Bitmessage (sending packets)

Last time I played with Bitmessage was back in September 2023. At that time, my custom client was able to connect to other nodes and discover peers. It was also able to listen for new objects and download them. We could also verify the proof of work of any objects we received.

Today, I worked on computing proof of work for objects we want to send, and sent them to some peers. I verified that this worked by both receiving the things I send on other connections, and by receiving them back from the peers I sent them to when I reconnected to them.

It looks like with the default PoW settings, it doesn’t take a lot of time to send something. In Bitmessage, the difficulty of the PoW depends on the size of the object, and its TTL (how long it should be stored by nodes).

Short messages (like from a messaging app) or short commands/broadcasts from automated systems are pretty small. With a TTL of 1 day, it takes just a few seconds to compute the PoW. This seems very workable.

The objects I sent are still plaintext, and won’t show up on the official client as “messages”. I can either work on that next, or use the current functionality to send messages for custom applications.