Decentralized internet is planned for Dubai, courtesy of startup Moeco | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized internet is planned for Dubai, courtesy of startup Moeco

techcrunch.com

67 pointsbl4derunner27 comments

The big challenge, as far as I can tell, is that the typical end user equipment just generally is not suitable. You e.g. want equipment with longer operating distance, and able to bridge multiple networks for example.

My home wifi barely stretches 50m down the road (yes I know they mention Bluetooth, but bluetooth is even worse in this respect). Meanwhile you can get outdoor wifi repeaters within the allowable output in the 5GHz channels in the UK with ranges in the 1km-2km range that are still cheap, and directional microwave equipment with theoretical ranges in the 100km range (major limit there is going to be height - beyond a few km, the curvature of the earth becomes a major hassle unless you can go higher gain).

Without that kind of distance, you need massive penetration to be able to connect users at all, even if you aim to pass data over the open net as soon as you get data to a node that is connected.

I live on a relatively high density London road, and I can typically see maybe 10 networks at any one time when travelling between home and my local train station for example. There'll be multiple devices on each, but with that kind of visibility it'll take a large proportion of users signing up to a service like this before you even start getting any big benefits from it.

I do believe peer-to-peer setups can make sense for this, but unless our smartphones gets massive upgrades in terms of antennas etc., I think building something around higher gain outdoor wifi will be more likely to be viable.

I've no issue with what you describe, I will question whether a high density London road may not be representative, anecdotally a foreign guest commented that he was amused by my concept of a busy place, he remarked that even in the busiest places in London his personal space was respected in a way he would not expect in his local village. Peer to peer has loads of potential, I can imagine a combination approach that makes the best of all available spectrum and falls back to a paid access tier if things get bad, this is an interesting area of technology as investment and innovation is less likely to come from the incumbent.

Even with 10x the density, you'd need very penetration to be able to create a mesh.

I do agree that peer to peer has potential, but I think as I mentioned it has more potential as a "house to house" than "person to person" thing unless it gets adopted by one of the major mobile networks and pushed very aggressively (e.g. either made compulsory or pushed hard with discounts).

What about some future scenario where smartphones are upgraded with P2P style antennas, is this technically feasible? Or will it be too much of a drain on batteries/heat generation given current technology?

The prospects of that happening and being widely deployed are quite interesting none-the-less.

Especially when combined with some more heavy duty stationary set-ups supporting the network.

Amazing idea, it seems they're implementing Pieter Hintjens' https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/edgenet

But why a blockchain? How can you even have a blockchain if everything is asynchronous and decentralized?

You will have the blockchain slowly.

Frankly, I don't see much use in blockchains besides public verifiable high-importance transactions where a significant number of parties does not trust each other, and some may be actively subversive. That is, a public ledger.

For less public cases, mere encryption could suffice, which is much faster. Most communications are between only two parties; they can check each other's key fingerprint via phone or a third party they both trust, if they even bother.

You'll have a blockchain, but the outstanding majority of blocks will be orphans and thus lost and invalid. Lots of promises will be broken.

You'll only know a transaction was confirmed after many months -- and before you get a confirmed transaction you may have to issue the same transaction hundreds of times.

Sounds cool, but slow. Bluetooth and/or Blockchain are not synonymous with speed.

Besides being slow, the local telcos don't even allow VoiP protocols, how will this pass through

I'm not sure i understand the benefits of blockchain here...though if they can pull off the mesh aspect of this, then that's really awesome. I wonder though, if the constant "peer hopping" (via bluetooth) won't drain the batteries of mobiles? Then again, if a mesh-like network takes off, maybe antennas can be tuned not to "catch" signals from far off cell towers but rather the next closest mobile...which might require less power? This is not my expertise, so will defer to other experts...Well, i'll say that the idea sounded cool on the Silicon Vallet show, and it still sounds cool in real life...assuming they can pull it off.

> Here’s the pitch: Remember that scene in the Silicon Valley HBO satire where they try to create a new Internet by connecting-up Smartphones using Bluetooth? Yes. I know. But these guys are actually doing it.

I guess this author hasn't heard of FireChat, and others like it:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/20/firechat-for-ios-is-a-hype...

> non-decentralized

Is there a difference between centralised and non-decentralised?

Just the author not fully understanding what he's writing about.

non-decentralised could also be distributed.

I don't know much about Blockchain but what is the benefit of using blockchain for Bluetooth LE network or IoT? If we care about security aren't higher level protocols doing that? AFAIK one of the biggest challenges in IoT field is to reduce network overhead and latency because constrained wireless networks like BLE are slow and not reliable. Doesn't blockchain significantly violate that?

I'm not sure how blockchain would fit into the picture? Maybe more of a buzzword soup than actual plans, or blockchain as in mesh network.

As I understand, the blockchain is used to track transactions between network providers and users (providers sell network access to users' devices).

LoRa is infinitely more reliable.

What about phone battery life?

Aren’t all internets decentralized?

Today's internet is more like "equal participation welcome", the decentralization being talked about in the article is at the ISPs level. Rather than having to choose from a few incompetent and monopolistic internet connectivity providers, decentralization would individuals to share wifi hotspots and create a mesh to which you can connect to. Ideally, this would allow people to get rid of blood sucking ISPs and would not be affected by the recent net neutrality disaster or any more of such but practically creating reliable high-speed user-participated decentralized ISPs haven't been possible, but might soon be.

Right, but at some point you are going to have to connect to an exchange if you want to access the rest of the internet. How are you going to pay for that connection?

IPFS and FileCoin, to the rescue!

Call me crazy but if we have this then e-voting becomes easier to do because locality is more inbuilt to the system making fraud harder because you can more easily tie voting to geography/gps. i.e. in an internet based system the votes can come from anywhere but in a system based in the physical world it might be possible to track the votes to a geographic location and if 10k votes come from a building site you can verify those votes are fraudulent as opposed to a massive block of flats.

I think that is unlikely. A vote is tied to a person, not a location. That said, I think voting system like Estonia's, where you have a cryptographic key on your ID, is the only correct way to do e-voting.

you're still thinking old system. In new system geography is fine because elections are cheap and you can do them weekly/daily. Fraud matters much less because you can't do much damage in a day/week as opposed to the sort of terms we have today. You can also temporarily back to the last known good recent from a particular quadrant/zone. What matters is long-term, persistent fraud and this can be audited against using geography and plausibility.

Sure a tourist can vote in one week but their vote is gone the next week after they fly home. It would be a new paradigm so try not to use the mindset of the old system where elections are expensive and results long-term.

> you can more easily tie voting to geography/gps

We've had both cruise and military ships that got their GPS spoofed by malicious actors. Tying voting to GPS doesn't seem too much of a hurdle for an attacker wanting to hack a country's elections.

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