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 futur…
This is why the only two options we have right now are a) volunteer-based carriers and b) market-based carriers. Some in-between probably won't work very well.
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…
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...
A mesh network is not necessarily the same thing as a wireless mesh network.
But that is how this mesh is supposed to work according to point 3.
It being a mesh protocol would supposedly mean that cut cables would get routed around fairly automatically. You'd have to cut all the cables as there'd always be a financial incentive for someone to carry that data to its destination.
And there is more than just wifi to pick up the slack in an emergency. Free space optical links, satellite uplinks are all possible mediums. I'm not arguing that this would work well, but I think this is the idea behind it all.
does "bitcoin-based" have anything to do with the priority of delivery over the network?
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).
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.
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 futur…
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.
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 futur…
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.
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.
This is already moving within IETF: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pouwelse-perpass-shad... 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
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). 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.
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 MI…
I think it mostly depends upon the range of each of the nodes. If your nodes have an average range of 820 feet (the range of 802.11n (in good weather, I assume)), and you have 1 node exactly every 820 feet between NY and SF, that's over 16,000 links. If each link has 10ms of latency, that's 16s of latency.
16s of latency is interesting to think about, do think we'll get around this issue with local web page caching (obviously won't work for non turn-based games). SyncNet or something similar could prove very useful... http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...
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.
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 I…
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).
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…
Not too far into their paper, they posit "tunnel nodes" that connect isolated mesh clusters through the normal Internet.
As the network grows, they imagine that tunnelling through the Internet will become rarer.