Topic: Decentralized internet - and what it could mean For Bitcoin (Read 3002 times)

During the last spectrum auction in Canada, the incumbent cell phone carriers spent about $4 billion CAD, doubling their amortized infrastructure costs in the process. The cell phone carriers expect to recouperate that cost by charging the average cell phone user $40/month. As I said, spectrum is a shared resource. You proposal seems to assume only a handful of users with everybody else acting as relays.


With a shared medium like air, it is easier to get routing loops.


That is a big can of worms. You should be familiar with the Network Neutrality debate before proposing Internet pricing schemes.

In my prefered scheme, everybody buys guaranteed bandwidth near the cost of provisioning the wholesale bandwidth. We are talking 64kbps chunks for consumer use: enough to transfer about 16GB in a month if the connection is saturated. The ISP would honor any priority flags on your packets up to that bandwidth. Once you exceed you guaranteed bandwidth, your data would only get through on a best-effort basis (like the current Internet for the most part). You would not be charged per packet or GB untill you exceed your guaranteed bandwidth allocation: other users are able to use your provisioned bandwidth when you aren't transmitting anything. Put another way, for every 64kpbs channel, 16GB of data transfer is already paid for. On top of all of that, you would pay a connection fee to maintain a relatively high speed, burstable connection. The connection cost should be about the same, regardless of the actual burstable speed.

The reason my sheme is so complex is that I wanted to derive a fair way for users to get priority traffic. In my scheme, if your only priority traffic is VOIP, you may buy only 1 or 2 64kps channels. If you are hosting a mulitplayer game server with voice chat, you may want 24 channels (1.5Mbps) or more. By paying for the bandwidth you actually use, you also give the ISP an incentive to actually upgrade their infrastructure instead of complaining that you are using it too much. Another important point: unlike with traditional bandwidth caps, my scheme is not punative. In my fantasy world, overages would be charged on the order of pennies per GB rather than dollars per GB.

I thought of this years ago, and for the same reason Bitcoin will fail, this will fail.
People are stupid and ignorant and listen to governments that do not like these things, thus, it will fail naturally or be made illegal.

Technically yes, But not really.

It's just an idea, Im sure someone could come up with something better.

We have to remember alot of people don't even know how to log into their routers let alone bridge them with other routers. 

wouldn't it become a Wide Area Network then, as opposed to a Local Area Network? 

Somebody send me a PM whenever CHUDnet is ready so I can plug in and ride the CHUD.

Oh, well I apologize. I had it backwards I guess. Shows my newbie roots in the forums

Each node should not care whether the packet is coming from a wireless connection or a wire connection or even a connection through the Internet.

I think if each node was paid based on packets transferred then people would be encouraged to come up with easy/fast transfer of data.

I considered using Bitcoin to pay per packet but I think as the Bitcoin value increases and amount of packets passing through a network increases, you would have to come up with a way to raise and lower prices on your node and have the network automatically find the cheapest route. Maybe even having a setting on your browser to pay extra for increased speed if you want.

Just wanted to point out that you quoted someone else, not me.

Problem is, the optimal infrastructure for something like the internet is probably a so called "small world" network, not a mesh

I <3 gubbermint!

i gave a stupid definition

the government should operate by the will of the people it governs that allows it to exist

the other one could mean some elitist group like we have now, but you get the idea

I feel more at ease Anon.

i talk about a perfect world, where the government works by the direct consent and authority of the people who allow it to exist, not in today's corrupt world

edit: also i would like to point out, you do not understand what anonymous is or who it is, everybody is always anonymous, unless you specifically are not. this means in a nutshell, if you do not enjoy the government running your life, and you want to express that without doing #1 then you are anonymous by the popular definition.

Well coming from someone with an Anonymous picture as their avatar, you really don't understand Anonymous. By letting the Government control the internet directly, they would censor everything they please, because companies (or the people) would have no control. In doing that, Bitcoin would see a farewell in places like the US and most likely the UK.

i think in theory, the government is the best entity to run the internet, but your right, there is no state in the world i would trust with the job today.

I agree
I strongly disagree. Giving the power to governments will cause even stronger "centralization" (of power). One doesn't even need to think about North Africa to see that a government controlling a medium of communication is a bad thing. I'd rather trust someone who provides this service for money than someone who is potentially addicted to power and wants to have control about the people (be it with good or bad intentions).

If you want to give the power to the people give them the technology in form of something like B.A.T.M.A.N. or Netsukuku.

Communication/transfer of information is important and therefor should be available to everyone (and yes, of course it can be abused, but all tools, the whole life and everything can be abused).

the problem with the internet is it technically isn't centralized but everyone who runs it has the same agenda. and that is to make money. this is also why i think the government should run the internet with the consent of the people who use it. that way they can run the internet in an unprofitable way, which will make it faster for everyone, and because they are technically forced to do it by the will of the people (lol i know right?) it cant infringe on peoples rights.

@OP: I understand what you mean when you say the internet isn't decentralized, but if you just say it like that it is confusing. I mean you defiantly can't call the internet centralized either. Maybe the question is what is decentralized and how much it is decentralized.

Also there are projects like this. I hope one of them emerges into something bigger and a lot of people start using them. The most interesting ones seem to be B.A.T.M.A.N. and Netsukuku, with the latter one appearing to be 'dead'.

RONJA requires different infrastructure. It would be awesome to have something WLAN based, because they are cheaper and built in everywhere (Smartphones, PDAs, TVs, ...).

I really would love to see such a project to succeed in a way that everyone becomes independent from any kind of provider or regulator.

The amount of IP adresses you can have is determined by the size of the subnet 255.255.0 - 255.255.255.0 etc

Here is a rough sketch of what im talking about.



The red boxes are WDS stations, the black boxes are routers and the green box could be any technology like cellular or sat link.

With today's networking technology. I see two real problems: ping, which would become entirely too large, to do anything high end; and the massive scale we would be talking about, there are no truly effective measures of broadcasting those kinds of internetz from a hand held device. Not to mention the amount of needed bandwidth would be crazy.

My theory from a quick glance at the tl;dr picture.