disclaimer: I am advising on a messaging system that will compete with Bitmessage. That said I was objective in my analysis, to the best of my ability anyway. I am going to take all of the information from my previous posts and make one single big post, with better organization. Here is kmfkewms consolidated analysis of Bitmessage, based off the two published papers and some news articles: Basic Information: Bitmessage is an everybody gets everything PIR (private information retrieval) system that also has worked in a message publishing (hence forth referred to as inserting) system. Concerns: 1. Inefficient A. They use everybody gets everything PIR. Although this is information theoretically proven as anonymous to within the set size of users, it is horribly inefficient. If they settled with computationally secure, rather than information theoretically, they could reduce the amount of required bandwidth by orders of magnitude. Everybody gets everything is an elementary form of private information retrieval, there has been over a decade of research into PIR greatly improving on its current state (largely efficiency and scalability) versus everybody gets everything. Everybody gets everything PIR is roughly equivalent to the one time pad of symmetric encryption, information theoretically secure but impractical. B. They have ALL nodes attempt to decrypt ALL messages. This is horribly horribly inefficient and CPU intensive, and will not scale. There are better solutions than this. Here is an example from me: