India’s Cybercrime Coordination Centre, operating under the Ministry of Home Affairs, has directed GitHub to disable three repositories belonging to Bitchat, an open-source messaging application developed by Jack Dorsey. The order, shared by Dorsey on X, gave the platform a three-hour compliance window and targeted the app’s censorship-resistant architecture that enables encrypted, registration-free communication over Bluetooth mesh networks—without internet, central servers, or user accounts.
Bitchat’s standout feature is its ability to relay Bitcoin transactions offline, passing them from phone to phone until one device connects to the network. This design was built specifically to sustain payments during government-imposed connectivity restrictions. According to the takedown notice, such capabilities hamper lawful interception, attribution, and investigations—a concern amplified by ongoing protests in Delhi, where demonstrators have turned to mesh-network tools to organize amid internet blackouts linked to a national exam scandal.
While it remains unclear whether GitHub complied with the deadline, the app is still reportedly accessible through the Google and Apple stores. Since Bitchat’s code is open source, it can be copied and hosted elsewhere, limiting the effectiveness of a single-platform takedown. The incident now serves as a key test of how far authorities can contain decentralized software once its code is publicly distributed, with the next checkpoint being whether access is restricted only within India or extended more broadly.
