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".
There will be no NFTs. Jack is Bitcoin (only).
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.
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?
- 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
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.
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.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
My interpretation here is that the location of a missing device can be passed around via Bluetooth mesh but that the last send must be sent via cellular or WiFi back to iCloud. So it’s P2P to relay getting location info back to final device with internet connection back to iCloud but the finder still need to connect to iCloud to view updated location.
“Find My works offline by sending out short range Bluetooth signals from the missing device that can be detected by other Apple devices in use nearby. Those nearby devices then relay the detected location of the missing device to iCloud so users can locate it in the Find My app—all while protecting the privacy and security of all the users involved.”
One huge advantage of this (beyond better networking) would be that apps could use existing IP APIs which would help abstract away vendor/implementation specific problems and improve adoption.
Note that this doesn't necessarily depend on a tier 3 network so you could still accomplish your goals. The internet already has enough features to support partitions and local discovery.
You of course still have to have fixed administrative domains but in reality you always do. Someone takes initiative and sets up the group chat/gets their friends into it. I think if you're willing to mentally separate the network topology from the administrative topology this could be solved.
Of course that's really boring. It's just MDNS and ad-hoc Wifi plus some routing. Everything is pretty much already there (although iOS probably won't let you do it, as usual.)
I think, it's all matter of inventing a proper protocol on top of it, and enough work-hours put into the implementation to make software reliable.
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]
bluetooth chips is child's play compared to cellular chips, just saying.
POTS? Gotta pay to play. Cell network? Gotta pay and use a creepy spyware baseband.
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...
mikeodds•6mo ago