Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol | Hacker News Reader

Open Libernet: a Bitcoin-based fully encrypted mesh networking protocol

openlibernet.org

126 pointsgasull82 comments

I'm no expert on mesh networks so maybe someone can tell me - how would a mesh network connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas? Or San Francisco to Salt Lake City?

Given the populations on both ends, I assume you'd need more bandwidth than you could get from wifi routers with pringles can antennas.

I assume the companies who own long distance fiber have to do what the government says, as they need government permission to dig up the streets and install more fiber meaning they can't afford to upset politicians. So you can encrypt the traffic, but if the word comes down to cut the cable the cable gets cut.

A related question: Does the proposed protocol allow the mesh network to be run on top of the existing Internet?

For example, it may be done with the satellites, which are sent by the community. Kickstarter already helped similar projects.

I don't think we have the technology today make a "global mesh network". We need new Wi-Fi technologies and products to appear, and I think they will over the next 10 years or so. We need to get the Wi-Fi Alliance to create new Wi-Fi standards for longer ranges, too, which would make this easier. It would also help commercial companies, especially if they want to disrupt wireless telcos (such as Google and Microsoft, who have been trying to work on this, too).

But until we get to that point, we can build the technology, and have it more localized in villages, towns, or even big cities. We can use the latest Wi-Fi routers, or mobile phones, to form these meshnets now. Then perhaps we'll get Wi-fi balloons like what Google is building in Africa, although I'm not sure how resilient those would be against a government, but perhaps there will be so many of them that shutting them down would be much like shutting down the Internet.

As for intercontinental meshnets, I think DIY sattellites will become more popular in the future, and could help with this, too.

Think low-cost drones [1,2], not satellites. I can imagine a constellation of drones, linked by modulated laser/led/radio beams beamed though the air. If using light/IR, a challenge would be keeping the beam pointing at the photo-diode (optical phased array?). The drones could link to the ground using either optical or radio. An awful lot of this work is already underway in the context of satellites.

[1] http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Solar-Powe... [2] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/08/new-9-hour-solar-pow...

They forget about wear and tear. The bandwidth is limited, as you should measure it in low-power high-bits/cubic-meter[1]. The higher the drone, the greater the distance therefore the lower the bandwith per cubic meter. A fast mesh network needs optical or should have ultra low power butterfly like drones with many gigabits, say one butterfly per human or per cubic meter.

[1] http://thor.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/papers/coreos/wei93.pdf

Not too long ago, the internet measured top speeds in tens of kBps. So first off, give it time. Engineers are good at solving problems like this.

Furthermore, mesh networking is a fundamentally different architecture solving a different problem than the internet. The current internet works great for high-bandwidth applications like commercial video streaming, but is terrible in terms of protecting itself from concerted attack by powerful actors. Mesh networks solve the single-point-of-failure problem.

http://gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet

A mesh network is not necessarily the same thing as a wireless mesh network.

But that is how this mesh is supposed to work according to point 3.

It being a mesh protocol would supposedly mean that cut cables would get routed around fairly automatically. You'd have to cut all the cables as there'd always be a financial incentive for someone to carry that data to its destination.

And there is more than just wifi to pick up the slack in an emergency. Free space optical links, satellite uplinks are all possible mediums. I'm not arguing that this would work well, but I think this is the idea behind it all.

Yeah, bandwidth is the big thing people overlook. The land-based backbones across the country is already made of bundles of 10Gbit strands. Can you imagine going from that, to all of the nation's traffic over a couple 54Mbps streams...

And these backbones are all in the hands of companies and governments very much against these proposals, or anything offering freedom. Don't discount the demise of Net Neutrality either, they'll filter out all these tunnels or just store them in Bluffdale for future decryption and prosecution. Unless of course, you are one of the good guys with private backbone fibers… (see my HN profile for those fibers and open hardware optical switches).

Even if traffic is drastically slower, on the order of a dialup modem, there is still be massive value in free internet for the poor and the developing world. Text is a powerful medium.

Let's figure we can get 10 WiFi links at half of full speed across the country, 10 x 30Mbps. That's 300Mbps, or roughly 1 bit per second per person. About 10 letters per minute.

Good luck. Even the very first modems offered 300 bits per second, so you would need 3,000 simultaneous non-colliding WiFi links across the country to have enough bandwidth for everyone to enjoy the speeds of the very first modems - a cool 40 letters per second.

"About 10 letters per minute."

This is a OpenLibreNet telegram. Full stop.

Assuming everyone is using it all the time, and there's no meaningful caching that can be done.

Not too far into their paper, they posit "tunnel nodes" that connect isolated mesh clusters through the normal Internet.

As the network grows, they imagine that tunnelling through the Internet will become rarer.

A large scale mesh network is interesting to me for a couple of reasons:

* Consumers would no longer be dependent on monopolies like Comcast for internet service (OSI layer 1)

* It is much more resistant to eavesdropping and censorship (OSI layers 2-3)

These seem like two totally different problems to me, and I'm still struggling to understand how the physical layer part can work on a large scale.

I get how they could work on a small scale. For example, you could easily set up an ad-hoc wifi network in a college dorm for, say, file sharing purposes. But in most other settings, I don't get how it could work. Most people don't even talk to their neighbors, so even if you lived in a neighborhood that had a high enough density of nodes for this to work, why would you want to share a little ad-hoc network with your neighbors?

Of course, wireless networks alone aren't going to be sufficient to build a large-scale mesh network that could disrupt existing ISPs. The latency alone makes this infeasible. So you need someone to invest in physical links, especially physical links that cover long distances. That's why the BTC part of this proposal is so great -- it provides a way to compensate these people. Of course, this is just a slightly different problem than the one we have today, but instead of being stuck with Comcast we're stuck with whoever runs these physical links.

wireless networks alone aren't going to be sufficient to build a large-scale mesh network that could disrupt existing ISPs. The latency alone makes this infeasible.

I'm not so sure, your links are almost c, whereas optic fiber is substantially slower, so it depends entirely on how little processing you can get away with in the message passing code.

edit - was just thinking about this, an arm cortex runs at ~ 2,000 MIPS, which gives you just under 15 cm per instruction for radio in air. Fiber is about a third slower, so your links do not actually have to be massively long to give you quite a few cycles to play with.

I think it mostly depends upon the range of each of the nodes. If your nodes have an average range of 820 feet (the range of 802.11n (in good weather, I assume)), and you have 1 node exactly every 820 feet between NY and SF, that's over 16,000 links. If each link has 10ms of latency, that's 16s of latency.

16s of latency is interesting to think about, do think we'll get around this issue with local web page caching (obviously won't work for non turn-based games). SyncNet or something similar could prove very useful... http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...

It's got nothing to do with the propagation speed. Wireless has high latency because it requires comparatively high amounts of processing, has to operate over a shared channel (requiring collision avoidance), is subject to unexpected interference...

You also need to send a lot of additional information for error correction.

> It is much more resistant to eavesdropping and censorship (OSI layers 2-3)

Not inherently. Arguably, a large-scale mesh network would be more susceptible to interference, due to the larger number of distinct parties involved in each communication. The difference is that because a mesh network assumes the lack of trust in the intermediate nodes, a sensible design for one has to include end-to-end security.

I think you have your OSI layers mixed up.

> Most people don't even talk to their neighbors, so even if you lived in a neighborhood that had a high enough density of nodes for this to work, why would you want to share a little ad-hoc network with your neighbors?

I've been thinking about this recently. The idea is that it's transparent. Imagine, for example, if Apple started shipping this on all iOS devices, or it became a common android feature. Here is a blog post I wrote on the topic last month: http://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/

Infrastructure is hand-waving friendly? The revolution will not be Pringle-can-ized.

Is this how bad it's getting for bitcoin? People are trying to invent dependencies based on flying currencies?

Let me get this straight... You want me to leave my darknet router on and running to help route all that traffic from all that blockchain crap related to bitcoin transactions? And my incentive is to get infinitesimally small amounts of this stuff (which then requires more blockchain network overhead)??? What is the likely ratio of blockchain noise to real data signal?

I enter the coffee shop and then we bucket brigade my order to the counter. Anyone standing between me and the barista will have to shake hands, exchange pleasantries, trade 1 hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, check some blockchains, express their love of the community that makes the ordering of coffee possible, then pass my order through letter-by-letter. Once complete, the same process occurs in reverse, except the coffee will now be passed drop by drop from mouth to mouth of everybody between the barista and myself (swished around to ensure proper encryption).

Let's not also forget that I'm bootstrapping a fiber optic network through my neighbors' back yards, because if I stick my router behind my Comcast modem... uh, yeah. Wifi? pshaw. My neighbors can't change a default password on their router. Now they're my decentralized network engineers that "love the community"??

Good lord, the bitbug miners are trying to take their electricity wasting exercise and make it a network wasting exercise as well.

I don't see this in the FAQ ...

What if I create an entire libernet network (say, 8 nodes, all meshed) and isolate, or fork them, from the rest of libernet ... and then generate massive traffic between them all to "earn" traffic currency ?

So, 8 nodes all connected with gigabit ethernet, all maxing out their traffic in one big circle, earning "traffic" currency ... and then I rejoin the mainline libernet in the future with my massive store of traffic currency.

How do you avoid that scenario ? Certainly you can't make the network inoperable (or non-earning) if a network link breaks somewhere in the mesh ... because there would always be links in the mesh breaking.

Is there a minimum number of peers accessible in order to earn traffic currency ? Is that number larger than the number of freebsd jails I could quickly initialize with a script ?

This is why the only two options we have right now are a) volunteer-based carriers and b) market-based carriers. Some in-between probably won't work very well.

One would imagine that the whole point of working with a protocol similar to bitcoin is that this is not possible: you can't fork the network and rejoin at a later time; that would be modeled as a blockchain fork, and your chain would be shorter than the main chain when you tried to rejoin the rest of the peers and your history would be erased.

Sure, but that doesn't make any sense in the context of a network.

You're saying that if my link goes down, or if my neighborhoods link goes own ... or if my city link goes down ... I can never rejoin the network ? Or perhaps I can never spend my traffic currency ?

Of course the links will go down all the time and various (large and small) segments of the network will be "islands" from time to time (as parts of the Internet sometimes are) ... and I wonder how currency accumulation behaves at these times.

If you read the FAQ and skim the paper, the idea is that a ledger is used between neighbors for temporary imbalances, with the hope that the routing mechanisms generally lead to bandwidth in both directions being fairly equal; when this is not the case, and one node owes a non-negligable sum to another node, it requests payment, and sends the signed transaction to a miner for inclusion in the blockchain (the document states that it purposefully doesn't go into the bitcoin parts of the mechanism, only documenting three changes, none of which are to the centralized blockchain). So, yes: if your city gets disconnected from the Internet, you will be unable to spend currency (but you will still hopefully be able to transfer some packets, at least temporarily, as long as you don't reach the de minimis accounting threshold).

I still don't understand.

First, it's not very clear, but in some cases you must consume the "traffic" you have stored, by using the network or buying it with money. If not everyone will be have plenty of "traffic". "The payment system ensures everyone is doing what they’re supposed to."

So the 8 interconnected computers earned a lot of "traffic" but also consumed a lot of "traffic". (This can work even if the 8-computer network is connected by a small bandwidth connection to the main network.)

If node A sends a lot of packets to B and B sends a lots of packets to C, who will earn the "traffic", A or B? Who has to pay for the "traffic"?

If I download a full 3 hours movie from Youtube, who has to pay the bills? I, my "ISP" or Youtube?

If I upload a full 3 hours movie to Youtube, who has to pay the bills? I, my "ISP" or Youtube?

If I download a full 3 hours movie from Youtube while I upload another full 3 hours movie to Youtube while, is it free for all?

I feel like you are using "send traffic" as if it were a "score", but the point is that it is a "currency". A disconnected group of eight nodes can't "earn a lot of traffic" because to move packets you have to spend currency. The network prints new currency in the same way bitcoin does (through mining): its a zero-sum (multi-party) transaction at the packet level, with new currency coming only from mining. The disconnected group of eight nodes is just going to be transferring data between each-other, not "earning" anything.

This is covered in the FAQ as well as the paper, so I'm not certain why this is confusing. I guess I will just paste the information here, to encourage people to actually read it.

FAQ:

> Each node keeps a small ledger for all its direct neighbors, with the total packets received/sent to and from each. The node also keeps count of all the packets it sent and received for its own consumption. When the balance of a neighbor hits a certain threshold, a payment request is initiated. The neighbor in question is required to sign the payment request with its Peer Address to make the payment legitimate. The signed payment is then forwarded to a payment processor (a mining node), which will verify and add the payment to the public ledger. The miners are special nodes that use a modified version of the Bitcoin Algorithm and require huge amounts of processing power. They earn free traffic for their efforts as well. Read more on Bitcoin for more information on how this works.

Paper:

> Accounting is calculated at Layer 3 packet level. Since transaction validation is computationally intensive and adds to the network overhead, it is obviously impossible to issue payments on a per-packet basis. Nodes will aggregate routed packets and only initiate a payment request when a set threshold is reached.

> Since neighboring nodes are more likely to owe each other packets than farther away nodes and are therefore more likely to reach that threshold, payment is only initiated between neighbors.

> The payment procedure is straightforward. Each node keeps accounting information for each of its neighbors and updates their balances as packets flow to and from each. Once a threshold limit is hit, the peer that is owed traffic initiates a payment request by sending a Payment Request packet to the neighbor that owes it traffic. The neighboring peer validates the requested amount against its own books. If the transaction is deemed valid, the Payment Request is signed and returned to the initiating peer. The initiating peer now has proof that the payment has been approved by the payer and is therefore valid. It then forwards it to any Payment Processing Peer (miner) it chooses and waits for the transaction to be approved. Ideally, the reciprocal balances of two neighbors should match, unless the protocol on one of the nodes is maliciously tampered with, or due to packet loss. We will cover those cases in more detail later.

On the other side (bills) you are taking into account the currency nature, but clearly the ISP could never be in the position to pay the bill because it is just in the middle: it extracts a transaction fee for transferring the data, but whether you feel the sender or the receiver should be the one that pays for bandwidth, they would never be in the position of being on the hook for the money required, it would always be up to one of the endpoints.

As for who pays for bandwidth, the paper quite clearly and unambiguously states that it is the sender. If you think about it, it pretty much has to be the sender, as (even on the current Internet!) the sender is generally the person who can "wreak havoc" by sending large quantities of unwanted traffic at some people, whereas the receiver is by definition passive. If this is expensive for YouTube they might have to charge you a subscription fee, or charge per download, to cover their costs. (One could imagine this price being paid either in dollars, which YouTube could then barter for bandwidth currency, or in the bandwidth currency itself: the network allows random payments to be made in this fashion.)

Finally: if you upload data to YouTube and download data from YouTube, in the same amount, you and YouTube will be passing a bunch of data between each other, and the ISP will keep taking a cut of the payments. Eventually you and YouTube will be broke, and the ISP will own all of the transfer currency, for being so kind as to sit there receiving and forwarding packets all day. This might seem to cause some kind of problem (like, "now ISPs own all of us, where do we get currency"), but this is a mesh network, so there's no such thing as an "ISP". Instead, everyone is forwarding packets for everyone else, and both you and YouTube are going to be serving as "ISPs" for all of your neighbors, so while you are downloading YouTube and your friend John is your "ISP", while he's streaming Netflix, you might become his "ISP". Sometimes the bandwidth flow to Netflix might even be going through YouTube (and vice versa).

Thanks. This is a more sensible model. I think I misunderstood the word "balance" in the sentence:

> The node also keeps count of all the packets it sent and received for its own consumption. When the balance of a neighbor hits a certain threshold, a payment request is initiated.

as payment is requested when "#sent-#received > threshold" (or "#received-#sent > threshold"), but it didn't make sense.

If your city goes down you'll probably not have much use of that internal network, the majority of services you access will be outside of your city, so you'll only go there and change that broken cable.

I think the solution for this problem is a single blockchain of network traffic. If your libernet is isolated from the rest, then the computing of the network traffic wouldn't make it into the shared global blockchain.

It should really say "proposed" somewhere in the title.

Totally agree. Sounds great, but I'd like to know more about who is behind it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like some of the concepts they are considering for the architecture, however until there is a working beta, I'm just going to file this as vapourware.

I am always a little suspicious of publicising something as a solution before a prototype exists.

This is a problem with the Bitcoin community. I think enthusiastic people come up with a good idea and release a white paper, thinking others will jump on board to help make a prototype.

They forget that Satoshi released a white paper, then put his nose to the grindstone for 2-3 months before releasing a working implementation.

According to Satoshi, he worked on the implementation before the whitepaper. iirc he released both at the same time.

Well, he may have been working on it, but he released the Bitcoin implementation several months after he released the whitepaper. He released the white paper to the public on Oct 31/Nov. 1 2008, and the actual Windows client (the initial client) on Jan 3, 2009.

I don't have time to dig up links at the moment, but you can check the cryptography list archives for confirmation.

This is already moving within IETF: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pouwelse-perpass-shad... Key problem is that people are re-inventing the wheel in 100+ projects. Good scalable code takes year to develop. The mesh project I'm working on has taken 42 man-years to date :https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki

Ugh, tell me about it. Every time one of these comes around I feel sorry for the poor guys at [CJDNS](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns). They've been working on it for ages now and the whitepaper behind it is amazing.

Sadly, not enough attention, as I fear most of these mesh networks get.

mesh/overlay stuff has been developed for decades, we even have lists of projects:http://redecentralize.org/interviews/ https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet Why don't we work more together?

Very very good point. My research group and ISP federation tries to work together with all of these 100+ initiatives, but sadly, a large fraction suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome or even worse, the "never read any scientific papers that solved this many years ago" syndrome. (See my profile).

I read your profile, and looked though the websites that it mentioned, but I'm not really any clearer on the connection to mesh networking. Do you mind giving a summary? I genuinely am interested.

I'm interested in mesh networking and its relation to the physical layer. As a (time deficient) hobby, I've been noodling on a bit of free space optics for a number of years. In my day job, I design physical layer radio infrastructure for data/voice networks.

(I just realised that "noodling" probably doesn't make sense outside Au/NZ. It comes from the practice of picking though mine tailings for opals, meaning: to toil in an ad hoc manner over a long period of time.)

I will try to be succinct here, but that is hard to do on the spur of this moment. I must refer to my scientific papers (see my HN profile for email address) where I had a few months to describe it right. Indeed, the website is being worked on while I write this, we are just coming out of stealth mode next week.

Our hardware switches are to build true mesh networks at hardware encrypted linespeeds up to 800 Gbps (Q1 2014).

Currently, most ISP and end-user routers and switches are set up behind NAT and with default routes in an hierarchical star topology, all pointed (slaved) to the central ISP. Only that ISP has true internet that they buy or peer with other ISP's and the top tier 1 global internet backbones. None of these users, worldwide 99.9% or more, can be considered to be in a mesh network. This is why the [No Such Agency] and governments only need to copy or deep packet inspect at a few points to see most worldwide internet traffic. Most of that traffic is not encrypted at one end, like the ISP or website side you are using. Peer to peer traffic is not yet using strong encryption or is not anonymous. Except Tor tunnels are, but that is slow and is under attack from the NSA and many national firewalls. Open Libernet only proposes to incentivize such a tor-like tunnel system, but do not claim Tor strength anonymity or security. BTW, I exchanged email with the Open Libernet authors, they are computer scientist with master degrees from Beirut.

Our system we designed over the last 20 years is based on a home switch with 8 ports at 1 to 3 Gbps, either gigabit copper, wifi or optical (or any connection including your radio and free space optics) would connect you to neighbors to the left, right, behind you, before you and wireless, at $50 mass produced ($200 for 8 ports at 10G). More importantly, it is free and open source hardware based on our own free and open source manycore microprocessors with free and open source software based on the new open openflow standards, so hackers, scientist and anyone can trust the encryption at linespeeds in these mesh switches and routers by constantly scrutinizing . The protocol we are making is similar to TOR, but always at linespeed. If you're house injects traffic, it is replacing less critical encrypted bittorrent or dummy traffic, in such a way that no change in bandwidth or content can be detected, providing you with even better anonymity than Tor does. It brings anonymous bittorrent and voice/email/skype-like traffic. The 60 manycore processor must be always on so your home router will pass on traffic from you neighbors in trade for them passing on your traffic. This allows the switch/router to also function as (web)server. One of the services will be an anonymous distributed cloud service, based on free cores and any terabyte harddisks you share by connecting to the switch. Most importantly, although you can run Unix/linux on the some cores, the switch and openflow protocols do not. This allows hardware protection of the e-capabilities that guard the free and open source encryption algorithms, so it is [No Such Agency] strength security. Linux, Intel and Arm processors has to many unknown security flaws and known backdoors and are not truly open hardware and software. We should be much more secure than Tor or Freedombox this way, although we do run these free software systems as well.

So now you have a secure anonymous free and open source mesh network that is running at hardware speeds, preferably over optical fibers, within your neighborhoods and not in the hand of any company or government you can not trust. You can at any time check the software and hardware if it still can be trusted. Your neighbors are by default incentivized (forced by social peer pressure) to also get a mesh router and more importantly, to keep it always on. By adding and sharing harddisks, they gain a shared petabyte anonymous cloud storage. By having a core surplus in the encrypting switch, the are further paying for the shared cloud services running distributed on their home switches/server. By using our built-in manycore parallelism, they are incentivized further to not rely on Linux encryption, but our microcode/bytecode based encryption that has no backdoors and can be constantly be checked for it. So mesh every aspect, not just the tunnels. Incentivize everyone, so they must peer with each other to gain high speed at zero or lowest cost. Keep it out of the control of a single provider, so it will remain free and open, right up to the continental crossing points and beyond. It must be crowd funded, by the richest most powerful group on the planet, we the people who should hold these anonymity, privacy and mesh peering/sharing truths to be self evident. I hope I made it clear you should mesh at every level and provide all that without end-users installing a single thing. They should not want to turn of the devices, ever. So make it very low power.

Next these neighborhoods need to have a mesh network with each other, city to city. So they should share the cost of private fibers between cities, also running the same strength encryption as the home routers but now at terabits speeds per fiber. They need to hook up through submarine cables with other continents, again with the same free and open hardware switches running at multiple terabits. That is why we design and built the entire system from scratch with the latest and best hardware, software and encryption systems science can come up with. At the internet exchanges, this local or global mesh network also peers with the current internet, where you will loose some or all encryption if you do not terminate with peers using the same mesh protocols or travel thru big companies or government networks. This is why we not just built mesh networks locally and have them financed and owned by the users themselves, but also provide community owned inter-city and inter-continental mesh fiber nets that do not fall under government laws or investor control.

We welcome developers, scientist, Phd students and HN type co-founders to work with or for us to build out this system to regain anonymity and privacy while providing gigabit+ speeds. We welcome ISP's and communities to use our open hardware and backbone at cost.

Edited for errors.

Thanks for the reply. Is there a repository available with the design/source files for the mentioned open hardware, free software and papers?

Not yet, we are, right today, putting up price lists and descriptions. Expect all you want and need to appear through http://morphle.org and http://morphle.com before june 2014. Please come help us put up the papers/design/source code you ask for, we are swamped already. We are applying for YC, write if you want to join us.

We are interested to use your "noodling" experiences in free space optics and packet radio as an additional interface type in our switch hardware. We have a low cost design for 1 Gbps free space optics below 1 km distances, similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA. Can you contact us?

The repositories and the design/source files have so far only been shared with local neighbornets that start with the minimal required 300 user group (for financing the required backbone) who buy our routers at today's non-mass produce prices.

Indeed. 'Our' mesh network is about 65 + 420 man years accumulative work on both free and open hardware and software, we are 95% done. I would say that some scientists group efforts can be considered a single line of collaborations, like the Arpa/Ipto or Alan Kay's lines we inherit from. We even intersected with your group around 1984-1985 and 1991-1994. But sadly, these other 100+ are not working together, not even like ships in the night.

To clear some things up: 1) The theory itself is a WIP. We only published in the hopes of getting reviews, comments and ideas from the community

2) The last thing we want to do is reinvent the wheel

3) We do not bring any novelty to either mesh routing or p2p payment systems. We only combined the two to create a mesh protocol with a built-in monetary incentive

4) The actual purpose of the monetary incentive is to get corporations capable of installing fiber links interested; we do understand it is impossible to create a global wireless mesh network.

5) Tunnel nodes are needed until a stable (fiber) infrastructure is built to replace them

6) It is always possible for other mesh network projects to implement the payment system into their protocols; we did not discover fire, we only proposed a solution to what we believe to be the main obstacle to widespread adoption of mesh networks; i.e. lack of incentive.

7) There are no political motivations for the project. Demanding a secure and spying-free communication channel is not anarchism. It is only the natural evolution of the internet. AFAIK eavesdropping is not just confined to the government/nsa. Even small ISPs possess the ability to spy on their clients. Also note that there are countries outside the US that have completely different concerns in regards to internet laws and regulations.

8) We understand there may be serious flaws in the theory at it's current state which is why we're teaming up with industry experts to refine and improve it.

Meshnet has been doing this for some time: https://projectmeshnet.org/. There are also other groups of people fighting for the same thing in Germany: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk

The Batman protocol doesn't scale well.

Meshnet doesn't have the incentive (the actual only thing we're contributing to mesh networking)

If we could apply our payment strategy to any of the existing protocols we would have done it. Also, the fact that we have incentive means we could add special nodes; which means we can solve some of the issues that other protocols suffer from more easily. Instead of relying on distributed hash tables for example (a layer of complexity), why not dedicate a special node for lookup queries (PLN). That and we don't mind adopting a completely different approach for the routing protocol. This is why we're asking for the help of the community.

Please read the paper.

For me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is that it can be used to solve incentivisation problems in decentralized/p2p applications like this, without relying on a centralized 3rd party.

BitTorrent has done well essentially using bandwidth as a currency, but it still relies on some users giving away more bandwidth than they consume, which doesn't necessarily work with other applications.

I will argue against this. Having a currency that can be bought or sold is also an incentive for big central service providers to crop up. For instance, bitcoin is not as decentralized as it should have been with only a few large mining pools.

just to be clear, the "bitcoin" in this proposal is a token of network traffic, more like your example of bittorrent than bitcoin really, with the caveat that it's built using an architecture more like bitcoin's. the incentives are simply based on a mutual desire to exchange traffic, like bittorrent. there's no monetary incentive, and i shudder to think what the consequences would be of thinking about network traffic as a traded commodity on some kind of market or exchange. (oh god that's almost the status quo!)

I don't like that they use misleading information to exaggerate the problems of the current Internet:

> One such limitation is the IPv4 protocol. With a 32 bit IP Address, it is only inevitable that the address pool will be exhausted (as it almost has) as the internet keeps on expanding.

This is true, but they completely ignore the advance of IPv6.

In order for IPv6 to ever become reality, a massive upgrade of infrastructure is required. So far ISPs have been reluctant to make the move. Whether or not ipv6 will ever see the light of day is arguable. We think not.

Has no reference implementation.

"20. What is the status of Open Libernet at this time? We are still at idea stage. We’ve built a few simulations to test some parts of the system, but the main development hasn’t begun. We have published our whitepaper, which explains – to some degree of detail – the proposed protocol, and we’re still waiting for review. For that, if you happen to have any insight on routing protocols, networking or software development that you would like to share with us, please do so. If you think something with the protocol is not right or needs to be improved, or if you have a better idea on how to do something, also do not hesitate to voice your opinion. This is a community project and we are more than happy to receive all the help we could get. Also, everything we’re doing is Open Source, including the white-paper, the concept and in the future the code. You are free to take anything you like, modify, publish and release, then tell us about it. Or if you prefer, don’t."

The 1st time I heard the analogy of a "silk road" online, it wasn't for an underground marketplace, but an agoric packet-routing scheme, the "Digital Silk Road":

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/HardyT...

Under that scheme, local microcredit along each hop would (theoretically) allow global routing without any global/monopolistic governance or currency.

I read these mesh network posts with great interest. I really like the idea of a neighbourhood having their own private network for communication. Sadly this project is not yet ready.

Let's say I found 10 people in my neighbourhood with 10 routers what's out there that's easy to set up that would get us started with a little mesh network?

A proof-of-stake system (see PeerCoin) might be nicer than encouraging Bitcoin-style proof-of-work mining throughout the network. Possibly it could even be run on simple nodes, as it doesn't require gobs of processing power.

Bitcoin only requires extreme processing power if you're trying mine blocks. For a node that just wants to issue and monitor transactions, there's no resource advantage to using Peercoin or other proof-of-stake coins.

Ripple (as it was originally conceived by Ryan Fugger) seems to be a much better match for this idea than bitcoin. The connections between nodes could work as the local credit relationships of Ripple.

does "bitcoin-based" have anything to do with the priority of delivery over the network?

The way I'm reading it, nodes pay their neighbors for successfully delivered packets using bitcoin-like credits mined by specialized nodes. I'd imagine the nodes with high balances would then be prioritized for delivery (both sending/receiving).

If that's really how it works then my gut instinct tells me it's wrong. We shouldn't rely on any form of currency exchange for negotiating the movement of web traffic, otherwise we risk messing with net neutrality. Bandwidth should be balanced by tracking load, not by currency.

Cryptocurrencies could prove useful as a form of identity on the network, a secure ID token that isn't traded but does allow nodes to recognise each other, I see the merit in that.

Yes, right. Not currency, identity. The bitcoin approach is used to uniquely identify specific transactions for a node's traffic.

But can these people built a better Tor network/tunnel than the Tor/EFF people did? Doubtful. Libernet seems based on Linux, itself not secure. My group has solved both this problem, without using security flawed Linux/Unix (I will be happy to send you the scientific papers proving my point. See my HN profile).

I love the idea of mesh networking to decentralize the net and using OTS solutions to do so. In fact, I've pushed for it on HN. But, here are a few problems:

* Before a "theory" website with cheesy blog/helloworld/contact images http://openlibernet.org/index.html#contribute, come up with a solution. The U.S. has been through several years of executive and legislative branches led on both sides by activists with good intentions and no real, thought-out workable solutions. Beyond bumper stickers of hope, you must have solutions, truly sell them, compromise on some keys points so you have enough people on board, and implement. We don't need a page telling us about a net we can't use yet.

* Bitcoin. Don't tie something completely unrelated to a networking solution.

* To make it work (really), you need points on the network that can do short and long-range. Wifi only is not enough.

* Bitcoin. Don't tie something completely unrelated to a networking solution.

Why not? We've seen plenty of good ideas that were inspired by Bitcoin (P2P DNS system, platform with a built-in Turing complete language, true P2P Twitter alternative for the first time, encrypted e-mail without PGP, P2P back-up solutions where you pay others to keep your data, rather than on a centralized place that can be hacked or abused, etc), and we're going to see a lot more like this.

The only problem is that unfortunately Bitcoin was never meant to be a platform on which to build other "apps". This is why all these "Bitcoin-based" or Bitcoin-inspired projects are actually heavily modified versions of Bitcoin, and not apps that work on top of Bitcoin. But I think Ethereum will solve this by creating another "Bitcoin-like" platform on which you can build anything you want, and everything is P2P by default.

http://www.ethereum.org/

They aren't using Bitcoin. They're using the Bitcoin Protocol but to trade in something else, which they call "Traffic." I suppose you'd be able to trade Traffic for Bitcoin, US dollars, or cabbage, once exchanges get set up.

I don't think incentives are completely unrelated to networking. They may not have the right design, but in theory applying Bitcoin-like concepts to networking incentives isn't a crazy idea.

People will share their connection in order to earn Libernet cryptocurrency.

I'd be more interested in a software that hosts data in a mesh network fashion rather than talk about zombie apocalypse, SOPA/PIPA and other political craze. And why does this thing talk so much about hardware anyways ?

Maybe the goal is to get funding to make that kind of project happen, but I don't think any engineer will like to get involved into a project than explicitely express political opinions and concerns. Let the politics deal with the NSA stories so it can get solved.

If you really want to make a difference like gnutella, edonkey and bittorrent did, just be a programmer and get working. I think the only thing that matter is to make a software protocol which is interesting to use, not a meli melo of nerd-oriented awesomeness.

You mean like MaidSafe? http://maidsafe.net/

As Lawrence Lessig said, "code is law". We've seen it before. Governments are usually too behind in understanding what's going on. Sometimes it helps, like with bittorent and TPB, while other times it hurts us, like with DRM being able to lock stuff that shouldn't actually be locked according to the law, but the DRM makers are basically making their own laws through code, or with NSA who spies on anyone they want no matter what laws exist, because they will just twist them to mean whatever they want in their "interpretations" of the law - and then keep those interpretations secret for "national security".

I don't think it's "political" to say you want anonymity or privacy to exist on a network, or that you don't want a network to be censored. You say "just program like the Bittorrent programmers did". Isn't that what they're doing? Bittorrent appeared because Napster and Kazaa could eventually be censored and stopped. Now we need new networks and apps that are decentralized by default.

These also bring increased security for everyone, increased privacy, and more resilience against DDOS attacks, too. So I'm not sure what you're really attacking here.

> I don't think it's "political" to say you want anonymity or privacy to exist on a network

anonymity is just a tool you use to protect your privacy if it's being prone to attacks. Pseudominity is fine most of the time.

> Isn't that what they're doing?

> So I'm not sure what you're really attacking here.

Bittorrent or previous protocols were not advertising their project as some new idea that still needed to be implemented. Previously they just released their apps, people used them, the app evolved and it grew more popular.

I think I see too many of those project embryos while there already is freenet and tor. It's either an attempt from investor to attracts tech unsavy people into a security trap, or inexperienced or tech unsavy project initiators. Maybe there is more work to be done to make freenet and tor more accessible to new users instead of reinventing new techs.

Nowadays with the sharp increase of internet users, the noose is indeed getting tighter and tighter. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel... Improve it instead.

> Through cutting edge end-to-end encryption and obscuring where data is located, MaidSafe offers currently unseen levels of security for all types of data. The platform is also autonomous, resistant to viruses and requires no human intervention of any kind.

Is Maidsafe another Freenet?

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