Paul's Page

The success of Bitcoin is impressive, especially considering it is an open-source project and very geeky.  I think it may be one of the most successful FOSS projects to date, with Bitcoin Watch reporting the network hashrate of Bitcoin miners at over 171 PetaFLOPS (by comparison, the world’s fastest super computer comes in at 10 PetaFLOPS).  It has been the topic of many tech blogs and discussion forums but has gone even beyond that to general news and special interest sites, though mostly libertarian.

While there may be many reasons contributing to the success of Bitcoin, what is likely the most important contributor is the profit motive.  Miners can easily purchase off-the-shelf equipment, install a Linux package designed to mine Bitcoins, and with little maintenance the computer will churn out Bitcoins, thus profit, for the miner.

Perhaps a variation of this model could be successful in building a mesh network alternative to the popular World Wide Web.  Most people have far more throughput available on their various devices than they use.  These personal network devices are now so ubiquitous that we hardly go anywhere that we are not in range of at least one, if not several.  I did a test of pulling out my phone and scanning for networks regularly and even in my relatively rural town I find I am never out of range of someone’s network.

But what if we could provide a profit incentive for people to share their network with all other networks by becoming a node on the Internet?  Something that is a standard and may not require the purchase of any special devices, and does not use up their ISP bandwidth.  My idea is to make a simple addition to the concept of the Mesh Network by requiring that base to all communications is a transaction of some type of digital currency.  With this simple profit motive, we would see people similar to the speculative miners of Bitcoin adding strategic nodes to this mesh network.

Aside from just profit, it offers benefits such as an escape from ologopolistic ISPs; more efficient networks; financial incentive to reduce undesirable traffic; access to regions that otherwise have no access; combining of voice and data into one wireless ‘service’ (where the mesh is popular enough to support the bandwidth and latency requirements); elimination of central-control and threat of ‘kill-switches’ and the like; increased difficulty in warrantless tapping; a large and profitable community that, if popular enough, could politically and even financially fight for unlicensed bandwidth.

I am a marketer, thus I have no real skills, but my instincts tell me that this is something could potentially be even bigger than Bitcoin.  If only I could convince those who have the skills to consider this project.