🚀 Jack Dorsey is developing Bitchat to make your neighborhood work with Bitcoin! 💬💰
Jack Dorsey, the former founder of Twitter, is bringing us the Bitchat app, not just an ordinary chat application, but an experience to form a digital community without central authority.
Key Points:
The app transitions from a short-range Bluetooth network to a location-based chat, organizing users by geographical area (geohashes) and giving each one a temporary alias.
The chat is built on the decentralized Nostr protocol, and payments are part of the messages themselves through the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This means you can pay or receive small amounts instantly within the conversation.
Using Bitcoin within the app opens up new opportunities:
Smartly combating spam messages instead of verifying via phones or central monitoring.
Supporting local commerce, like paying for your neighbor's service or quickly sharing small rewards.
Challenges:
Apple's policies on in-app payments.
Protecting privacy despite geographical identification.
Limitations of the public Lightning network's capacity.
Sustainability of independent Nostr servers.
🔮 The Future: If Bitchat succeeds in addressing these challenges, it could be a first step towards a local social economy based on Bitcoin. If not, it will remain just a useful educational experiment.
#Bitcoin #Bitchat #LightningNetwork #Crypto