# Bitreich

{ Researching this on-the-go, send me corrections, thanks. ~drummyfish }

Bitreich is a small, obscure underground group/movement of programmers who greatly value [minimalism](minimalism.md)/[simplicity](simplicity.md), oppose the [evil](evil.md) and degeneration of [modern](modern.md) mainstream technology and aim for making the world a better place mainly through simpler [technology](tech.md). They seem to belong to the cluster of "minimalist programmer groups", i.e. they are similar to [suckless](suckless.md) (which in their manifesto they see as a failed project), [reactionary software](reactionary_software.md) and our very own [LRS](lrs.md), sharing many values such as [minimalism](minimalism.md), [Unix philosophy](unix_philosophy.md), preference and love of the [C](c.md) language, carrying on some of the [hacker culture](hacking.md) heritage, though of course they also have their own specifics that will make them different and even disagreeing with us and others on occasion, e.g. on [copyleft](copyleft.md) (unlike us, they seem to greatly prefer the [GPL](gpl.md)), terminology (yeah, they seems to prefer "[open source](open_source.md)") and probably also things like [privacy](privacy.md) (though the craze doesn't seem to go too far, many have listed their real names and addresses) etc.

According to the gopherhole Bitreich started on 17.8.2016 -- one of the top members (maybe even the founder) seems to be 20h (Christoph Lohmann according to the user profile) who even gave an interview about the project to some radio/magazine/whatever. It seems they are based in Germany. As of 2023 they list 12 official member profiles (the number of lurker followers will of course be a much high number, there seem to be even bitreich subcommunities in other countries such as Italy). They are mostly present on [gopher](gopher.md) (gopher://bitreich.org), which they greatly promote, and [IRC](irc.md) (ircs://irc.bitreich.org:6697/#bitreich-en). There are also [Tor](tor.md) hidden services etc.; their website at bitreich.org seems to be purposefully broken in protest of the [web](web.md) horror.

Some of their ideas and philosophy seems to be very based, e.g. preference of KISS/older protocols (gopher, ftp, IRC, ...), "users are programmers" (opposing division into users as consumers and developers as overlords), "bug reports are [patches](patch.md)", "programs can be [finished](finished.md)" etc.

Bitreich is also about humor and [fun](fun.md) (sometimes so much so that it's not clear if something is a joke or serious stuff -- maybe because it's partly both). They invented *[analgram](analgram.md)*, an authentication method based on analprints (alternative to fingerprint authentication). They put a snapshot of their source code into an actual Arctic vault in Greenland, to be preserved for millennia. Often there appear parodies of whatever is currently hyping in the mainstream, e.g. [NFT](nft.md)s, "big data", [AI](ai.md), [blockchain](blockchain.md) etc. { There's also some stuff going on with [memes](meme.md) and cooking recipes but TBH I didn't get it. ~drummyfish }

Some interesting projects they do:

- **Bitreichcon**: annual conference, running since 2017. Their slides can be downloaded in plain text.
- **Bitreich radio**
- **Day Of The GrParazyd**: point and click adventure [game](game.md). { Didn't even take a look at this yet, sorry, no idea what it really is :D ~drummyfish }
- **The Gopher Lawn**: directory/index of gopherspace, categorizing gopherhole links.
- **The Gopher Times**: a very cool printable magazine (in both [pdf](pdf.md) and [plain text](txt.md)), `git clone git://bitreich.org/tgtimes`.
- A number of smaller utilities/programs and parody stuff (see their gopherhole).
- Keeping infrastructure to host stuff they see as valuable.
- ...

## See Also

- [suckless](suckless.md)
- [reactionary software](reactionary_software.md)
- [less retarded software](lrs.md)
- [KISS](kiss.md)