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by OpenLibernet 4503 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.