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Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, the other thing that doesn't scale with this topology is the network itself. A centralized network needs to be trusted for transporting data over vast expanses of underpopulated areas, or even urban bottlenecks (e.g., LA communicating with SF)).

Ignoring this fact makes most "mesh" seem like the answer, but the real answer, especially pertaining emergence, is continual improvements in encryption, etc., not a replacement of the entire construct of the Internet, which itself is emergent.

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> A centralized network needs to be trusted for transporting data over vast expanses...

Thanks for the reply!

You state this as a fact, but I've spent many hundreds of hours trying to prove to myself that it's not a fact. I think with packet switched networks, you are probably correct. Instead, I've been designing an Isochronous network protocol. If you could help me out with more concrete details on why all non-centralized networks are incapable of running at scale, it could save me a lot of time! :-)

Just a quick thought experiment (because my networking expertise is limited):

Take a single computer at the edge of town A. It's the only machine in town A that can connect to the next town B, because of the distance between town A and town B. All traffic in town A now has to route through this machine to reach town B. How will a single machine achieve this?

Even worse, what if the two towns are too far for any connection other than a centralized style connection (large wires on a pole).

If you arbitrarily define any large wire on a pole as being "centralized", then sure, but I wouldn't agree with that definition. For example, I can lease long distance point to point dark fiber for my personal use, and run whatever combination of wavelengths and protocols that I want on it.

In the case where there is only one link between two towns, then the owner(s) of the switches at either end of that link will be able to charge a monopoly price for the bits that get sent across it. Market forces will soon encourage others to create additional links between the two towns.

In the bootstrapping phase of my plan, the case of a single link between two cities would be impossible: Network participants would create tunnels through the IP Internet (with the obvious downside of higher latency and cost).

Back to my original question: Should I be spending my time on this? You claimed that crypto was a better route because mesh doesn't scale. I'm not a crypto genius, but I do consider myself a reasonably proficient systems software engineer. I feel that if I could design a scaleable mesh network protocol stack, many of the problems we're discussing become tractable. What do you think?

I think mesh doesn't scale is a pretty valid network assumption, in the general case.

So. Maybe an interesting question is: What sorts of applications and protocols will work in a mesh topology? That set might be interesting. For example, you could imagine big chunks of Nextdoor working well in a mesh topology, since it's already a geo-limited social graph by design.

I think the answer to your question is here today, if not that popular yet. Lambda.

After that, the next step might something as open and decentralized as Ethereum.

You mentioned a tunnel. That's exactly what I mean. If the Internet itself wants to constrain and control us, we can just create a new Internet inside of it, at their (e.g., ISPs, backbones) expense. The result is a system of protocols in communication standards that can be distributed across on trusted hardware, which lens itself well to a future, more open and distributed Internet, at a point when these types of things become illegal on the existing Internet. In other words, work with what we have for now, building up the necessary tools and infrastructure from the inside.

I want a mesh network that does to the TCP/IP Internet what the road network has done to the train network. The road networks reduced the barriers to entry in so many industries.

I only have Comcast as an option for broadband Internet. This is the direct result of the protocol's topology. This is power and control that no amount of protocols written on top of TCP/IP can break. We can keep wanting to have decentralized or non-centralized services, but I don't see it actually happening on the TCP/IP Internet: The economies of scale are too powerful too compete against.

If we tried to layer a road network exclusively on top of a rail network, we'd just have a less efficient rail network.

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