[aakilfernandes]

Played around with bitmessage for a bit and worked on an alternative for a bit. Here's some thoughts:

1. Like most gossip networks, it uses tcp. Since most consumer devices won't allow for incoming tcp connections, the end result is that most traffic gets routed through the small fraction of nodes on cloud servers. While this is true for most gossip networks, it is particularly problematic when you're using it bandwidth intensive applications (a twitter/parler alternative).

2. Using PoW for spam prevention is better than nothing, but the PoW algorithm is a simple sha256 hash. Sha256 ASICs will keep spam cost effective. Not sure if there's any solution. I think using some kind of crypto based incentive would be better economics, though of course have an increased user burden of acquiring crypto.

3. Bitmessage IMHO tries to be too many things with a message storage/rebroadcast protocol on top of a gossip network. All of these suffer from less than great documentation.

[RL_Quine]

For 2, the system is just broken. There's no balance between a message that's acceptable in terms of time to be able to send for a user (say, 10 minutes of proof of work), that would reduce spam. If someone sends me a message every 10 minutes the service is unusable, but making the proof of work more expensive means it's unusable as well. This is why the original proof of work for email was broken as well.

[CyberDildonics]

Someone has to know your public key to send you a message in the first place.

[RL_Quine]

Nah, they can be sniffed.

[vbezhenar]

Regarding PoW: I think that there are two improvements that could be implemented.

1. Allow sending messages without PoW to friends. If you want to send a message to a stranger, you still need to do PoW. That should not happen often, so PoW bar could be higher.

2. Mobile clients probably won't be able to perform adequate PoW, so there should be an option to delegate PoW to some server for money. That's not a protocol issue, though.

2.1. May be instead of paying for PoW, it would be better to send money directly to the receiver. That would complicate the protocol, though.

[webmobdev]

HOw does this compare with Jami - https://jami.net/ ?

[generalizations]

Re: point 1. The bittorrent protocol somehow manages to get around this problem. I wonder if that mechanism could be used here.

[lostmsu]

> Since most consumer devices won't allow for incoming tcp connections

I am curious why do you say that?