Encrypted chat between Bitcoin node operators. It runs beside Bitcoin Core or Knots, uses your node to discover and identify peers, and serves its own web interface.

Messages are not sent over the Bitcoin P2P network. They cannot be — the protocol has no message type that can carry chat, and nodes drop peers that send unknown data. NodeSignal is honest about the split:

Features

• No central server, no accounts
• End-to-end encrypted, with forward secrecy and key pinning
• Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, including pruned nodes
• Tor, Tailscale, IPv4 and IPv6
• Zero dependencies — Node.js and nothing else
• Self-hosted web interface

How it works

Your Bitcoin node
   └─ RPC (read-only, 3 methods)
        └─ NodeSignal daemon ──── encrypted TCP :8788 ────┐
             └─ web interface :8789                       │
                                                          ▼
                                          Remote NodeSignal daemon
                                               └─ their Bitcoin node

Install

On Windows the installer asks a short series of questions and verifies each answer against your actual system: it finds your RPC credentials, really connects to bitcoind and reports your node's height and peer count, checks ports are free, and starts the daemon once to prove the configuration works.

On Linux, install-node.sh installs a systemd service.

Files

The daemon needs noise.js and nodeps.js beside it, plus one interface file.

Repository contents

Program files (all required together):

nodesignald.js  noise.js  nodeps.js
nodesignal.html          operator console, for a machine with a node
nodesignal-demo.html     demo build, for a machine without one

Installers:

install-windows.bat + install.js     Windows
install-node.sh                      Linux (systemd)
start-node.bat / start-daemon.bat    Windows manual launchers

Everything else is documentation, plus LICENSE (MIT) and .gitignore.

Do not commit these

The .gitignore already excludes them, but they are worth knowing about, because two of them are genuinely sensitive:

If you ever commit state.json by accident, treat that identity as burned: delete it, restart the daemon to generate a new keypair, and tell your contacts, who will see a fingerprint mismatch.

Documentation

Honest limitations

Worth knowing before you run it:

• Messages are stored decrypted at rest.
• Running it links a social identity to a node IP. That is inherent to the design, and the reason to prefer Tor.
• Content is encrypted; metadata is not — who talks to whom, and when, is visible to anyone positioned to watch.
• Every claim a peer makes about its node is self-declared.

SECURITY-CRITIQUE.md covers these properly, with what has been fixed and what has not.

Ports

Tor and Tailscale need no port forwarding. Clearnet needs TCP 8788 reachable.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.