The messenger DarkIRC, touted as “the world’s most reliable anonymous chat,” has entered the alpha testing phase, according to veteran bitcoin developer Amir Taaki.
DarkIRC is the world’s strongest anonymous chat. There is no identity. Messages have no link.
Free society means free speech. That means all speech. Without limits.
We made this chat because of the brutal censorship of crypto devs by authoritarian regimes.
The power regime… pic.twitter.com/AXf6YlGf5J
— Amir Taaki (@Narodism) October 2, 2024
According to Taaki, the solution was developed in response to the “brutal censorship of cryptocurrency developers by authoritarian regimes.”
The main feature of DarkIRC is its “lack of identification.” Users can change their pseudonyms at any time, making it impossible to link messages to a specific individual.
“All other applications require you to register or generate keys. Then this becomes your identifier. All your messages are tied to this identifier. But DarkIRC has no identification. You simply send messages in an anonymous P2P network based on Tor,” Taaki explained.
To combat spam, the messenger employs rate limiters at the network level to prevent network flooding. Each channel can set its own posting policy, and users can add optional moderation.
DarkIRC operates on any computer or mobile device. Users can set up a custom interface or IRC frontend for the application.
“The EU forced Telegram to hand over all chat data to them. This is the new norm. But enough is enough. A free society must have free speech. Free speech means all speech. […] Our goal is to make the internet wild again with a dense dark forest of encryption. This dark forest shelters and protects freedom. It is an internet with strong cryptography everywhere, impervious to surveillance,” the developer concluded.
In late September, Variant Fund managing partner Jesse Walden predicted the demise of “cypherpunk values” in blockchain within the next decade.