  \section{Basics}

  While encryption technology like PGP or S/MIME provides a secure way to protect content from prying eyes, we lerned from Edward Snowden that metadata - information about who communicates with whom - is equally interesting and much easier to analyze.

  With e-mail, we can only prevent this by encrypting the connection to the server as well as between servers. Therefore we can only hope that both our and the recipient's e-mail provider are both trustworthy and competent.

  With Bitmessage we send a message to a sufficiently large number of participants, with the intended recipient among them. The message is encrypted such as only the person in possesion of the private key can decrypt it. All participants try to do this in order to find their messages.