Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks

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?

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.

One option --but it might require some centralization-- is that people announce they're going to travel, and stash a bunch of messages. If the sender can provide information about the geographical destination, that could help.

About monetization: remember what money did to the internet. But the above option would practically invite some form of payment. Thinking of Perth, that would lead to a kind of "Mad Max meets Johnny Mnemnonic".