Bitchat

Building Resilient Mesh

Guide to making the ultimate mesh 🥸 Meshtastic + MeshCore + Bitchat for Self-Sovereign Communication

Gathering Our Circles of Trust

Gathers the Circle argues that refugee “digital identity” programs fail because displacement is defined by unreliable power, unreliable internet, and broken institutions. So identity must work offline first and live with the person, not in a database. It proposes a practical, deployable “camp-in-a-box” stack: $0.80 NFC “Name Tag” tokens that hold cryptographic keys and enable physical MFA; “Camp Cash” scratch-off bearer notes denominated in sats for private, offline exchange; and a peer-attestation reputation layer that rebuilds trust without documents. When connectivity disappears entirely, the system continues through Bluetooth mesh networking, then later syncs to global relays and Lightning when any link comes back online. Creating a three-layer infrastructure (physical, local digital, global digital) designed to survive censorship, surveillance, and collapse.

Bringing the Noise; Secure Communication in Bitchat

This document describes how Bitchat works.

BitChat: Jack Dorsey’s Leap Into Decentralized, Off-Grid Communication

Jack Dorsey’s latest project, BitChat, is a decentralized messaging app that enables communication without internet, cell service, or centralized servers. By using a Bluetooth mesh network, each phone becomes both a user and a relay, allowing messages to hop device-to-device until they reach their destination. With no accounts, no phone numbers, and end-to-end encryption for private chats and password-protected channels, BitChat offers a radically different model of communication, one focused on sovereignty, privacy, and resilience in scenarios where traditional infrastructure fails. However, this independence comes with trade-offs. BitChat’s range is limited to local environments, reliability is “best effort” compared to the smoothness of centralized apps, and the user experience remains minimalistic. While it cannot replace global messengers like WhatsApp or Signal, BitChat represents a powerful complement: an off-grid tool for censorship resistance and emergency communication. In short, BitChat embodies the decentralization ethos, trading convenience for sovereignty, and challenges us to rethink how communication can be built, controlled, and protected.

Testing Bitchat at the music festival

Last weekend I was testing Bitchat with a couple of friends at Off Festival in Katowice. How did it fulfil its role as an short range communication tool?

Liberated Spectrum: Sovereignty and Security

Bitchatr = bitchat + reticulum

Imagining if Bitchat and Reticulum could help solve each other's problem.