People at a protest/rally.

I came here to basically say the same thing. I read over some of the white paper to see if I was missing something that would make this more viable or useful and I'm just drawing a blank. I suppose if you were a group of people sitting around a table or maybe a small room and wanted to text each other everything in a non-ip-network setup and didn't need a record or something.

So yeah, I still can't figure out who this is for or maybe it was just to say hey, look what we made!?

The use case is situations where centralized chat infrastructure is either offline or undesirable. Emergency situations where cell and/or WiFi infrastructure is knocked offline for extended periods. Quick, informal group chats where not everybody needs to know each other (think: concert; sports event). Repressive countries with centralized control of the internet.

> This is dependent on a short range and unreliable local network.

This would not be a show-stopper if enough people made use of it, where statistically some of them always change locations and thus data could be stored-and-forwarded at times.

But I see a different show-stopper: The tragedy of the commons. If such network attracted a lot of users, it would also attract the scum of the Internet - advertisers, for example, who would immediately try to abuse this network for molesting people with endless SPAM messages. It would really take some very clever mechanisms to buil

> So what's the application for this? Students in class? People in a movie theater? This is a nonstarter.

Being in an area where the government is interfering with cell comms.

Israel and Iran both shut down their internet during the ongoing conflict for multiple days. It's standard operating procedure to flip the "internet kill switch" as soon as a foreign bomb explodes on your soil. In a major city like Tehran, Tel Aviv, NYC, SF, London etc where you have 10,000+ people per square mile, you could easily have 20-30,000 people on a network like this with moderately low latency during a bombing situation.

But yeah if you live in the Houston suburbs where each house sits on a

One could easily argue that Briar is a much better system.

But, it lacks iPhone and Dorsey support so...

He wouldn't just steal the concept (and possibly code) from an open source project and then commercialize it, right?

The reason Briar can't work on iOS is because of the Wifi support. If it only supported Bluetooth, it could be ported.

Dorsey is going to run into the same problem - his app will be severely limited by the range of Bluetooth, and as soon as he tries to add Wifi, Apple will block him.

The same can be said about anything using RF to communicate.

I thought a hammer was just $5?

Who cares about Dorsey? I hate it because it uses Bluetooth. Although I can see a potential value when used in countries with dictatorships. But luckily I live in the U.S. where that is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon.