Jack Dorsey has spent the last decade searching for ways to strip intermediaries out of communication and finance. He has maintained that Twitter would have been better conceived as a protocol than an app; since then he has supported the development of Nostr, an open-source, permissionless, and censorship-resistant social network.
Now he and a team of collaborators have developed Bitchat, a Bluetooth‑only messaging app that quietly appeared in the Apple App Store earlier this month. The software knits phones that are within close-range of each other into a low‑energy mesh so that text can hop from device to device without ever touching a cell tower, router, or remote server. It works like an offline version of Signal, and that alone would be newsworthy, but the real breakthrough emerges when Bitchat pairs its mesh with ecash, a recently resurrected concept that wolud allow bitcoin to be transmitted from phone to phone in the same way.
Ecash vs. Bitcoin
Bluetooth was not designed for payments, but by combining it with Bitchat and ecash, an offline digital bearer instrument can be created. A bitcoin developer known as Calle, best known for Cashu, an open‑source implementation of ecash, recently filmed two phones beaming satoshis back and forth over a Bitchat mesh. No internet connection was required for this transaction to take place. Later, the ecash tokens can be finally settled when they are converted to on-chain bitcoin.
Ecash dates from David Chaum’s 1982 paper on blind signatures, a cryptographic primitive that lets a bank vouch for a coin without learning who spends it. It was a solution to maintaining the privacy of cash while solving the double-spending problem of digital money (being able to spend the same money multiple times). Chaum launched the idea commercially in the 1990s, but it failed to achieve traction.
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