Now add a twist: • Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further. • End-to-end encrypted, fully decentralized, optionally anonymous.
Basically, a “postal network” built on people’s phones, without needing a traditional internet connection. Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.
Obvious challenges: • Latency and reliability (it’s not real-time). • Abuse/spam prevention. • Power consumption and user opt-in. • Viable incentive structures.
What do you think? Is this viable? Any real-world use cases where this might be actually useful — or is it just a neat academic toy?
The Helium Network tried something like this, but with a fixed infrastructure: People were incentivized to run Helium network nodes and could earn micropayments for running nodes and handling traffic.
It revealed a lot of problems with structures like this, such as the incentive to cheat through various loopholes that were discovered.
It also became apparent that the monetization/tokenization aspect overtook the network functionality as the primary motivator for the project. After a while, people started looking at the traffic and payouts and realized that almost nobody was using it for real communication, it had become one big shell game for collecting the payments designed to incentivize nodes to come online and relay traffic. Then the token itself had become a speculative commodity that people used for trading more than anything.
I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases, but it seems the allure of generating a new token that the founders can sell into a speculative market to raise funds for the project is always too alluring, so every project goes from having good intentions to becoming a veiled pump and dump. Maybe some day there will be a stable coin that escapes these issues, but I haven’t seen it yet.
Like the US dollar and Postgres?
For like $200 anyone can start a business entity in the US with a tax ID and a bank, I’m still yet to understand how crypto is better other than for circumventing regulators
The OP's idea is an improvement: if you have to use crypto, then the only way a token is generated is when a sender buys one with fiat, so that they can transmit their message on the network.
Personally I think everything gets perverted when monetisation becomes the primary goal.
We are thinking about this and building in this direction with Paygo.wtf
The biggest problem I immediately foresee is that this sounds backwards. It doesn't work best in areas with patchy or no internet, it works best in areas with lots of participating devices. It's most needed in areas with patchy or no internet, but those areas are likely to be the opposite of the areas with lots of participating devices.
In fairness to op, the proposed solution seems best intended for comms blackouts in densely populated areas rather than areas with persistently limited access.
Participate in the development of Reticulum. Install the app Sideband on your Smartphone or other device.
Sideband is a chat app that uses LXMF. LXMF is a messaging protocol based on Reticulum. Reticulum is a full network stack that is decentralized and transport layer agnostic.
What we need for your vision is LoRa modems integrated in our phones.
Or just a bluetooth mesh interface for Reticulum. That is a great idea. Develop that, and you have exactly what you described.
To be more specific: Reticulum's main program is the daemon rnsd. It uses so called interfaces and can route between them (WiFi, LoRa, other radio services...). Implement a new interface type that uses the technology called 'bluetooth mesh' and your vision is done.
Reticulum supports using serial ports as interfaces, so if you get serial-over-Bluetooth working it can be done now.
One other thing I really like about Reticulum is that it also supports generic stdin/stdout to a process as an interface, so with some scripting and what not you can literally make it work over anything.
(YES APPLE DOES THAT TOO)
The firmware on these devices is open source (minus proprietary blobs for ESP32 WiFi, etc.) and the community is active. Check the Meshmap [2] to see some nodes that have made their location public in your area.
I love the project and participate, but people mentioning stuff like this in response to buzzwords irritates me. Like ipfs it is a buzzword-driven curiosity, not a real solution to real problems that anyone has.
Additionally, the meshtastic encryption is a toy. In 2025 when you say encryption you make people think of modern features like replay resistance, perfect forward secrecy, etc. Meshtastic doesn’t do any of this.
So long as you're using the standard long fast and 0/20 frequency slot you'll still have your messages passed via NCMesh nodes even if you're using the broader US Mesh as your MQTT server.
[0] MQTT here simply tunnels the messages over the internet so you get placed in a broader chat room and pseudomesh than you could reach through RF.
They have been around for longer and have some interesting thoughts in there.
The thing is, it's almost impossible to guarantee payments work as expected in decentralized system, see "double spend attack". Bitcoin was designed to prevent it but does it by having common ledger which is a bit too much for a chat
Ontop of that, I think payment isn't critical. You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself - all you need then is to limit how much power you're prepared to spend on it. What does it matter to you if 100 people use your phone or none? ....other than power.
To put it another way, I think money would introduce a commercial motive which would end up gobbling up the system like bitcoin mining.
And if someone tries and fails to send a message across such a gap, is it stored on every phone in the vicinity? That could lead to unwanted conditions (large queues, multiple delivery), which also muddle the accounting. But not doing so practically guarantees the message won't be delivered.
It gets more complex if there's messages intended for Village C where no one from Village A visits though without some deleterious privacy impacts from needing to know what nodes see what other nodes but if the messages are relatively small you can address that with just increasing the level of optimistic caching and forwarding perhaps. Also the higher bandwidth the link the better so you can transfer more of these optimistic packets.
I'm generally against strapping a coin to this since it seems inevitably to hamper end user adoption in favor of making money for speculators and the people in the ICO. It could incentivize creating static point to point links though by providing potential revenue. Not sure that gets over the downsides of strapping a coin onto this though.
However, I wonder how would the sender know how to route the message so that it gets to the correct recipient. It would have to send it to all nearby devices, which would then send it to all nearby devices, and so on, but that would be terribly inefficient; moreover, the message would continue to circulate even after the recipient received it, unless the recipient sends a receipt acknowledgement, which would then need to be propagated to all devices as well.
Apple's Find My network is not decentralized: all participating devices send the locations of objects they find to Apple's servers, which then forward the information directly to the correct recipients.
Having nodes know their neighbors isn't necessarily required. It can help build a more efficient network where nodes know their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors which can allow for a shorter number of allowed hops. If a node knows the route to get to a recipient, it can continue passing the message even if the hop counter is at zero. For example, a node in a rural area would require a couple hops to reach the edge of the city where the message is immediately passed using a known route even if the allowed hop count has run out.
But you can also build a totally blind network where nodes just pass a message until the counter hits zero. A blind network may be helpful in a contested environment where you can't trust any nodes with information beyond its own view.
If the information isn't critical, then you can hide the network even further by not requiring ACK messages from the recipient and not building a route trace in the metadata. This prevents a bad node from collecting network information.
Personally, I've always been surprised that traditional cellular networks didn't try to incentivize femtocell placement by awarding compensatory minutes or megs or something, to the operator of the serving femtocell. Imagine someone with an apartment over the old bakery downtown where the historical district has made it difficult to place normal towers, so they get a femtocell for their own usage. But if it carries other customers' traffic, they'd get kickbacks and incentive to place it near the window where it has the best view of the shopping area below. Suddenly they're working on RF optimization without even knowing it.
In both cases, you have an existing payment expectation that you're just piggybacking on. People already pay their ISP for connectivity, so they expect to pay Althea, and the distribution of money after that is a detail. People already pay their cellco for service, and if some of that kicks back to other customers, that's a detail.
I think your idea has legs, if you can solve the onboarding and payment expectation. There's also a critical-mass problem that Apple solved with Find My by just force-installing it on every device without consent, and you can't do that. So people will only run your software if they:
A) know about it
B) are in a place with poor enough connectivity that it's needed
C) are in a place with enough user density that it's worthwhile
D) perceive that it doesn't unduly kill their battery while in a place that also might not have a lot of opportunities to charge
That's a mighty tricky combination, especially the overlap between B and C. The only setting I can imagine is Burning Man. But micropayments directly conflict with the gifting and decommodification principles.
Remember that network operators plan their frequency allocations so that base stations on the same frequency don't also overlap in space. How would you ensure this with random femtocells? The frequency allocation plan for a femtocell relies on it having a very small area of coverage and being far away from others, so that it doesn't matter if they all use the same frequency.
Cell networks aren't plug-and-play YOLO networks like wifi - they're properly engineered stuff.
Now, they could absolutely form a contract with a customer to put a proper base station in their apartment window - according to the locations and frequencies that best fulfill the needs of the network. Not just "buy one of these and plug it in for a discount" but "we'll pay you ten times over to let us fill a corner of your apartment with big metal boxes, and enter for maintenance with 24 hours notice". Evidently this is a lot of hassle compared to getting permission to put them on roofs, so they don't do it.
I assume this Althea network does something similar but with a reversed order of operations: first someone sets up a network repeater, then someone at Althea HQ figures out how much value they're providing to the network. If it's fully automated, it would run into the same problems as Helium, like people creating fake nodes to carry fake traffic (if nothing else, getting a discount on their real traffic by pretending it passed through 100 of their own nodes before reaching someone else's node).
Socially not viable since all actors that could make it happen are incentivised to actively work against this to ever happen: Governments and big tech. Where are the ad opportunities if stuff does not go to a central platform which profiles you and serves "content" with ads?
It would technologically be even pretty easy to do. There have been many attempts already, including things like roof net / freifunk. It just never works because you have very big actors against you.
You pass along a message, and get a token in return. Then, some options:
1) the message never makes it through
2) the message makes it through, via your path
3) the message makes it through, but via some other path, and yours is really a dead end
Also, how would you handle the case where multiple peers all get the message and send it through the same bottleneck node? I guess you’d want to have some incentive to widen bottlenecks, so that no nodes become important…
If you gossip/broadcast messages, the message will be copied to many nodes that end up not being involved in the actual path from source to destination. Will they still be paid for it?
If so, why shouldn't I copy each message I receive onto my 50000 Sybil devices that don't move, and get paid 50001 times what I should?
So let's assume instead that they don't get paid. That means when I receive the message I read out the path it actually took and pay those people. What if I simply don't pay those people? I could even forge a different path, maybe through my 50k Sybil devices.
I don't see a way to make it work. But nobody saw a way to make cryptographic digital currency work until Bitcoin, so maybe there's some crazy innovation that could make this work too.
How do I know that for device A to reach device B, I need to go through device C but not D?
And if I try to go through device D but device C actually delivers the message, then does device D get paid? How would you validate which devices actually participated in the transmission of the message? How does this not turn into a privacy nightmare?
Look up "distributed peer to peer" e.g. kademlia
Timing is the key: you want to start working on it when the regular internet shows cracks.
In the meantime, build features that work in both worlds!
Not quite the discoverable, user-friendly experience of Briar, Bitchat etc. but it can be combined with online links (Briar can technically go online, but only via Tor; both Briar and Bitchat are only for smartphones).
Aside from that, most of what your concept includes (but uses Internet instead of BT) exists with Nostr+Lightning.
Building on a a diverse transport layer of Bluetooth, UWB, and Wi-Fi Direct is incredibly astute as it would create a resilient, delay-tolerant fabric.
The model where senders pay and relayers earn is a perfectly balanced state machine, providing the exact proof-of-transit mechanism needed to prevent spam and ensure message integrity.
Ship a TestFlight beta and do a Show HN.
(The paper was linked from internet co-inventor David Reed's open spectrum site, which appears to be gone now.)
Central node addressing control is the only way to solve it. Making it self-governing through payments is a nice idea.
I worked the field both academic and startup, I even made one of the first implementation of the Bundle protocol for store carry and forward (IETF transport protocol for the deep space network RFC9171).
Turns out the Mobile OS are making this kind of communication nearly impossible. To work well, it basically needs background job (automatic scan of nearby ble/wifi/radio) and automatic connection without user interaction (imagine being prompted to accept a connection every time you pass by someone), both have been basically made impossible (especially after covid).
Isn't this how some covid-specific apps work to let you know if you've come in contact with an identified carrier? https://www.gao.gov/blog/covid-19-exposure-notification-apps...
The Internet was a neat academic toy at one point for whatever that's worth :-)
It's very little energy, but it's literally non-zero, so definitely not "literally zero marginal cost".
Why would the user care if it's negligible? Because very-small-but-nonzero things scale very differently from actual zero things. If the price of injecting something is zero or almost zero, then this gets quickly abused and suddenly your battery drains like crazy because somebody decided that this is an excellent new vector to serve spam. So everybody will deinstall/deactivate this.
And that's why we can't have nice things.
Doesn't really get any downloads, so not sure there's much demand for this - but I use it with some shokz bone conducting headphones for talking to my wife when we're cycling (also for wrangling our two small girls)
For example, this completes with motorcycle communicators such as Sena. That dedicated hardware can be over $400. If your app is as easy to use as a Sena device and you market it to bikers looking for a cheaper alternative you'll get users.
Sena or Cardo work in 2.4 Ghz (ISM) range as well, but as a class 1 devices, which with 100mW (20 dBm), they can allow for maximum range in excess of 1 mile.
I'd use Walkie - talkies (PMR 446 MHz, about half of a mile of the range in the town) before resorting to the smartphone bluetooth. Likely only feasible on the parking.
Smartphone bluetooth is fine for two bicycles but it does NOT compete with a purpose-built hardware, especially not with the top makers like Cardo or Sena, LOL.
(See: https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43363031 }
Anyway, -Question: I take it Murmur is end to end encrypted fully? Also, just curious if this is open source?
This could become SUPER useful- having a actual mesh networking Bluetooth app , if it's open source/E2EE!
It works best if there's 3 phones though - as it can route via the other if a link drops.
If it's open source, I would love to help.
I will give your app a try.
Was trying to keep things simple though - the separate server seemed a step too far for most people I talked to about it.
Might be more reasonable to use higher bandwidth, lower latency codecs over bluetooth as well?
I wonder if there's a home lab / self hosted solution for this.
Also, I could see it as a useful tool in emergency situations. But a lot of people would need to use it to be actually useful.
For my use, I'd like to be able to join and monitor multiple groups at once (cameras, presenters, certain others individually), and select which I talk to (including being able to talk to several or all groups at once).
Another feature idea, if you are out of range, it would be good if there was an option to save the message until you come back and replay it.
Re. Messages - if you're not in range, as long as you don't leave the call, it'll send as soon as you reconnect. Messages are not currently persisted to a database though (- unsure if that's a feature or not?). I'd wanted to hold off on that until I was sure I'd covered everything I needed for the schema - they're currently encoded with ITA-2 (which is why some punctuation and emoticons go missing) - but I've made some improvements to the protocol, and intend to move to UTF-8 for broader character/language support.
The current protocol is very much designed to work around all the ways streaming audio really isn't a good fit for Bluetooth LE GATT. It does things which don't really make sense for messages, so I'm intending to separate messages from the live call.
The current focus is trying to make it play a little better with wireless headphones though. I started the app back in the days when phones had 3.5mm headphone jacks. If you've an Android phone and can use LE Audio headphones - they work much better, but wired headphones work best.
I'm regularly frustrated by modern phone's complete inabilities to allow any communication when outside of mobile network or Wi-Fi coverage, not even within the two large walled gardens.
It would be so easy for Apple to extend iMessage to work peer-to-peer, at least between people that have already messaged each other before and while both screens are on. That's literally how AirDrop works, and having to send a "Notes" text back and forth is just silly.
There's no cell service or wifi at my neighborhood movie theater. If I could send her a message when she's up, I could tell my wife to bring me back a box of Sno-caps.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...
I'm a bit more concerned that it is a niche application. Not having Mac myself, can't compile it without going through the hassle of getting the environment running.
It would be better if the application was built is something a bit more cross-platform, as I find the idea really good. Not sure if the "mesh network" part would work though, as you need a really high enrolled-device density in order for it to work further than just an office (it's BT after all). I guess the "Fork" button is there for a reason, or maybe a new repo with some other stack.
As much as people want to be "leet" and run 3rd party software, it's inherently insecure and that's why Apple shuts it down.
Surprised to see Jack pushing code himself. Love to see it.
Almost the whole repo is LLM generated. Look at the commits, code, structure and wording of the docs.
Would also be neat if there was a way to build a LoRA proxy to extend the range. I might give this a try with my meshtastic devices.
It's an Arduino library for mesh networking, that works over BLE and UDP, but it can also link to MQTT.
An MQTT node routes the packets it sees to the appropriate topics, and subscribes to topics for all the channels local nodes want, so you should be able to talk to anyone anywhere via the gateway.
The packet destination addresses are rolling codes, so you can't tell if someone's online just by watching their channel, at least not for more than an hour.
And there's a web app that talks directly to the public MQTT broker, and it can do chat and sensor data.
All payloads are Messagepack to make it easy to add new data types, and all packets are encrypted, authenticated, and timestamped to provide a bit of replay protection.
Everything is purely symmetric crypto, trust is left to a higher layer or something out of band, so you there's no handshakes or connection state management overhead, aside from one announce packet per hour to make the MQTT gateways work.
No LoRa, but the transports are modular and pluggable so you can easily add them. I just only have one LoRa Arduino node here so I haven't bothered writing a driver.
I'm also working on a Python port for easy pip-installable bots and home automation stuff.
https://blog.technitium.com/2015/05/technitium-bit-chat-rele...
I had released that 10 yrs ago lol.
Presumably that is the key to getting out of the Apple ghetto.
I wonder why they didn‘t implement the BLE mesh networking standard released in 2017 by the Bluetooth SIG.
There are other alternatives for Android, like https://github.com/glodanif/BluetoothChat but it is only for close distance chatting without any network other than Bluetooth, doesn't have encryption, and is not IRC-themed.
Am I missing something?
That technology is interesting, but it is probably not a good usecase. There are potentially lots of interesting things you could do with smart watches and bike computers, such as uploading activities without direct connection to a phone or sharing routes with nearby participants, etc.
Use cases where you may not necessarily have a phone or adequate network coverage.
Consider if at a large conference where enough participants are able to create a mesh and then leave geo tagged messages and send beyond BT range.
If there was a way to piggyback on top of the airtag network we could do a lot more.
I am glad it's public domain - I don't think I really want to invest any effort in getting non-techy people to try and use something that might go away one day and be irreplacable. OTOH, I need Android as well so....
From what I can see, it's a native IOS/MacOS app (SwiftUI). I don't see an Android version.
Also seems pretty spartan, but it looks like it could be embedded in "friendlier" apps.
Also, I have not seen unlicense before -- guess I'm one of todays lucky 10,000
[0] https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...
> protocol is designed to be platform-agnostic. An Android client can be built
https://github.com/jackjackbits/bitchat?tab=readme-ov-file#a...
Use case? You're in the middle of a protest. Where to next?
Hopefully, not in prison.
Seems like people in this thread are inspired by this novel concept that isn't novel at all.
FireChat was in fact used against dictatorial governments during protests in Iraq and Hong Kong. So it fits the aspired goal for the apps suggested here perfectly, and yet still failed as a product.
Get rid of all these garbage social media (government honeypots) platforms that leak all your data every other weak.
Use Zero-knowledge proofs for authentication into distributed web apps.
Use BitTorrent file system to distribute data to prevent a single point of failure where all your data is leaked.
I could go on and on.
Scuttlebutt is another decentralized peer to peer messaging platform
Since its so niche people should probably collaborate to get one of these solutions out into adoption. Coding stuff is super fun though...
The range is perfectly good for a lot of applications where one might actually want to not use the internet, just not all of them.
the spitball questions I would ask might be, a) how do you handle a theoretical timing attack where the time to respond to a room scan could yield whether a given device is a member of a known room, (the paralellism?) and b) does the GCM counter IV/nonce value cluster around rooms, so the counter for a given room will be in a shared range?
not dealbreakers or anything, this is simple and cool for its purpose, but design consideration wise, what's the thinking on those scenarios?
Cool to see he still gets his hands dirty in code.
- protests
- festivals / events
- remote communities
details are in other comments in this thread.
Wonder how many Claude Code tokens that would take...
This is listed as a dedicated "feature" in the README: "IRC-Style Commands"
But i'm also firmly in conviction that p2p is the future, so i don't know how we get there. regulators getting on Apple's ass again?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/jack-dorsey-working-on-blu...
So we could have localhost or offline websites doing this.
In general mobile app development seems to be very maintanence heavy
But perhaps I could give briar another try.
No wait, let's reinvent the wheel again :)
In case of war or something, internet is down, decentralized Bluetooth messaging app is your last problem.
IRL you will be using unencrypted radio, yes doesn't make sense. But already proven in the UA war.
Try using encrypted radio on the frontline and you will get suicide drones or artillery shell on your position, pretty quickly ;-)
Additionally, tools that allow communication and coordination without relying on internet or cloud-based services seem to be of increasing pertinence to the direction the world is currently going.
Re hype: that's just human reaction to any well known person's new thing. Just don't get caught up in it, discuss "thing" for "things" sake and move on.
