The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
There are yes for Meshtastic. This map seems to have the highest coverage of people sharing their nodes, but in reality in my area there are significantly more which are not shown on the map.
Absolutely, from Amsterdam I can sometimes hop all the way into Germany, The Hague, Haarlem. That doesn't mean my messages will always travel that far. Far from it, but it does mean that an identification message _has_ made it from there. On average there's around 80-100 nodes that I can connect to.
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
