Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#71

Post by morphle » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 3:42 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #66

higherpurpose wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have the technology today make a "global mesh network". We need new Wi-Fi technologies and products to appear, and I think they will over the next 10 years or so. We need to get the Wi-Fi Alliance to create new Wi-Fi standards for longer ranges, too, which would make this easier. It would also help commercial companies, especially if they want to disrupt wireless telcos (such as Google and Microsoft,…

Think low-cost drones [1,2], not satellites. I can imagine a constellation of drones, linked by modulated laser/led/radio beams beamed though the air. If using light/IR, a challenge would be keeping the beam pointing at the photo-diode (optical phased array?). The drones could link to the ground using either optical or radio. An awful lot of this work is already underway in the context of satellites. [1] http://oilpr…

They forget about wear and tear. The bandwidth is limited, as you should measure it in low-power high-bits/cubic-meter[1]. The higher the drone, the greater the distance therefore the lower the bandwith per cubic meter. A fast mesh network needs optical or should have ultra low power butterfly like drones with many gigabits, say one butterfly per human or per cubic meter.

[1] http://thor.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/papers/coreos/wei93.pdf

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#72

Post by femto » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 4:07 AM UTC

morphle wrote: post #69

femto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inf…

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…

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

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#73

Post by morphle » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 4:15 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #72

morphle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Not yet, we are, right today, putting up price lists and descriptions. Expect all you want and need to appear through http://morphle.org and http://morphle.com before june 2014. Please come help us put up the papers/design/source code you ask for, we are swamped already. We are applying for YC, write if you want to join us.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#74

Post by morphle » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 4:41 AM UTC

synctext wrote: post #32

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

Indeed. 'Our' mesh network is about 65 + 420 man years accumulative work on both free and open hardware and software, we are 95% done. I would say that some scientists group efforts can be considered a single line of collaborations, like the Arpa/Ipto or Alan Kay's lines we inherit from. We even intersected with your group around 1984-1985 and 1991-1994. But sadly, these other 100+ are not working together, not even like ships in the night.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#75

Post by lukifer » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 4:47 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #42

michaelt wrote: post #5

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...

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.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#76

Post by gasull » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 5:54 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #40

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…

I think the solution for this problem is a single blockchain of network traffic. If your libernet is isolated from the rest, then the computing of the network traffic wouldn't make it into the shared global blockchain.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#77

Post by sliverstorm » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 6:13 AM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #75

sliverstorm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#78

Post by pistle » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 9:03 AM UTC

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.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#79

Post by morphle » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 10:05 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #72

morphle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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. 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.

Re: Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

#80

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:15 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #58

gus_massa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-comp…

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 discon…

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.