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".
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
mikeodds•3h ago