Bitchat Mesh App Defies India Cybercrime Notice After Protesters Use It During Network Restrictions

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitchat Mesh App Defies India Cybercrime Notice After Protesters Use It During Network Restrictions

Bitchat, Jack Dorsey’s censorship-resistant, Bluetooth-enabled messaging app, has gone viral again, this time due to the Indian Government trying to get it banned from GitHub. In this latest round of authoritarian measures versus decentralized technologies, Bitchat has won. 

In July 2025, Jack Dorsey announced a new messaging application he described as a weekend project. The app, called Bitchat, was designed to work without internet access, phone numbers, user accounts, or central servers. It relied instead on Bluetooth mesh networks for local communication and the Nostr protocol for wider reach.

A year later, that same application became the subject of a formal takedown request from India’s cybercrime authorities during a period of student protests. The episode offers a clear illustration of how cypherpunk ideas—building systems that function without permission from intermediaries—continue to shape tools used in moments of political tension.

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