alexxnica / bitpost

OSX app for Bitmessage

About Bitpost

Bitpost is a user friendly Bitmessage client for OSX.

The official website for the project is:

• http://voluntary.net/bitpost

What's Bitmessage?

Bitmessage is a decentralized messaging system. Instead of connecting to centralized servers (like Facebook, gmail, etc) or federated servers (like email, IRC, Jabber), when you run a Bitmessage client it connects to other clients directly forming a network which can relay messages with no central control.

Your address is a public encryption key that others can use to encrypt messages to you in a way that only you can decrypt. Messages are sent to the network over Tor (another decentralized network that hides the source of network requests) in order to conceal the location of the sender.

Bitmessage adopts some standards from Bitcoin such as sharing a similar binary protocol, similar node discovery and message sharing systems, and address format but it has no "blockchain". Messages are simply shared between nodes and cached for two days before being deleted (though your client will keep any messages sent to you).

For more info see:

• https://bitmessage.org

How Bitpost Works

The UI launches a local pybitmessage node in the background which uses Tor to connect to the Bitmessage network.

The local bitmessage node is run with custom node and API ports so it doesn't interfere with other bitmessage clients. The app uses it's own bitmessage keys.dat file for the app which is stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Bitpost.

Importing keys

Dropping in your current bitmessage-qt keys.dat file may not work as the .dat file format changes between pybitmessage releases. You may be able to import a key pair by:

• making sure the Bitpost app is not running
• make a backup copy of the Bitpost keys.dat
• open the Bitpost keys.dat and copy in your identity key pair
• close the keys.dat file and try starting Bitpost

If this doesn't work, replace the Bitpost keys.dat file with the backup copy.

Compiling

After cloning the repo:

• git clone https://github.com/stevedekorte/Bitpost.git

and making sure to pull in the submodules, you should be able to open the project file in Xcode and build it. Note that BitmessageKit includes some precompiled components. See it's notes for compiling those from source.

License

The code is open source under an MIT license.

Contributing

We would welcome your contributions.

Credits

• Chris Robinson - Designer
• Steve Dekorte - Lead & UI Developer
• Adam Thorsen - Generalist (Tor and Python intergration)
• Dru Nelson - Unix Guru