Crypto Chat with the World via Space
For a small fee in Bitcoin (about 2–3 cents), you can now send a message that will be delivered to a random recipient, according to bits.media. These messages cannot be blocked by internet providers or governments. This is made possible by the Blockstream satellite—an eccentric project announced over a year ago, aiming to make Bitcoin accessible to people without internet access. You can do this through the website spacebit.live. The results of combining these two projects are quite interesting. Users who participated in this small experiment sent a wide variety of messages—from the quirky thoughts of an unknown person about Bitcoin to a poem dedicated to the Lightning Network, as well as an encrypted “Pepe the Frog” card.
According to the Blockstream website, users are sending many messages through the system, and soon there may be even more. Currently, the technology is running on a test network, but the anonymous creator of Spacebit.live, MediumSqueeze, hopes it will soon move to the main network and be used with real Bitcoin.
For now, the idea is seen by the community as entertainment, but some developers believe the technology opens up new possibilities. Bitcoin podcast host Ansel Lindner believes it has potential for truth-seekers—people who expose unethical actions by governments or corporations to the rest of the world. They can use the technology to broadcast anonymous messages that cannot be censored, and according to Lindner, there are practically no other ways to do this.
“The technology can be used to send anonymous messages to the whole world. Such messages cannot be stopped by the media, internet providers, or the government,” he said. “If you post such messages on social networks, they can still be censored. If you write something like this on your own website, it’s harder to remove, but you’re easier to find. An encrypted message or email can also be censored if several people are targeted. But a message sent via satellite will be very hard to stop.”
Nevertheless, the site’s creator sees this simply as a way to keep expressing opinions about Bitcoin.
“This network isn’t meant for ordinary chatter; it’s true 21st-century cyberpunk,” said MediumSqueeze.