A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.
If I need to have all 4 members of the family meet me at the pool, first I need to go find each one of them. They could all be at different place. And then tell them individually to meet me at the pool? Is that the better solution you are proposing?
You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.
* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. No good.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
jagermo•1h ago
I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)
atoav•1h ago
bariswheel•56m ago
littlecranky67•39m ago
card_zero•21m ago
littlecranky67•13m ago
gloxkiqcza•1h ago
jagermo•1h ago
maqp•1h ago
zenmac•45m ago
plasticeagle•25m ago
prmoustache•1h ago
hardran3•1h ago
troupo•57m ago
utopiah•24m ago
PatronBernard•50m ago