no blockchain"? Are you saying Bitmessage doesn't work on top of Bitcoin?
  - awt 12y ago
    Correct.
  - oleganza 12y ago
    Bitmessage uses similar p2p messaging as Bitcoin (all messages are broadcasted to everyone on best effort basis), similar binary protocol, Base58 encoding for addresses which are hashes of EC pubkeys and per-message proof-of-work to combat spam in Hashcash-manner. But there's no currency and no blockchain.

hisabness 12y ago

every time i see a service promising privacy i laugh. no company can guarantee privacy, and most companies don't know what they don't know.

okso 12y ago
BitMessage is a pretty neat idea, and this service is only a GUI on top of it.
awt 12y ago
Bitmessage is not a service. There's no central server. Also, it is opensource -- as is the Bitpost app.

danesparza 12y ago

Information is a bit sparse on the page, so here is more information: Source is available here: https://github.com/stevedekorte/Bitpost https://github.com/stevedekorte/Bitpost This is a client based on the BitMessage protocol. Here is a whitepaper that describes BitMessage: https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf What I would like to know (since it seems that the original developers are reviewing comments made here it seems): How is this different from PGP? (Wikipedia article in case you're reading this and haven't heard of PGP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy)

awt 12y ago
PGP AFAIK is simply encrypting the content of an email with the public key of the person you're going to send it to. The address is public. PGP is a bit of a hassle in terms of exchanging public keys and integrating with legacy email clients/web clients. Bitmessage has additional features, such as the ability to broadcast messages from a public address to all subscribers. Especially with this client, Bitmessage is actually much more user friendly and powerful. To simplify, PGP hides: content Bitmessage hides: content, recipient, sender.
- danesparza 12y ago
  PGP isn't just for email. "PGP is a bit of a hassle in terms of exchanging public keys" this is true, but it's a bit of a necessary evil. How do you accomplish this in a secure and transparent way?
autodidakto 12y ago
BitMessage uses private/public keys, but it isn't built on top of email like PGP. It's meant to replace email. It is its own network and protocol, intended to be private at every level.
- danesparza 12y ago
  PGP isn't built on top of email.