Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat Lets You Chat Without Wi-Fi, Data, or Servers

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder and former CEO, is on the move with another ambitious endeavor in decentralised technology, this time aiming for the supremacy of WhatsApp. Dorsey announced the messaging application named Bitchat over the weekend, which is designed to live in a world where privacy, decentralization, and resilience are the mainstays.

No Internet? No Problem

The decentralised messaging app Bitchat is now in beta on TestFlight and has been created by Jack Dorsey. This is a peer-to-peer app, which means that no internet, no server, and no personal information is required to utilize the associated blockchain technology. Bitchat is focused on offering off-the-grid communications, with the messages being encrypted and shared over device-to-device links, no matter the absence of Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

It is not just another messaging app, as it has been designed to operate without the typical infrastructure. By using Bluetooth instead of the internet or centralised servers, it can create a local network through Bluetooth, enabling encrypted, peer-to-peer communication off the grid.

How Bitchat Works Without Internet

"Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has announced the beta launch of Bitchat, a decentralised, peer-to-peer messaging app to take on WhatsApp. Dorsey revealed over the weekend that the beta version is now live on TestFlight, with a detailed white paper available on GitHub."

According to Dorsey, the app runs entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks, requiring no phone numbers, emails, or Wi-Fi. Instead, it connects nearby devices directly, passing messages from device to device.

Bitchat allows encrypted chats among the immediate devices. Messages are transferred between phones as they move through the formation of local Bluetooth clusters, which one leads to another. This can extend messages to other peers who are outside the normal Bluetooth range, without Wi-Fi or cellular orientation. 

Bridge-like devices facilitate the links by using overlapping clusters to stretch out the mesh network covering longer ranges. Messages are merely hidden locally on individual devices, expire by default, and never come into contact with any centralised infrastructure.

A Tool for Resilience and Privacy

Dorsey described the project as a personal experiment exploring “Bluetooth mesh networks, relays, store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.”

Bitchat isn’t entirely unprecedented — it takes inspiration from apps used during the Hong Kong protests in 2019 to bypass internet shutdowns, as per reports.

Group Chats and More

It is not even one-on-one messaging. The report added that Bitchat also allows optional group chats or rooms that could be named with hashtags and password-protected. It has a store-and-forward component whereby the messages are sent to offline but temporarily connected users.

In the future, the application can even be endowed with Wi-Fi Direct support in order to increase speed and coverage: The report also found a note that an upcoming update will include Wi-Fi Direct to further improve speed and reach, further fulfilling Dorsey in his off-grid, user-controlled-communication vision.

Why Bitchat Stands Out

Unlike the popular messaging services of Meta, Bitchat does not collect any personal data, does not need an account, and leaves everything on the participating devices exclusively.

Bitchat abandons the personal data that is being used by such mainstream messaging services as Meta, WhatsApp, and Messenger, as it is a completely peer-to-peer communication system with no accounts, individual identifiers, or data collection.

In Bitchat, Dorsey is envisioning a new way to communicate, and people may hook up privately and securely, with no snooping by corporate spies on Bitchat. Despite its beta status, it is indicative of a growing trend to decentralized user-owned technology in the face of an ever more centralized digital world.