I stumbled on this new messaging technology recently and am convinced that it is going to catch on (much as the developers of the Betamax video standard were convinced, no doubt). Anyway it does seem very promising – here’s an excerpt from a wiki page about it:

Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer communications protocol based on the Bitcoin crypto-currency used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide “non-content” data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs.

It is worth noting that Bitmessage is at a fairly early stage in its development, in particular there has apparently as yet been no professional security audit done on the code, so its usefulness at this stage for guaranteed secure communications is dubious, however I can confirm that it is easy to set up (easier than setting up GPG encryption with Thunderbird for example) and that it works as advertised. I will definitely be keeping an eye on its development.

Here is a video presentation by Hak5 about how to set it up and a quick run through:

http://youtu.be/473Irvi6loM?t=6m7s

(I wanted to embed the video but it’s not letting me at the moment).

If anyone would like to send me a bitmessage, here’s my address:

BM-NBqu4m8YkNyfkWQQNx68YNGkxQCoRDvF