Late Sunday, Elon Musk broke the information straight on X: “All new XChat is rolling out with encryption, vanishing messages and the ability to send any kind of file. Also, audio/video calling. This is built on Rust with (Bitcoin style) encryption, whole new architecture. You can do audio/video calls without a phone number across all platforms.”
By Monday morning X engineers had begun pushing the primary builds to Premium subscribers. An organization memo seen by Enterprise Insider says early variations lock every chat behind a four-digit pass-code till the rollout stabilises, after which the characteristic set will “cascade to all tiers.”
What “Bitcoin-Style” Encryption May Imply
Whereas Musk didn’t specify what “Bitcoin-style” encryption means, it may be speculated.
Bitcoin’s blockchain information isn’t encrypted, however the community is authenticated and permission-less due to a good suite of cryptographic primitives—most notably the secp256k1 elliptic-curve and ECDSA/Schnorr signatures. Those self same primitives type the spine of BIP 324, an opt-in transport layer that encrypts peer-to-peer visitors with an Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman handshake, then secures packets with ChaCha20-Poly1305. The proposal is now partially merged into Bitcoin Core.
Rust implementations of these libraries—rust-secp256k1 and associated crates—have been audited for years contained in the BTC ecosystem. In apply, they allow a stateless, low-latency channel that retains ahead secrecy as soon as the ephemeral key materials is discarded. That structure maps neatly onto Musk’s necessities: encrypted payloads, vanishing messages, and identification decoupled from cellphone numbers.
Core contributor James O’Beirne has lengthy argued that with out transport-layer encryption, “the claim of ‘censorship resistance’ is sort of a bluff while P2P traffic happens in the clear.” Lightning Labs co-founder Olaoluwa Osuntokun instructed the Bitcoin Optech podcast that BIP 324 “is a pretty big bump” as a result of it lastly hides link-level metadata for gentle shoppers.
If XChat in the end adopts the secp256k1-based handshake outlined in BIP 324, it will ship ahead secrecy and low-latency efficiency corresponding to Lightning-network transports. As of press time, no impartial audit of XChat’s supply code has been printed, and the exact cryptographic design subsequently stays unverified.
A Deeper Musk-Bitcoin Nexus
Musk’s resolution to badge the improve as “Bitcoin-style” isn’t merely rhetorical. In February 2021 Tesla disclosed a $1.5 billion BTC buy in its 10-Okay submitting, calling it a reserve-management technique. Though the automaker bought roughly 75% of these holdings in Q2 2022, Tesla continues to carry roughly 10,725 BTC on its stability sheet, based on the most recent shareholder letter.
Past treasury exercise, Musk has periodically lent public help to the ecosystem, and initiated a short-lived “Bitcoin Mining Council” in 2021 to debate renewable vitality information.
At press time, BTC traded at $104,879.
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