Topic: Hocnet: A competitively decentralized internet using Bitcoins (Read 2430 times)

No, I believe it's still in early planning stages.

Has this service been made yet?

If they make it run on open-mesh hardware like the open-mesh MR3201 I have at least 20 of those laying around.  I would love to put them into use with good software. 

I was thinking of a youtube/music/porn site where users install an extension linked to a bitcoin wallet. As long as their wallet is > 0 then they have access to the site. Imagine youtube where you pay a fractional amount to view the video and the content owner gets paid. Plus no infuriating ads.

Another option is to treat bitcoin transactions separately from normal traffic.  Something like deep packet inspection or IPv6 link local addresses and having a lightweight bitcoin peer running on each node should allow for payments even when there is no other traffic routed.  Though I agree that for small amounts of traffic, it may be more hassle for both parties.

I think this is unavoidable. Unless you know you'll be relaying a lot of packets through a specific node (in which case you could just pre-pay that node), there will have to be trust between nodes.  Doing an online transaction for relaying a single packet, which in itself would require an online transaction, doesn't make sense.

Naturally having a distributed trust and reputation system would be very helpful here.

So how do we sign up!?

Correct: a node will start out not trusting any other nodes. Therefore it will not be willing to relay packets unless it receives payment for doing so.
And the more it is able to trust any given node to provide that payment, the more packets it will be able to relay before demanding it.
If the protocol is not designed to handle this, then the network will suffer from a "tragedy of the commons" when it could instead be growing like an organism (once digital cash is used to solve issues of resource allocation.)

A mesh nework of trust assigned nodes sounds really backwards.
Imho the way to go is for no node to trust other nodes. As for routing just depend on capacity, relay times etc.

--- A decentralized mesh network is a "holy grail" of freedom and an important goal to work towards.

--- Such a network is subject to a "tragedy of the commons" and will fail, until digital cash is used to solve issues of resource allocation. (Mojo Nation would have succeeded here, if they had used Bitcoin for the currency instead of Beenz/Flooz. You haven't actually tried a digital cash solution, unless you actually used real digital cash.)

--- Once digital cash is used to solve issues of resource allocation, then wireless mesh routers will start popping up all over the place, like mushrooms, the same as ATMs do today.

--- The solution is for any Node to relay packets for other nodes UP TO A LIMIT, based on a trust value it assigns to each other node.

--- When a node has earned more trust, then other nodes will forward more packets to it, before reaching their limit and demanding payment. (Whereas nodes with less trust, will have to pay more often.)

--- When the limit is reached, payment should be settled using a transaction server such as Open-Transactions.  (http://open-transactions-tv.github.com/) These servers can run anonymously, for a profit.

--- Once voting pools are added to OT (allowing Bitcoin reserves to be stored safely on the blockchain as multisig transactions, so hackers and transaction servers cannot steal them) then Bitcoins can be used to exchange onto/off-of the transaction servers, and to convert into any other asset type (on markets, on those same transaction servers.)

--- Network nodes should be able to demand payment in any currency type they wish, and should be able to pay for whatever resources they need, all at the protocol level.

When this is set up, the network will grow like an organism.

Again: trust units, eventually settled up on transaction servers, eventually settled up in Bitcoin and other currencies. Bitcoin is an essential part of the protocol, since it enables transaction servers to operate anonymously at a profit, but should not be used directly for the microtransactions themselves, since that is infeasible on the blockchain.

It seems that development stuck on how to implement the payment method because Bitcoin by it self can't accommodate it. Was Rapidly-adjusted (micro)payments considered?

oh well, that's disappointingly close.

But that's not important. The more important thing is: How many of you can actually write code?

Good question. It's addressed here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/hocnet/comments/v6tk9/this_subreddits_differences_from_rdarknetplan_a/

tl;dr Hocnet is focused on payment for mesh net services and relies on other elements of darknet type stuff for the actual network technology.

So this is basically the same thing as Darknetplan from last year?

http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan

Has anybody seen this description of Hocnet? It's billed as "A competitively decentralized internet." It seems to be a sort of p2p mesh network where nodes that provide services such as routing are rewarded with payment. Although there's been some discussion on how to do payment, Bitcoin figures prominently in the plans. I think the financial incentive to miners in Bitcoin is one of the major drivers of its success so far, so I believe that the same kind of financial incentive to mesh net operators could be a huge driver of mesh net deployment.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osU8vnuOW1eV3hdYMxg8hDh7E6kZLvf05uKvgYAE6SU/edit#heading=h.z59dueh145yu
http://www.reddit.com/r/hocnet