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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

so is it

Bit Chat

Bitch At?

And is it somehow connected to bitcoin? This post mentions buying beer in exchange for "sats" so perhaps it is.

The entirely-in-lowercase page of the actual project does not clarify any of these questions. Not that they're more than idle curiosity given that the conclusion of this review is "it didn't work".

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lol it's just a LARP project marketed by jack and his conman buddy calle. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Briarproject dot org already exists and is better. These LARPers will likely use it to steal someone's bitcoins using it.

For context, briar is android-only and bitchat was released for ios initially. Afaik calle did the android release on his own, vibe coded iirc.

Calle is a genius and is pushing this space forward, and Jack has the capital to get it there. Ignore the haters, we can have all the things we want now, it’s just going to take a few iterations and lessons learned.

Calle is a decent coder, outside of that he has plenty of flaws.

Neither Calle nor Dorsey can solve the adoption issue, that's something they both struggle with vis-a-vis decentralized projects. Knowing Jack this is more likely to end up as an NFT marketplace app than anything that someone might want to use.

Jack is very strongly bitcoin only & anti "crypto". He sees Bitcoin alone as the Internet's missing money protocol. There is zero chance of what you suggest might happen.

Correct, Jack is even going to make double sha256 mining chips in the US.

There will be no NFTs. Jack is Bitcoin (only).

This. Jack Dorsey had his "out" from the tech industry with Twitter, but he mismanaged it and started shilling crypto before he could turn it around. He's a wannabe white-hat incapable of monetizing good solutions and equally bad at improving upon free ones. If it weren't for his clout as "oh yeah the Twitter guy" then he'd be washed away in the sea of 0.1x engineers making the same AI-generated tinker-toys.

You'd hope that a guy like him could see the writing on the wall, and complete the transition to a full-time celebrity asskisser like Sam Altman did. Nope, he wants to roleplay as Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic to fill the hole of ennui that's consumed his identity since selling Twitter. At least he looks like he's having fun.

Is a 'Bit' prefix now solely read as a bitcoin reference?

I thought it existed before bitcoin as, like, some computer thing or the platonic ideal of information. Did I get that wrong? Does 'bit' just mean bitcoin?

It was popular for BitTorrent but torrenting isn't as popular these days

No, I’m explicitly wondering if it’s “bit as in Bitcoin” because there’s mention of sending a few satoshis.

"crypto" as a prefix also used to refer to other things, not to mention the absolute absurdity of the term "web3" for an ecosystem that has yet to produce even a single key mainstream application... I'm going to go out on a limb here say that maybe the people using the prefix in that way don't particularly care about whether their terminology is informative as much as whether it conveys the narrative they want.

Been shilling crypto since 2016 and never heard "Bit" as a reference to bitcoin. Common are: Bitcoin, BTC, satoshis, sats, crypto, bitkorns, space cash.

It's tangentially related through the theme of decentralization

- It's trying to be a very decentralized chat application

- The linked post is on nostr, which decentralized broadcast messaging protocol

- Bitcoin is a decentralized money protocol

- Nostr has the capability to send bitcoin between users via the lightning network via https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md

It takes more effort to use nostr than it does anything relatively more centralized like bluesky or mastodon. So people there are the kind who are dedicated to decentralized technologies & support bitcoin.

It’s a nod to the song Where My B At by Esham

it’s fairly obviously bit chat, named most likely in homage to bitcoin, due to its decentralized nature, though there is no connection beyond that

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