# Why the Meshcore mesh network is not suitable for bitcoiners

May 16, 2026 - Renaud Lifchitz, cybersecurity & IoT expert

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Radio mesh networks are growing more and more, and that's a good thing! The [Meshcore](https://meshcore.io/) mesh radio protocol is far superior to that of [Meshtastic](https://meshtastic.org/) (no flooding to everyone to broadcast a message, better radio efficiency), but is, in my opinion, not suitable for providing offline services beyond "one-to-one" communications within the same cell. In particular, it's not well suited for sending Bitcoin transactions...

Here are 10 reasons not to use Meshcore for Bitcoiners:

1. Several components of Meshcore are paid (T-Deck application, in-app payments on smartphone)
2. Several components of Meshcore are "closed-source" (including the official iOS smartphone application, notably)
3. Project essentially funded by a commercial company, Ripple Radios
4. Meshcore suffers from structural security vulnerabilities (https://alainx277.com/posts/meshcores-problem-with-security/), TLDR:
- Weak encryption (no nonce, no padding, no chaining)
- Weaknesses in message integrity and authenticity verification (16-bit MAC brute-forceable in 4 days)
- Poor development practices (dangerous development practices, silent fixes, no warnings to users during previous severe vulnerabilities)

And this is not minor — it requires rebuilding the entire protocol, network, and firmwares to fix it...

5. The Meshcore project is splitting due to development governance disagreements: https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split
6. Meshcore is not usable without specific hardware and a radio network (in particular, not usable over Bluetooth as with applications like [Bitchat](https://bitchat.free/))
7. Network designed to operate in a closed loop over radio only, with no official bridges to the outside world (therefore an obstacle to developing bots or offering services on Bitcoin)
8. Extending the network via IP (linking two radio bubbles) is not native, and requires one of the routers to know the IP of another router willing to receive IP traffic (voluntary port forwarding). This is neither practical, nor confidential, nor scalable...
9. Meshcore cannot host files for sharing
10. Meshcore cannot host small applications or web services (P2P exchanges, for example)

As you have understood, none of this aligns well with the open-source, sharing, inclusive, and privacy-focused philosophy of Bitcoin...
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:bulb: **#protip:** [Reticulum](http://reticulum.network/) fixes (**all of**) this!
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*Example of a Bitcoin page hosted anonymously on Reticulum/NomadNet*
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