Bitmessage Wiki

Bitmessage Wiki

Bitmessage is a P2P communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities.

bitmessage.org

Hello everyone,

A long while ago I was looking at any new emerging technologies surrounding cryptography and information security. I came across BitMessage. It was touted to me as a riff on Bitcoin, but turned into a P2P communications system where you insert messages into the system using a BitMessage address and can reply in kind. This could potentially eliminate the identities from a messaging platform and be a way to communicate securely without interference or censorship.

Creating a BitMessage "account" is very similar to creating a Bitcoin "account", in that you request a new address from the system and it generates a public and private key and then places your public key in your address book, which you can then give to other people to share. For me, my main BitMessage address is: BM-2cVohimkvrso3ZicWRBepArg1cBweWkaRL.

This arrangement is hard to remember and doesn't lend itself to quick retrieval, but it does seem to be slightly more anonymous, at least on the sending end. Since PGP/GPG isn't really viable it seems anymore, perhaps protocols like BitMessage will pick up where PGP/GPG left off.