Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has launched the beta version of a new decentralized peer-to-peer messaging service that runs entirely over Bluetooth.
Dorsey said he spent his weekend learning about “Bluetooth mesh networks, relays, store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things” as he introduced Bitchat on X on Sunday.
The “Bluetooth mesh chat” system has “IRC [Internet Relay Chat] vibes,” he added, harking back to the early days of web-based messaging systems in the late 1990s.
His white paper provides more detail about Bitchat, a decentralized messaging application that operates over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networks.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networks.
Inventors designed the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard to address the growing need for Internet of Things (IoT) applications in various domains. They developed the mesh on top of its stack to extend its use in many-to-many topologies.
Using this concept, multiple devices called nodes send and receive messages to other devices within the network.
Bluetooth published the Mesh specifications in 2017 and Its documents are available on the Bluetooth.com website.
Additionally, the device operates in two states, viz. advertising or scanning, and connection state. The mesh nodes utilize advertising/scanning states in order to exchange messages with each other, and also their devices or nodes operate in different roles based on their functionalities.
Bluetooth mesh supports a maximum of 32,767 nodes and a maximum of 127 hops for a message to travel.
Bluetooth Relays To Hop Messages.
The device acts as both client and peripheral, creating a self-organizing mesh where messages can hop between devices to reach distant peers. The system uses a 30-meter Bluetooth range with bridge nodes connecting separate clusters.
However, messages are encrypted based on whether they are private, in a room, or broadcast, and large messages are fragmented into smaller 500-byte chunks.
There are future plans to enable messaging over WiFi, which will increase the bandwidth for large messages, according to Jack Dorsey.
The system has several use cases, such as conferences, protests, disaster areas, or any scenario where internet infrastructure is unavailable, unreliable, or untrusted.
The paper concluded that Bitchat demonstrates that secure, private messaging is possible without centralized infrastructure.
