If you’re a frequenter of the Bitcoin forums and chatrooms as I am you’ve likely heard of Bitmessage. It’s a new p2p distributed mail server that is completely free and open source software. I had first heard about it a few months ago but paid little attention. In the free software movement there are tons of ideas that come and go and are soon forgotten. Only after something stays around a while or a friend gets into it am I likely to give a project a closer examination. That happened last night when fellow bitcoiner and free stater Joshua Harvey announced that he had installed the software and was impressed.

After reading the Bitmessage wiki I, too, began to get excited. The software is very similar to a type of email protocol that I had found totally revolutionary in the past called i2p-Bote. The problem with i2p-Bote, however, is that it only existed on the i2p network, a very cumbersome onion network that isn’t yet accessible to non-techies. What Bitmessage has done is allow easy access to ground-breaking email software to the technophobe.

What is so revolutionary, though, about Bitmessage? It provides easy message encryption by default. It anonymizes both the sender and recipient of messages. It fights spam like no other, and because of its distributed nature it cannot be shut down. In other words the spam ridden, DDoS vulnerable, corporate data mined, NSA spyware called e-mail is eventually going to get replaced by Bitmessage. So, the next time I get a “Constitutionalist” in my face complaining about how the government is reading all of our emails, I’m going to direct them to Bitmessage and tell them to put up or shut up.

But enough from me. Here’s a nice video that will better explain what Bitmessage is. Enjoy!