
Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol  - gasull
http://openlibernet.org/faq.html
======
michaelt
I'm no expert on mesh networks so maybe someone can tell me - how would a mesh
network connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas? Or San Francisco to Salt Lake City?

Given the populations on both ends, I assume you'd need more bandwidth than
you could get from wifi routers with pringles can antennas.

I assume the companies who own long distance fiber have to do what the
government says, as they need government permission to dig up the streets and
install more fiber meaning they can't afford to upset politicians. So you can
encrypt the traffic, but if the word comes down to cut the cable the cable
gets cut.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yeah, bandwidth is the big thing people overlook. The land-based backbones
across the country is already made of _bundles_ of 10Gbit strands. Can you
imagine going from that, to all of the nation's traffic over a couple 54Mbps
streams...

~~~
lukifer
Even if traffic is drastically slower, on the order of a dialup modem, there
is still be massive value in free internet for the poor and the developing
world. Text is a powerful medium.

~~~
sliverstorm
Let's figure we can get 10 WiFi links at half of full speed across the
country, 10 x 30Mbps. That's 300Mbps, or roughly 1 bit per second per person.
About 10 letters per minute.

Good luck. Even the very first modems offered 300 bits per second, so you
would need 3,000 simultaneous non-colliding WiFi links across the country to
have enough bandwidth for everyone to enjoy the speeds of the very first
modems - a cool 40 letters per second.

~~~
userulluipeste
"About 10 letters per minute."

This is a OpenLibreNet telegram. Full stop.

~~~
dllthomas
Assuming everyone is using it all the time, and there's no meaningful caching
that can be done.

------
jsaxton86
A large scale mesh network is interesting to me for a couple of reasons:

* Consumers would no longer be dependent on monopolies like Comcast for internet service (OSI layer 1)

* It is much more resistant to eavesdropping and censorship (OSI layers 2-3)

These seem like two totally different problems to me, and I'm still struggling
to understand how the physical layer part can work on a large scale.

I get how they could work on a small scale. For example, you could easily set
up an ad-hoc wifi network in a college dorm for, say, file sharing purposes.
But in most other settings, I don't get how it could work. Most people don't
even talk to their neighbors, so even if you lived in a neighborhood that had
a high enough density of nodes for this to work, why would you want to share a
little ad-hoc network with your neighbors?

Of course, wireless networks alone aren't going to be sufficient to build a
large-scale mesh network that could disrupt existing ISPs. The latency alone
makes this infeasible. So you need someone to invest in physical links,
especially physical links that cover long distances. That's why the BTC part
of this proposal is so great -- it provides a way to compensate these people.
Of course, this is just a slightly different problem than the one we have
today, but instead of being stuck with Comcast we're stuck with whoever runs
these physical links.

~~~
lotsofmangos
_wireless networks alone aren 't going to be sufficient to build a large-scale
mesh network that could disrupt existing ISPs. The latency alone makes this
infeasible._

I'm not so sure, your links are almost c, whereas optic fiber is substantially
slower, so it depends entirely on how little processing you can get away with
in the message passing code.

edit - was just thinking about this, an arm cortex runs at ~ 2,000 MIPS, which
gives you just under 15 cm per instruction for radio in air. Fiber is about a
third slower, so your links do not actually have to be massively long to give
you quite a few cycles to play with.

~~~
ris
It's got nothing to do with the propagation speed. Wireless has high latency
because it requires comparatively high amounts of processing, has to operate
over a shared channel (requiring collision avoidance), is subject to
unexpected interference...

~~~
adestefan
You also need to send a lot of additional information for error correction.

------
pistle
Infrastructure is hand-waving friendly? The revolution will not be Pringle-
can-ized.

Is this how bad it's getting for bitcoin? People are trying to invent
dependencies based on flying currencies?

Let me get this straight... You want me to leave my darknet router on and
running to help route all that traffic from all that blockchain crap related
to bitcoin transactions? And my incentive is to get infinitesimally small
amounts of this stuff (which then requires more blockchain network
overhead)??? What is the likely ratio of blockchain noise to real data signal?

I enter the coffee shop and then we bucket brigade my order to the counter.
Anyone standing between me and the barista will have to shake hands, exchange
pleasantries, trade 1 hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, check some blockchains,
express their love of the community that makes the ordering of coffee
possible, then pass my order through letter-by-letter. Once complete, the same
process occurs in reverse, except the coffee will now be passed drop by drop
from mouth to mouth of everybody between the barista and myself (swished
around to ensure proper encryption).

Let's not also forget that I'm bootstrapping a fiber optic network through my
neighbors' back yards, because if I stick my router behind my Comcast modem...
uh, yeah. Wifi? pshaw. My neighbors can't change a default password on their
router. Now they're my decentralized network engineers that "love the
community"??

Good lord, the bitbug miners are trying to take their electricity wasting
exercise and make it a network wasting exercise as well.

------
rsync
I don't see this in the FAQ ...

What if I create an entire libernet network (say, 8 nodes, all meshed) and
isolate, or fork them, from the rest of libernet ... and then generate massive
traffic between them all to "earn" traffic currency ?

So, 8 nodes all connected with gigabit ethernet, all maxing out their traffic
in one big circle, earning "traffic" currency ... and then I rejoin the
mainline libernet in the future with my massive store of traffic currency.

How do you avoid that scenario ? Certainly you can't make the network
inoperable (or non-earning) if a network link breaks somewhere in the mesh ...
because there would _always_ be links in the mesh breaking.

Is there a minimum number of peers accessible in order to earn traffic
currency ? Is that number larger than the number of freebsd jails I could
quickly initialize with a script ?

~~~
saurik
One would imagine that the whole point of working with a protocol similar to
bitcoin is that this is not possible: you can't fork the network and rejoin at
a later time; that would be modeled as a blockchain fork, and your chain would
be shorter than the main chain when you tried to rejoin the rest of the peers
and your history would be erased.

~~~
rsync
Sure, but that doesn't make any sense in the context of a network.

You're saying that if my link goes down, or if my neighborhoods link goes own
... or if my city link goes down ... I can never rejoin the network ? Or
perhaps I can never spend my traffic currency ?

Of course the links will go down all the time and various (large and small)
segments of the network will be "islands" from time to time (as parts of the
Internet sometimes are) ... and I wonder how currency accumulation behaves at
these times.

~~~
saurik
If you read the FAQ and skim the paper, the idea is that a ledger is used
between neighbors for temporary imbalances, with the hope that the routing
mechanisms generally lead to bandwidth in both directions being fairly equal;
when this is not the case, and one node owes a non-negligable sum to another
node, it requests payment, and sends the signed transaction to a miner for
inclusion in the blockchain (the document states that it purposefully doesn't
go into the bitcoin parts of the mechanism, only documenting three changes,
none of which are to the centralized blockchain). So, yes: if your city gets
disconnected from the Internet, you will be unable to spend currency (but you
will still hopefully be able to transfer some packets, at least temporarily,
as long as you don't reach the de minimis accounting threshold).

~~~
gus_massa
I still don't understand.

First, it's not very clear, but in some cases you must consume the "traffic"
you have stored, by using the network or buying it with money. If not everyone
will be have plenty of "traffic". "The payment system ensures everyone is
doing what they’re supposed to."

So the 8 interconnected computers earned a lot of "traffic" but also consumed
a lot of "traffic". (This can work even if the 8-computer network is connected
by a small bandwidth connection to the main network.)

If node A sends a lot of packets to B and B sends a lots of packets to C, who
will earn the "traffic", A or B? Who has to pay for the "traffic"?

If I download a full 3 hours movie from Youtube, who has to pay the bills? I,
my "ISP" or Youtube?

If I upload a full 3 hours movie to Youtube, who has to pay the bills? I, my
"ISP" or Youtube?

If I download a full 3 hours movie from Youtube while I upload another full 3
hours movie to Youtube while, is it free for all?

~~~
saurik
I feel like you are using "send traffic" as if it were a "score", but the
point is that it is a "currency". A disconnected group of eight nodes can't
"earn a lot of traffic" because to move packets you have to spend currency.
The network prints new currency in the same way bitcoin does (through mining):
its a zero-sum (multi-party) transaction at the packet level, with new
currency coming only from mining. The disconnected group of eight nodes is
just going to be transferring data between each-other, not "earning" anything.

This is covered in the FAQ as well as the paper, so I'm not certain why this
is confusing. I guess I will just paste the information here, to encourage
people to actually read it.

FAQ:

> Each node keeps a small ledger for all its direct neighbors, with the total
> packets received/sent to and from each. The node also keeps count of all the
> packets it sent and received for its own consumption. When the balance of a
> neighbor hits a certain threshold, a payment request is initiated. The
> neighbor in question is required to sign the payment request with its Peer
> Address to make the payment legitimate. The signed payment is then forwarded
> to a payment processor (a mining node), which will verify and add the
> payment to the public ledger. The miners are special nodes that use a
> modified version of the Bitcoin Algorithm and require huge amounts of
> processing power. They earn free traffic for their efforts as well. Read
> more on Bitcoin for more information on how this works.

Paper:

> Accounting is calculated at Layer 3 packet level. Since transaction
> validation is computationally intensive and adds to the network overhead, it
> is obviously impossible to issue payments on a per-packet basis. Nodes will
> aggregate routed packets and only initiate a payment request when a set
> threshold is reached.

> Since neighboring nodes are more likely to owe each other packets than
> farther away nodes and are therefore more likely to reach that threshold,
> payment is only initiated between neighbors.

> The payment procedure is straightforward. Each node keeps accounting
> information for each of its neighbors and updates their balances as packets
> flow to and from each. Once a threshold limit is hit, the peer that is owed
> traffic initiates a payment request by sending a Payment Request packet to
> the neighbor that owes it traffic. The neighboring peer validates the
> requested amount against its own books. If the transaction is deemed valid,
> the Payment Request is signed and returned to the initiating peer. The
> initiating peer now has proof that the payment has been approved by the
> payer and is therefore valid. It then forwards it to any Payment Processing
> Peer (miner) it chooses and waits for the transaction to be approved.
> Ideally, the reciprocal balances of two neighbors should match, unless the
> protocol on one of the nodes is maliciously tampered with, or due to packet
> loss. We will cover those cases in more detail later.

On the other side (bills) you are taking into account the currency nature, but
clearly the ISP could never be in the position to pay the bill because it is
just in the middle: it extracts a transaction fee for transferring the data,
but whether you feel the sender or the receiver should be the one that pays
for bandwidth, they would never be in the position of being on the hook for
the money required, it would always be up to one of the endpoints.

As for who pays for bandwidth, the paper quite clearly and unambiguously
states that it is the sender. If you think about it, it pretty much has to be
the sender, as (even on the current Internet!) the sender is generally the
person who can "wreak havoc" by sending large quantities of unwanted traffic
at some people, whereas the receiver is by definition passive. If this is
expensive for YouTube they might have to charge you a subscription fee, or
charge per download, to cover their costs. (One could imagine this price being
paid either in dollars, which YouTube could then barter for bandwidth
currency, or in the bandwidth currency itself: the network allows random
payments to be made in this fashion.)

Finally: if you upload data to YouTube and download data from YouTube, in the
same amount, you and YouTube will be passing a bunch of data between each
other, and the ISP will keep taking a cut of the payments. Eventually you and
YouTube will be broke, and the ISP will own all of the transfer currency, for
being so kind as to sit there receiving and forwarding packets all day. This
might seem to cause some kind of problem (like, "now ISPs own all of us, where
do we get currency"), but _this is a mesh network_ , so there's no such thing
as an "ISP". Instead, everyone is forwarding packets for everyone else, and
both you and YouTube are going to be serving as "ISPs" for all of your
neighbors, so while you are downloading YouTube and your friend John is your
"ISP", while he's streaming Netflix, you might become his "ISP". Sometimes the
bandwidth flow to Netflix might even be going through YouTube (and vice
versa).

~~~
gus_massa
Thanks. This is a more sensible model. I think I misunderstood the word
"balance" in the sentence:

> _The node also keeps count of all the packets it sent and received for its
> own consumption. When the balance of a neighbor hits a certain threshold, a
> payment request is initiated._

as payment is requested when "#sent-#received > threshold" (or
"#received-#sent > threshold"), but it didn't make sense.

------
lotsofmangos
It should really say "proposed" somewhere in the title.

~~~
imdsm
Totally agree. Sounds great, but I'd like to know more about who is behind it.

~~~
lotsofmangos
Don't get me wrong, I really like some of the concepts they are considering
for the architecture, however until there is a working beta, I'm just going to
file this as vapourware.

I am always a little suspicious of publicising something as a solution before
a prototype exists.

~~~
jnbiche
This is a problem with the Bitcoin community. I think enthusiastic people come
up with a good idea and release a white paper, thinking others will jump on
board to help make a prototype.

They forget that Satoshi released a white paper, then put his nose to the
grindstone for 2-3 months before releasing a working implementation.

~~~
kylebrown
According to Satoshi, he worked on the implementation _before_ the whitepaper.
iirc he released both at the same time.

~~~
jnbiche
Well, he may have been working on it, but he released the Bitcoin
implementation several months after he released the whitepaper. He released
the white paper to the public on Oct 31/Nov. 1 2008, and the actual Windows
client (the initial client) on Jan 3, 2009.

I don't have time to dig up links at the moment, but you can check the
cryptography list archives for confirmation.

------
synctext
This is already moving within IETF: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-
pouwelse-perpass-shad...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pouwelse-
perpass-shadow-internet/) Key problem is that people are re-inventing the
wheel in 100+ projects. Good scalable code takes year to develop. The mesh
project I'm working on has taken 42 man-years to date
:[https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki](https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki)

~~~
huwtheperson
Ugh, tell me about it. Every time one of these comes around I feel sorry for
the poor guys at
[CJDNS]([https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns)).
They've been working on it for ages now and the whitepaper behind it is
amazing.

Sadly, not enough attention, as I fear most of these mesh networks get.

~~~
synctext
mesh/overlay stuff has been developed for decades, we even have lists of
projects:[http://redecentralize.org/interviews/](http://redecentralize.org/interviews/)
[https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-
internet](https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet) Why don't we
work more together?

~~~
morphle
Very very good point. My research group and ISP federation tries to work
together with all of these 100+ initiatives, but sadly, a large fraction
suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome or even worse, the "never read
any scientific papers that solved this many years ago" syndrome. (See my
profile).

~~~
femto
I read your profile, and looked though the websites that it mentioned, but I'm
not really any clearer on the connection to mesh networking. Do you mind
giving a summary? I genuinely am interested.

I'm interested in mesh networking and its relation to the physical layer. As a
(time deficient) hobby, I've been noodling on a bit of free space optics for a
number of years. In my day job, I design physical layer radio infrastructure
for data/voice networks.

(I just realised that "noodling" probably doesn't make sense outside Au/NZ. It
comes from the practice of picking though mine tailings for opals, meaning: to
toil in an ad hoc manner over a long period of time.)

~~~
morphle
I will try to be succinct here, but that is hard to do on the spur of this
moment. I must refer to my scientific papers (see my HN profile for email
address) where I had a few months to describe it right. Indeed, the website is
being worked on while I write this, we are just coming out of stealth mode
next week.

Our hardware switches are to build true mesh networks at hardware encrypted
linespeeds up to 800 Gbps (Q1 2014).

Currently, most ISP and end-user routers and switches are set up behind NAT
and with default routes in an hierarchical star topology, all pointed (slaved)
to the central ISP. Only that ISP has true internet that they buy or peer with
other ISP's and the top tier 1 global internet backbones. None of these users,
worldwide 99.9% or more, can be considered to be in a mesh network. This is
why the [No Such Agency] and governments only need to copy or deep packet
inspect at a few points to see most worldwide internet traffic. Most of that
traffic is not encrypted at one end, like the ISP or website side you are
using. Peer to peer traffic is not yet using strong encryption or is not
anonymous. Except Tor tunnels are, but that is slow and is under attack from
the NSA and many national firewalls. Open Libernet only proposes to
incentivize such a tor-like tunnel system, but do not claim Tor strength
anonymity or security. BTW, I exchanged email with the Open Libernet authors,
they are computer scientist with master degrees from Beirut.

Our system we designed over the last 20 years is based on a home switch with 8
ports at 1 to 3 Gbps, either gigabit copper, wifi or optical (or any
connection including your radio and free space optics) would connect you to
neighbors to the left, right, behind you, before you and wireless, at $50 mass
produced ($200 for 8 ports at 10G). More importantly, it is free and open
source hardware based on our own free and open source manycore microprocessors
with free and open source software based on the new open openflow standards,
so hackers, scientist and anyone can trust the encryption at linespeeds in
these mesh switches and routers by constantly scrutinizing . The protocol we
are making is similar to TOR, but always at linespeed. If you're house injects
traffic, it is replacing less critical encrypted bittorrent or dummy traffic,
in such a way that no change in bandwidth or content can be detected,
providing you with even better anonymity than Tor does. It brings anonymous
bittorrent and voice/email/skype-like traffic. The 60 manycore processor must
be always on so your home router will pass on traffic from you neighbors in
trade for them passing on your traffic. This allows the switch/router to also
function as (web)server. One of the services will be an anonymous distributed
cloud service, based on free cores and any terabyte harddisks you share by
connecting to the switch. Most importantly, although you can run Unix/linux on
the some cores, the switch and openflow protocols do not. This allows hardware
protection of the e-capabilities that guard the free and open source
encryption algorithms, so it is [No Such Agency] strength security. Linux,
Intel and Arm processors has to many unknown security flaws and known
backdoors and are not truly open hardware and software. We should be much more
secure than Tor or Freedombox this way, although we do run these free software
systems as well.

So now you have a secure anonymous free and open source mesh network that is
running at hardware speeds, preferably over optical fibers, within your
neighborhoods and not in the hand of any company or government you can not
trust. You can at any time check the software and hardware if it still can be
trusted. Your neighbors are by default incentivized (forced by social peer
pressure) to also get a mesh router and more importantly, to keep it always
on. By adding and sharing harddisks, they gain a shared petabyte anonymous
cloud storage. By having a core surplus in the encrypting switch, the are
further paying for the shared cloud services running distributed on their home
switches/server. By using our built-in manycore parallelism, they are
incentivized further to not rely on Linux encryption, but our
microcode/bytecode based encryption that has no backdoors and can be
constantly be checked for it. So mesh every aspect, not just the tunnels.
Incentivize everyone, so they must peer with each other to gain high speed at
zero or lowest cost. Keep it out of the control of a single provider, so it
will remain free and open, right up to the continental crossing points and
beyond. It must be crowd funded, by the richest most powerful group on the
planet, we the people who should hold these anonymity, privacy and mesh
peering/sharing truths to be self evident. I hope I made it clear you should
mesh at every level and provide all that without end-users installing a single
thing. They should not want to turn of the devices, ever. So make it very low
power.

Next these neighborhoods need to have a mesh network with each other, city to
city. So they should share the cost of private fibers between cities, also
running the same strength encryption as the home routers but now at terabits
speeds per fiber. They need to hook up through submarine cables with other
continents, again with the same free and open hardware switches running at
multiple terabits. That is why we design and built the entire system from
scratch with the latest and best hardware, software and encryption systems
science can come up with. At the internet exchanges, this local or global mesh
network also peers with the current internet, where you will loose some or all
encryption if you do not terminate with peers using the same mesh protocols or
travel thru big companies or government networks. This is why we not just
built mesh networks locally and have them financed and owned by the users
themselves, but also provide community owned inter-city and inter-continental
mesh fiber nets that do not fall under government laws or investor control.

We welcome developers, scientist, Phd students and HN type co-founders to work
with or for us to build out this system to regain anonymity and privacy while
providing gigabit+ speeds. We welcome ISP's and communities to use our open
hardware and backbone at cost.

Edited for errors.

~~~
femto
Thanks for the reply. Is there a repository available with the design/source
files for the mentioned open hardware, free software and papers?

~~~
morphle
We are interested to use your "noodling" experiences in free space optics and
packet radio as an additional interface type in our switch hardware. We have a
low cost design for 1 Gbps free space optics below 1 km distances, similar to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA). Can
you contact us?

The repositories and the design/source files have so far only been shared with
local neighbornets that start with the minimal required 300 user group (for
financing the required backbone) who buy our routers at today's non-mass
produce prices.

------
OpenLibernet
To clear some things up: 1) The theory itself is a WIP. We only published in
the hopes of getting reviews, comments and ideas from the community

2) The last thing we want to do is reinvent the wheel

3) We do not bring any novelty to either mesh routing or p2p payment systems.
We only combined the two to create a mesh protocol with a built-in monetary
incentive

4) The actual purpose of the monetary incentive is to get corporations capable
of installing fiber links interested; we do understand it is impossible to
create a global wireless mesh network.

5) Tunnel nodes are needed until a stable (fiber) infrastructure is built to
replace them

6) It is always possible for other mesh network projects to implement the
payment system into their protocols; we did not discover fire, we only
proposed a solution to what we believe to be the main obstacle to widespread
adoption of mesh networks; i.e. lack of incentive.

7) There are no political motivations for the project. Demanding a secure and
spying-free communication channel is not anarchism. It is only the natural
evolution of the internet. AFAIK eavesdropping is not just confined to the
government/nsa. Even small ISPs possess the ability to spy on their clients.
Also note that there are countries outside the US that have completely
different concerns in regards to internet laws and regulations.

8) We understand there may be serious flaws in the theory at it's current
state which is why we're teaming up with industry experts to refine and
improve it.

~~~
ofxartem
Meshnet has been doing this for some time:
[https://projectmeshnet.org/](https://projectmeshnet.org/). There are also
other groups of people fighting for the same thing in Germany:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk)

~~~
OpenLibernet
The Batman protocol doesn't scale well.

Meshnet doesn't have the incentive (the actual only thing we're contributing
to mesh networking)

If we could apply our payment strategy to any of the existing protocols we
would have done it. Also, the fact that we have incentive means we could add
special nodes; which means we can solve some of the issues that other
protocols suffer from more easily. Instead of relying on distributed hash
tables for example (a layer of complexity), why not dedicate a special node
for lookup queries (PLN). That and we don't mind adopting a completely
different approach for the routing protocol. This is why we're asking for the
help of the community.

Please read the paper.

------
tlrobinson
For me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is that it can be used
to solve incentivisation problems in decentralized/p2p applications like this,
without relying on a centralized 3rd party.

BitTorrent has done well essentially using bandwidth as a currency, but it
still relies on some users giving away more bandwidth than they consume, which
doesn't necessarily work with other applications.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
I will argue against this. Having a currency that can be bought or sold is
also an incentive for big central service providers to crop up. For instance,
bitcoin is not as decentralized as it should have been with only a few large
mining pools.

------
gus_massa
I don't like that they use misleading information to exaggerate the problems
of the current Internet:

> _One such limitation is the IPv4 protocol. With a 32 bit IP Address, it is
> only inevitable that the address pool will be exhausted (as it almost has)
> as the internet keeps on expanding._

This is true, but they completely ignore the advance of IPv6.

~~~
OpenLibernet
In order for IPv6 to ever become reality, a massive upgrade of infrastructure
is required. So far ISPs have been reluctant to make the move. Whether or not
ipv6 will ever see the light of day is arguable. We think not.

------
tinco
Has no reference implementation.

~~~
cmpaul
"20\. What is the status of Open Libernet at this time? We are still at idea
stage. We’ve built a few simulations to test some parts of the system, but the
main development hasn’t begun. We have published our whitepaper, which
explains – to some degree of detail – the proposed protocol, and we’re still
waiting for review. For that, if you happen to have any insight on routing
protocols, networking or software development that you would like to share
with us, please do so. If you think something with the protocol is not right
or needs to be improved, or if you have a better idea on how to do something,
also do not hesitate to voice your opinion. This is a community project and we
are more than happy to receive all the help we could get. Also, everything
we’re doing is Open Source, including the white-paper, the concept and in the
future the code. You are free to take anything you like, modify, publish and
release, then tell us about it. Or if you prefer, don’t."

------
gojomo
The 1st time I heard the analogy of a "silk road" online, it wasn't for an
underground marketplace, but an agoric packet-routing scheme, the "Digital
Silk Road":

[http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/HardyT...](http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/HardyTribbleSilkRoad.html)

Under that scheme, local microcredit along each hop would (theoretically)
allow global routing without any global/monopolistic governance or currency.

------
deanclatworthy
I read these mesh network posts with great interest. I really like the idea of
a neighbourhood having their own private network for communication. Sadly this
project is not yet ready.

Let's say I found 10 people in my neighbourhood with 10 routers what's out
there that's easy to set up that would get us started with a little mesh
network?

------
jccooper
A proof-of-stake system (see PeerCoin) might be nicer than encouraging
Bitcoin-style proof-of-work mining throughout the network. Possibly it could
even be run on simple nodes, as it doesn't require gobs of processing power.

~~~
goodside
Bitcoin only requires extreme processing power if you're trying mine blocks.
For a node that just wants to issue and monitor transactions, there's no
resource advantage to using Peercoin or other proof-of-stake coins.

------
wcoenen
Ripple (as it was originally conceived by Ryan Fugger) seems to be a much
better match for this idea than bitcoin. The connections between nodes could
work as the local credit relationships of Ripple.

------
MWil
does "bitcoin-based" have anything to do with the priority of delivery over
the network?

~~~
cmpaul
The way I'm reading it, nodes pay their neighbors for successfully delivered
packets using bitcoin-like credits mined by specialized nodes. I'd imagine the
nodes with high balances would then be prioritized for delivery (both
sending/receiving).

~~~
ZenoArrow
If that's really how it works then my gut instinct tells me it's wrong. We
shouldn't rely on any form of currency exchange for negotiating the movement
of web traffic, otherwise we risk messing with net neutrality. Bandwidth
should be balanced by tracking load, not by currency.

Cryptocurrencies could prove useful as a form of identity on the network, a
secure ID token that isn't traded but does allow nodes to recognise each
other, I see the merit in that.

~~~
cmpaul
Yes, right. Not currency, identity. The bitcoin approach is used to uniquely
identify specific transactions for a node's traffic.

~~~
morphle
But can these people built a better Tor network/tunnel than the Tor/EFF people
did? Doubtful. Libernet seems based on Linux, itself not secure. My group has
solved both this problem, without using security flawed Linux/Unix (I will be
happy to send you the scientific papers proving my point. See my HN profile).

------
flibertgibit
I love the idea of mesh networking to decentralize the net and using OTS
solutions to do so. In fact, I've pushed for it on HN. But, here are a few
problems:

* Before a "theory" website with cheesy blog/helloworld/contact images [http://openlibernet.org/index.html#contribute](http://openlibernet.org/index.html#contribute), come up with a solution. The U.S. has been through several years of executive and legislative branches led on both sides by activists with good intentions and no real, thought-out workable solutions. Beyond bumper stickers of hope, you must have solutions, truly sell them, compromise on some keys points so you have enough people on board, and implement. We don't need a page telling us about a net we can't use yet.

* Bitcoin. Don't tie something completely unrelated to a networking solution.

* To make it work (really), you need points on the network that can do short and long-range. Wifi only is not enough.

~~~
higherpurpose
* Bitcoin. Don't tie something completely unrelated to a networking solution.

Why not? We've seen plenty of good ideas that were inspired by Bitcoin (P2P
DNS system, platform with a built-in Turing complete language, true P2P
Twitter alternative for the first time, encrypted e-mail without PGP, P2P
back-up solutions where you pay others to keep your data, rather than on a
centralized place that can be hacked or abused, etc), and we're going to see a
lot more like this.

The only problem is that unfortunately Bitcoin was never meant to be a
_platform_ on which to build other "apps". This is why all these "Bitcoin-
based" or Bitcoin-inspired projects are actually heavily modified versions of
Bitcoin, and not apps that work on top of Bitcoin. But I think Ethereum will
solve this by creating another "Bitcoin-like" platform on which you can build
anything you want, and everything is P2P by default.

[http://www.ethereum.org/](http://www.ethereum.org/)

------
jokoon
I'd be more interested in a software that hosts data in a mesh network fashion
rather than talk about zombie apocalypse, SOPA/PIPA and other political craze.
And why does this thing talk so much about hardware anyways ?

Maybe the goal is to get funding to make that kind of project happen, but I
don't think any engineer will like to get involved into a project than
explicitely express political opinions and concerns. Let the politics deal
with the NSA stories so it can get solved.

If you really want to make a difference like gnutella, edonkey and bittorrent
did, just be a programmer and get working. I think the only thing that matter
is to make a software protocol which is interesting to use, not a meli melo of
nerd-oriented awesomeness.

~~~
higherpurpose
You mean like MaidSafe? [http://maidsafe.net/](http://maidsafe.net/)

As Lawrence Lessig said, "code is law". We've seen it before. Governments are
usually too behind in understanding what's going on. Sometimes it helps, like
with bittorent and TPB, while other times it hurts us, like with DRM being
able to lock stuff that shouldn't actually be locked according to the law, but
the DRM makers are basically making their own laws through code, or with NSA
who spies on anyone they want no matter what laws exist, because they will
just twist them to mean whatever they want in their "interpretations" of the
law - and then keep those interpretations secret for "national security".

I don't think it's "political" to say you want anonymity or privacy to exist
on a network, or that you don't want a network to be censored. You say "just
program like the Bittorrent programmers did". Isn't that what they're doing?
Bittorrent appeared because Napster and Kazaa _could_ eventually be censored
and stopped. Now we need new networks and apps that are decentralized by
default.

These also bring increased security for everyone, increased privacy, and more
resilience against DDOS attacks, too. So I'm not sure what you're really
attacking here.

~~~
jokoon
> I don't think it's "political" to say you want anonymity or privacy to exist
> on a network

anonymity is just a tool you use to protect your privacy if it's being prone
to attacks. Pseudominity is fine most of the time.

> Isn't that what they're doing?

> So I'm not sure what you're really attacking here.

Bittorrent or previous protocols were not advertising their project as some
new idea that still needed to be implemented. Previously they just released
their apps, people used them, the app evolved and it grew more popular.

I think I see too many of those project embryos while there already is freenet
and tor. It's either an attempt from investor to attracts tech unsavy people
into a security trap, or inexperienced or tech unsavy project initiators.
Maybe there is more work to be done to make freenet and tor more accessible to
new users instead of reinventing new techs.

Nowadays with the sharp increase of internet users, the noose is indeed
getting tighter and tighter. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel...
Improve it instead.

