Original author: Xiaobing, Shenchao TechFlow

The French are very anxious lately.

On October 17, 550,000 to 800,000 people took to the streets to protest against rising living costs, with tear gas and burning trash bins flying at Place de la République in Paris, and over 400 people were arrested nationwide. Former Prime Minister and presidential candidate Gabriel Attal subsequently publicly proposed to temporarily block social media during the unrest.

Four days later, on October 21, the largest telecommunications operator in France, Orange, and its sub-brand Sosh experienced a nationwide outage, disrupting calls, text messages, and mobile data for several hours, affecting millions of users.

Politicians talk about disconnecting social networks, while operators actually cut off mobile networks; however, the French voted with their actions: An app called Bitchat surged to the top of the social networking category in the French App Store, surpassing Telegram and Signal, and made its way into the top ten of all free apps.

The creator of this app is Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, and it’s a software that allows chatting without the internet.

A chatting tool that doesn't require the internet

Bitchat’s core selling point is just one sentence: No internet, no problem.

It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networking technology. Once you open the app, your phone will automatically search for nearby devices using Bitchat and establish a direct connection via Bluetooth. Each phone acts as both a sender and a relay node, allowing messages to be transmitted from device to device in a hop-like manner, with a theoretical coverage range of about 300 meters; the denser the crowd, the stronger the network.

No account registration, no phone number, no email, no centralized server is required.

Messages in public channels can be seen by all nearby users, similar to a localized anonymous square. Private messages use the Noise Protocol Framework for end-to-end encryption. If the phone has internet access, Bitchat will automatically switch to the Nostr protocol, supporting longer-distance communication and location-based channels.

There is also a "panic mode": triple-tap the logo, and all local data is instantly wiped.

Dorsey released it as a "weekend project" last July, with all code open-source, the Android version written in Kotlin, the iOS version in Swift, with licenses being MIT and Unlicense, respectively. Android users can even share the app directly with others via Bluetooth without an app store.

It sounds geeky, but what truly propelled it into the spotlight was never the technology itself.

Every time the internet goes down, Bitchat erupts

Bitchat's spread has a clear pattern: wherever the internet is cut off, it erupts.

In September 2025, Nepal. Generation Z took to the streets to protest, and the government blocked social media. Within a single day, Nepal contributed nearly 50,000 downloads, at one point accounting for 39% of global installs. During the same period, Madagascar also experienced a similar download surge, contributing 70,000 downloads in a week.

In January 2026, Uganda and Iran. Internet restrictions tightened, and Bitchat's download numbers surged again.

In July 2026, India. Protests broke out among students in New Delhi, and authorities restricted internet access. Within just five days from July 17 to 23, over 91,000 Indian users downloaded Bitchat, with India’s share of global downloads skyrocketing from 1% to 85%. The daily download volume on July 19 surged by 32 times, with daily active users exceeding 330,000.

The Indian government's response was also direct; it first ordered GitHub to remove Bitchat’s open-source code repository and then, in early October, invoked Article 69A of the Information Technology Act to directly request Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores. The website was also blocked by ISPs. The Internet Freedom Foundation claimed that this order was unconstitutional, arguing that the legal basis for banning a communication software should not be "because it works during an internet outage."

Now it's France's turn. The model is exactly the same: social unrest combined with actual or potential disruptions to communication infrastructure, prompting users to flock to an alternative that does not rely on traditional networks.

The difference is that France is the first developed country market to see this phenomenon. Previous outbreaks occurred in developing countries, where people had a visceral fear of "government internet shutdowns." The situation in France is more complicated, facing both the threat of political blockades and technical failures from operators, with both lines converging in the same week, pushing Bitchat to the top.

Is this a coincidence? Look at the past twenty years of the person behind it, and you will find the answer is: No.

Dorsey’s cypherpunk universe

In 2006, Dorsey founded Twitter, aiming to enable everyone to speak to the world.

In 2009, he founded Square, intending to allow everyone to accept payments.

Both companies grew into giants, but Dorsey became increasingly dissatisfied with them.

Twitter turned into an attention black hole driven by algorithms and monetized by ads. Square became a payment intermediary requiring a bank license and compliance team to operate. They achieved scale but betrayed their original intention: lowering the entry barrier, eliminating intermediaries, and returning power to individuals.

The turning point came in 2021.

That year, Dorsey made a widely spread remark at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami: "Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don't think there's anything more important in my lifetime to work on."

A few months later, he resigned as CEO of Twitter.

Insiders said Twitter executives had grown tired of his obsession with Bitcoin, but for Dorsey, this was not a resignation, but a redirection.

He renamed Square to Block, and the company bought over 8,000 bitcoins, valued at about $170 million. Block's Cash App had already launched Bitcoin trading back in 2018, and later introduced Bitkey (a self-custody Bitcoin wallet) and Proto (Bitcoin mining chip).

At the end of the same year, Dorsey threw a bombshell on Twitter.

He publicly criticized the then-hot Web3 narrative: "You don't own 'web3.' The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label."

This remark offended half of Silicon Valley. a16z partner Chris Dixon responded with a quote from Gandhi, and Dorsey shot back: "You are a fund that wants to be a media empire, not Gandhi."

In 2022, he judged Ethereum too: "If you build on ETH, you at least have one or multiple single points of failure, so it has no interest for me."

Dorsey's attitude toward the entire crypto industry can be summed up in one sentence: Only Bitcoin. Everything else is noise, or worse, a new form of centralization under the guise of decentralization.

But he didn’t just say it.

In 2022, he donated 14 bitcoins (about $245,000 at the time) to fiatjaf, the founder of the Nostr protocol. Nostr is a minimalistic decentralized social protocol that has no company, no board, no tokens, anyone can run a relay node, and anyone can build clients on it. In May 2024, he donated $21 million to OpenSats through the Start Small Foundation, with $15 million for Bitcoin open-source development, $5 million specifically for the Nostr ecosystem, and $1 million for operations. He also pledged $5 million to Brink to fund Bitcoin core developers.

The total amount of these donations exceeds $30 million. In the context of Silicon Valley, this amount is not large. But in the context of open-source infrastructure, it is a game-changing figure. The Nostr protocol now has around 16 million users and 500,000 daily active users, transforming from a geek experiment into a network with a real user base.

Dorsey also funded Bluesky, but later resigned from the board. He posted something deeply meaningful on Nostr: "There is no Nostr board."

For him, a "decentralized" protocol needing a board has already taken a wrong turn.

In November 2024, Block cut the Web5 project (an ambitious attempt to build a decentralized internet layer on Bitcoin) and focused resources on Proto and Bitkey. This seemed like a strategic contraction, but from another perspective: Dorsey is betting on the most fundamental infrastructure. Not a platform, but a protocol. Not an app, but a tool.

In July 2025, Bitchat was released.

A chat tool that does not require a server, Bluetooth serves as the local communication layer, while Nostr serves as the online communication layer. The code is completely open-source. There is no corporate operation, no terms of service, no backdoors.

If you draw all that Dorsey has done in the past five years on a single chart, Bitchat is the latest piece of that puzzle, representing Dorsey’s entire cypherpunk worldview in technical expression.

Dorsey spent twenty years, from creating one of the largest social platforms in the world, to completely denying that model, to tearing everything down and starting over.

The path he has walked is almost a microcosm of the entire history of internet socialization: from open to closed, from idealism to compromise, and then breaking free from compromise, trying to regain the original answer.

The declaration page of the Bitchat project still begins with a saying left over thirty years ago by Eric Hughes in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto":

"In an electronic age, privacy is essential for an open society."

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