> 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.

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.

> Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.

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.

This is already mostly done.

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.

I'd like to point you towards Meshtastic [1]. It's off-grid, decentralized text messaging that allows for encryption, and is inexpensive to get into (a basic node is about $30 or less), and don't require a license to operate.

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.

[1] https://meshtastic.org/ [2] https://meshmap.net/

For a real-world use case, maybe cruise ships? Internet service on the ships is expensive if it works at all, but that's not necessarily what people need - they just need to be able to exchange whatsapp style messages with people already on the same ship, especially if they can't find each other. Music festivals, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, might face a similar issue as they can be in remote locations.

If I was looking for a thing that is fascist proof I'd add Briar to the list: https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

They have been around for longer and have some interesting thoughts in there.

> Relaying devices earn a micro-payment

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

Who would you pay for sending messages? That's your centralization point. Alternatively if you allow "starting balance", how would you prevent from making a lot of accounts for spam sending?

I cannot imagine how that would work when there are gaps between populations, such as villages. There are so many places where you have gap of several kilometers until the next village or city. How do you plan to bridge that gap?

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.

Areas with censorship will simply ban such services and make it a crime to participate.

I really like the idea and it would certainly be very useful for communicating in case of censorship or Internet outage.

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.

In a way, the Althea wireless network already does this, but it looks like a more conventional wireless ISP in some ways. If you have upstream connectivity that you provide to a downstream customer, you earn a cut. If you have access to a mountaintop or something and run a repeater that suddenly brings a lot of nodes better connectivity, you earn a cut.

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.

Technically viable.

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.

How would the payment work?

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…

Yeah I’ve wanted to build this for ages (and have tried a couple times). The use case is festivals/sporting events and other places where permanent infrastructure doesn’t really exist. The hard part is keeping messages small if you wanna include any of the token tech you’re talking about - probably, a system where your payment for usage is that you be an active relay node is more effective. Something something trust models, ala existing cert signing models.

Planning paths in that kind of environment is impossible (literally not figuratively). Systems that achieve this are gossip broadcast systems, where messages explore every possible path, but those that don't scale well.

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 does routing work?

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?

Would it work: yes, could it be disrupted: also yes.

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!

http://radiomesh.org

Delta chat does this, without the micropayment.

I like the idea, I just don't know how to implement a robust micropayment system that does not require a lot of messages back and forth for a transaction. Given the intended use-case, that would not work.

I once saw a paper showing that if you don't mind hours of latency, and your nodes are mobile, then a network like that scales linearly with the number of nodes. So at least you won't have to worry about congestion.

(The paper was linked from internet co-inventor David Reed's open spectrum site, which appears to be gone now.)

This reminds me a little of [Scuttlebutt](https://scuttlebutt.nz) (positive it has been posted on HN before). But I think these little projects are awesome, even if they have a limited audience. Go forth!

Absolutely viable.

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.

that was basically Rumble an app I developped 10 years ago: https://github.com/Marlinski/Rumble

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).

If it's ever going to happen the receivers won't be getting anything. They'll just be forced to participate by Google/Apple who will run this as a system service, probably with dedicated hardware to reduce power usage impact.

This can indeed work. The fundamental problem with mesh networks is that nodes have to behave, otherwise a malicious actor can just flood the network with undeliverable messages and/or fake nodes.

Central node addressing control is the only way to solve it. Making it self-governing through payments is a nice idea.

“One hop further” sounds like an unbounded loose end… could you tighten this up further somehow? Pre-allocate a larger, more worthwhile portion to do a round trip or something else more verifiable?

I've been toying with a concept for a cryptocurrency that works without internet access (like physical money) - peer to peer credit. I believe it is the only real use case for this technology.

If you are going to do a payment system all other things come second.

I believe that's called sneakernet. See reticulum for that.

Neat academic toy - unless you can predict why a large-scale, long-term internet outage should happen.

Aside from that, most of what your concept includes (but uses Internet instead of BT) exists with Nostr+Lightning.

Not inspired by FireChat?

Get Uber drivers/taxis, truck drivers, ups/amazon delivery people etc. As your relay devices (and gives them extra cash for driving around)

> or is it just a neat academic toy

The Internet was a neat academic toy at one point for whatever that's worth :-)

https://ditto.live

Why does anyone need a cash incentive to pass a message silently? There is literally zero marginal cost to them to do this. Why does everything have to cost/make money?

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

basically, a user friendly and publicly accessible variant of APRS for ham radio?

Well it's a tough problem even before you start adding money to it.

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I'd guess you're not getting downloads because you're not marketing it to people who want it. You mention a few use cases at the end of the short description and that's it.

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.

This looks really cool. I'd see it being useful as a headset to talk to camera people and others during a live stream. We already have hardware for this, but if we didn't it would be great.

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.

Okay, this is neat! A true mesh networking bluetooth app- The other one that's notable, Briar is super impressive - but i think it doesn't actually have proper mesh capability due to difficulties with how devices handle things

(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!

How's the range on BLE? I was looking at this app for exactly the use case you mentioned but was curious if it worked with varying distances on bike rides

Any chance it could use seamless transport switching? It would be so awesome if it could switch to cellular(if available) or wifi-direct as needed on the fly. I have been thinking about creating such an app but lacked the time.

If it's open source, I would love to help.

I will give your app a try.

Cool technology, but what is the usecase? I can imagine traveling abroad without a sim and using it as described. But is it any better than using the cellular network (when you have access to it)?

Unfortunately you have generated a name collision: the server component of the Mumble VoIP is also called "Murmur", for a long time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)

Looks interesting, especially that use case. May I ask which headphone you are using? I have the older openmove from shokzs and voice isn't really understandable while riding a bike.

Legit curious what the use case would be, that would justify Apple adding it in. Like, when do you need to text someone who's within Bluetooth range but somehow has no WiFi or cell reception?

Looks like it, at least on the README, section "Building for Production" mentions it.

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.

I'd much rather Apple allow running something like this (open source) myself rather than use their "just trust me bro" store.

> 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.

Interestingly only a few commits were written by his account. Almost all were from https://github.com/nothankyou1

Is there a link to the TestFlight itself?

I assumed it was a subtle nod to an old irc client https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX

I didn't read it like that immediately, but I noticed there was something that my brain recognized and asked me to look at it again. I wondered for a second if it could be filtered in some corporate filters (emails/servers/etc.).

“Did not work at all for my male dog. One star”

Same but I thought it was a place to yell and complain at people

bruh...

I'm working on a project that uses the same kind of idea as the Bluetooth tracking tags.

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://github.com/EternityForest/LazyMesh#

It depends on the antenna efficiency of course, but I was surprised to discover that BLE modes around 128kbps using coded-PHY have a range extending over 1-1/2 km without a directional antenna. At 2.4ghz its line of sight, of course, but still…

I think the reason AirTag works is because Apple turns it on-by-default on i-devices and people can't be bothered to go turn it off. For a chat to work on the same scale it would literally need Apple or Google to ship it as enabled-by-default on all phones.

It'd be cool if Meshtastic's UDP mode could run over BLE like this, for local bluetooth clouds linked by just a few LoRa nodes.

FWIW, I've found a T-1000e to be a pretty good way to get people into meshtastic. It's not perfect because it has a weird dongle to charge, but it's pretty cool and I think you can convince people it's a worthwhile thing for emergency recovery.

Once you have brought LoRa into the mix, you might as well just ask for p2p cell connectivity. Our phones could totally talk to each other over reasonable distances with no extra infrastructure.

the special hardware's cheap enough that if they can't be bothered, then they're not serious about it.

From the whitepaper: "bitchat implements a custom mesh networking protocol over BLE"

I wonder why they didn‘t implement the BLE mesh networking standard released in 2017 by the Bluetooth SIG.

We can communicate in more ways than just with words. Would be great to FINALLY have a sensible, low-friction, secure way to transfer files to people. It's 2025 and that's still not a solved problem.

You don't need to be close to send a message, just close to someone on the network so you can connect, the message will be relayed hoping through the network

I would agree although I can see a few applications of the tech that could be helpful.

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 find this interesting, there was a briar app that was spoken about a few months ago that was only for android citing that iOS had issues [0] with apps running in background, wonder if/how this was solved here.

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...

No android but “can” be built?

> protocol is designed to be platform-agnostic. An Android client can be built

https://github.com/jackjackbits/bitchat?tab=readme-ov-file#a...

>Universal App

For Apple only. In what way is this universal?

I mentioned elsewhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat

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.

> Use case? You're in the middle of a protest. Where to next?

Hopefully, not in prison.

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I’m assuming that it’s Bitch At since with a ~30ft range you’ll be able to see who you’re bitching at

Nice double entendre for sure.

Or like the old chat client BitchX

Bitch At. Same as Bitch Ute.

Yes

[dead]

Depends if you're messaging your friends or your girls.

Firechat is defunct and hasn't been updated in ~7 years which is a pretty big issue.

good question. but FireChat never took off for some reason(s).

Checkout Meshtastic nodes you can get them pretty cheaply at 30-40 USD each and get way better ranges than BTLE.

The big problem with BLE is the insane amounts of packet loss with extended advertising, even with perfect SNR many devices seem to just kind of not have the receive windows lined up right and drop 10% of packets.

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.

Using the phone's RF modem itself would be the ideal choice. Why aren't there any userspace applications over this?

How about HaLow?

Without the help of LLMs, this would have been much more difficult.

It’s a good example of what someone can accomplish when they understand how to work effectively with them.

one programmer and 20 AI agents probably

It's not though, it's written by someone called nothankyou1 https://github.com/jackjackbits/bitchat/graphs/contributors

Yeah I noticed this too! The profile picture looked familiar.

BitChat.

You don't need TK invent another transport protocol: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

> Looks to be a little IRC-inspired with the usage/commands.

This is listed as a dedicated "feature" in the README: "IRC-Style Commands"

This is one of those ideas that everyone has had.

NNTP is alive and well, as is USEnet.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/usenet_revival/

TherapistFinder might want a word

It is

This particular application isn't, but at the end of the README you get a section on how to port to Android, and the protocol is open as well. So it's a matter of investing the effort on your side.

This looks like a nerd’s tool, but I suspect we’ll start seeing more GUI-friendly versions, shortly.

Meshtastic requires a separate transceiver.

I will Woof it to you

Management-tier grasping at technical language, reads like CSI dialogue.