Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

This is a great use case for crypto. You can earn by supporting the network and spend it to use the network. It helps the incentive layer. Those supporting the network can pay for support personnel as they grow, or there can be a network tax that goes towards this. You can also decentralize the support personnel by rewarding people that successfully answer tickets and offer a premium for when questions are answered within a certain amount of time. These questions and answers would also be stored on-chain on a sidechain.

View on HN

Why is crypto better suited to any of this than... money?

The tokens can be used for authentication. With money you'd need accounts, auth for those accounts, somebody needs to manage those accounts, etc

> With money you'd need accounts, auth for those accounts, somebody needs to manage those accounts, etc

Like... a bank? I mean, you're talking as if the infrastructure for paying someone money in return for providing you with a good or service is a wild west territory. It's, er, pretty well established.

Yes, but this way it can be decentralized along with the rest of the network, otherwise you need some central entity to manage these accounts and payments and you're back at square one where it basically becomes an ISP.

There's still some centralisation to a network like this whether you like it or not. The internet connection it uses has to be paid for somehow.

> you're back at square one where it basically becomes an ISP.

Well, a non-profit ISP, which is an important difference. The non-profit nature makes a much bigger difference to customers than the mesh nature of distribution does.

Payments can be reduced to packets, for one.

We are doing exactly this with althea.net

I've been reading https://althea.net/how-it-works and I don't quite understand one aspect:

The article says there's a "backhaul" that connects the althea network to the internet. I understand this means the community will then need just one subscription to the internet, as opposed to n, so it's cheaper. But doesn't this mean that every user in the network will experience vastly slower connection than if they had their own internet subscription?

It's a commercial subscription. The fact is, any residential ISP is selling the same connection to the internet to 20-100 subscribers. This is known as the oversale ratio. Since nobody is using the whole connection continuously, people experience the advertised speeds most of the time.

The backhaul connections that ISPs resell (and that are sold into Althea networks) are usually around 10x the price of a residential connection with the same advertised speed.

It's the difference between "it is technically possible for this connection to attain this bandwidth" and "you are guaranteed this bandwidth at all times"

thanks for clarifying! I was under the assumption that, in a normal setting where 'n' people have subscribed to an ISP, there would 'n' backhauls, one for each subscriber.

Turns out that isn't quite the case...

To be fair, reading your comment again, it doesn't make sense to me why the reselling price to Althea network is 10x the normal price.

I don't quite see why ISP's would treat a commerical subscription to an Althea network differently than a residential network.

Sure, if an ISP knows that the Althean network is trying to optimally squeeze the most out of the backhaul, then it makes sense to increase the price. But in that case, surely an Althea network would never "reveal" itself?

"crypto" means cryptography, not cryptocurrencies. Please stop appropriating the word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com