Show HN: Better Version of Bitchat
A developer on Hacker News shared "BitchatX21," describing it as a better version of Bitchat. The project is hosted on GitHub under the account goldenwebb. The post highlights an improved iteration of the Bitchat application.
Background
- Bitchat is an open-source, peer-to-peer chat application originally created by the pseudonymous developer "Satoshi Nakamoto" (the creator of Bitcoin) around 2010. It uses Bitcoin's cryptographic principles to enable direct, encrypted messaging between users without any central server.
- The original Bitchat project was abandoned years ago and its code became outdated — it used old versions of the Bitcoin protocol and had no active development community.
- This "Better Version of Bitchat" (bitchatX21) is a community fork that updates the original codebase to work with modern Bitcoin infrastructure (Post-Quantum security, Bitcoin Cash support) and adds features like file sharing and group chats.
- The significance: it revives a piece of Bitcoin/Cypherpunk history that was considered dead, bringing back a fully decentralized messaging system that doesn't rely on any company, server, or phone number — just Bitcoin-style key pairs.