Negotiate sensitive terms with no transcript

The problem

A salary discussion with a recruiter. An early conversation between two founders about a merger. A quiet attempt to settle a dispute before lawyers get involved. A back-channel between two parties who officially are not talking. In every one of these, the substance is sensitive, but the bigger risk is the record: a message that gets forwarded, screenshotted, pulled into discovery, or read by the wrong colleague six months later.

"Off the record" used to mean a phone call or a walk. Now most negotiation happens in writing, and writing persists. You want the flexibility of typing, without the paper trail.

Why ordinary tools leak

• Work email and Slack belong to your employer. Everything is archived, searchable, and discoverable. A salary negotiation with a competitor, or a candid exchange with a counterparty, is sitting in a system your employer owns.
• LinkedIn and platform DMs tie the exchange to your real, public identity and store it on the platform indefinitely.
• WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage keep the full thread on the other person's phone. Anything you write can be screenshotted and forwarded, and Telegram's normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted at all.
• Disappearing messages in Signal or WhatsApp help, but both parties must already be in each other's contacts with their real phone numbers, which is often precisely what one side wants to avoid.

How Btwinus fits

Btwinus is one web page. Click Start a new chat and your browser generates an encrypted invite link and a passphrase. The link carries a WebRTC handshake encrypted with AES-256-GCM, keyed from the passphrase with PBKDF2 (100,000 iterations), inside the URL fragment, which browsers never send to a server. The other person opens the link, enters the passphrase, and sends back a reply link. From then on, messages travel directly between the two browsers. There is no identity on either side unless you choose to give one, no server that could keep a transcript, and no history. Closing the tab ends it.

Keep the link and the passphrase on two separate channels. That way a counterparty's assistant, or a compromised inbox, cannot reassemble the conversation.

Step by step for a negotiation

1. Agree the ground rules first. A short call: "Let's talk numbers somewhere that doesn't keep a record. I'll send you a link; I'll give you the passphrase on this call."
2. Start the chat and send the link. Open btwinus.com, click Start a new chat, and send the invite link by whatever messenger you already use. On its own it is unreadable.
3. Say the passphrase. Read it aloud on the call, or text it from a different app than the one that carried the link.
4. Exchange the reply link. They open the link, enter the passphrase, and get a reply link copied to their clipboard. They send it back, you paste it, and you are connected.
5. Compare the short authentication string. Both screens show a short code. If they match, nobody is in the middle.
6. Talk, then record only what was agreed. When you reach terms, each side writes down the outcome in their own notes. The exploration, the anchors, the walk-away numbers: gone with the tab.

Neither side needs to give a name, an email, or a phone number to Btwinus at any point. If the two of you are in the same room, the link can be shown as a QR code and the passphrase spoken.

Honest limitations

• Both people must be online at once. It is a live conversation, not a message queue.
• One to one only. Two principals, not two delegations.
• The other side can still screenshot. No tool can stop someone photographing their own screen. Btwinus removes the automatic record, not the deliberate one. Choose your counterparty accordingly.
• IP addresses are mutually visible. As with any WebRTC connection, each browser learns the other's IP. Btwinus sees neither. Use a VPN if that matters to you.
• Not a daily messenger. Use it for the sensitive session, not for logistics.
• No history means no evidence. If you need proof of what was agreed, put the final terms in writing through a normal channel afterwards.

Btwinus is free and open source. Either side can verify what the page does before trusting it.