Bitcoin Forum

I just recently moved to a new apartment, and I have to wait 2-3 weeks before they can setup my internet connection. That really sucks. Perhaps some of my neighbours would see the opportunity and earn a couple of bucks with his wlan router.

I will start developing it later when I have finished my current bitcoin projects. However that will take time, so be free to implement the idea  ;D

Perhaps this could be even a profitable business, a company would offer the software/wifi routers and take a small cut from internet subscriptions.

To those that don't know, DD-WRT is an open source firmware for wifi routers, so additional functionality on top of it can be implemented easily. http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index

or use your mining power to crack their WPA/WEP password :P

on a serious note. this would either require a payment processor to handle the payments, because running a client on a router is not an option.

Or use Electrum or Stratum protocol.

Most likely against the ISP's terms of use. Be careful how you tread or they will find you.

Except for the bitcoin part, thats what fon does (http://corp.fon.com/en).

Its been a while since I used it, but its free wifi if you share one, and users without a shared AP themselves can buy access for a small fee.

They have routers that users can setup to make it easy, and makes 2 ssids, so the one you let others use are seperated from your private LAN.

Yeah, I had one fon myself. It's a shame people don't use something like that a little more, I would pay for internet connection right now to someone :)

Just simple cost-sharing. OK, it could be against ISP rules, but who cares? And how is ISP going to see if the internet connection is resold or not?

why isn't an option ? because it takes too much resources on the router or it could be hacked ?  bitcoind has ssl support too

I thought DD-WRT already had an option for "coffee shop" login where you get a temporary password that lasts x number of minutes.  Seems like it would be really easy to make it so it auto emails someone a temp password when they send you a payment.

This?:  http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Captive_Portal

I'm currently running an open wifi network on my internet connection and using "nodogsplash" to hijack the first page access to display a message

WiFidog, has a lot of functionality and allows for payment:
http://dev.wifidog.org/

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Captive_Portal

http://hashcat.net/wiki/cracking_wpawpa2

And what happens when the people you are selling access to, do something illegal with YOUR internet access?

Who will be tracked down and made to pay?

This... they will either fuck with your customers connections (html injections for one example), or filter you.  Also, many connections have monthly cap.  I'm talking about in the US, on Comcast's network to be clear.  Other jurisdictions and ISPs will vary, so check the terms of use.  They will find you.  Your statistics will be very different.

It would be nifty if one could sell Tor-only internet access. Liability is the only reason I don't share my wireless for FREE, let alone for money.

If you run a linux firewall it would not be too hard, setup a tor relay and force all users to use the tor proxy, like many corporations already do (transparent proxy).

But tor is often slow and barely useful to check email.

Yeah. dd-wrt already has this, so what are you wanting that is different?

Bitcoin?

Some of the router captive portal packages are third-party companies, the router sends the wifi user to a page on their server where they can purchase credits or a password, and the owner of the router gets a cut of the profits. Hotels outsource to companies like this, where 24 hours cost $10 or something ridiculous like that. It would seem easiest to convince these companies to take Bitcoin too, as they already have the rest done.

Oh. The OP said "bucks" so I didn't think Bitcoin was what he was asking for. I guess I should have assumed since this is bitcointalk

If someone makes a captive portal that accepts bitcoin I will install it.. 

I think this is a great idea..

+1 i can manage both dd-wrt and openwrt. They easily support php that has json-rpc libraries available out there (http://jsonrpcphp.org/) and be able talk to a bitcoin daemon. You could just point a few routers at it. Support for ssl/tls would be great because bitcoind already has it and would enable any individual share the same wallet with captive portals outside his lan.

Great idea, I have bought my first open-source router recently. But I don't think any of my neighbours would use it.

Probably not, but it would be a great way to advertise bitcoin at least. And maybe if you would sell it really cheap, like 5 eur/month, then it would catch better the neighbours attention.

Getting my own internet hopefully tomorrow, and going to setup dd-wrt at some point...

Hmm, how are people going to pay with bitcoin, if the network is blocked until they do so ? :)
(Assuming one does not have a mobile wallet with a few coins)

I can imagine two ways:
1. Seller allows free use of traffic that looks like Bitcoin for X hours/MAC (most people won't change their MAC address)
2. Buyer creates an offline signed transaction, sends to seller

I had mobile wallet with couple of coins, in addition I had a lousy 3g connection via my mobile phone. Mobile connections are common nowadays, however they are not that reliable and don't offer high bandwidth. In Finland you can get one even as low as 1 eur/month, in Germany where I currenöty reside mobile internet starts from 10 eur/month.

Edit: In addition, I think that almost all operators offer internet connection built in for something like 24 snt/megabyte. Of course it isn't cheap, but is enough to access your bitcoins and pay for the connection :)

right, one could get online using the phone and broadcast a transaction, even without catching up first, as long as its not new coins.

there is an easier solution that avoids all that headaches

1. You allow any person to have bitcoin connectivity. The portal would allow only port 8333 connection to a bitcoind daemon until the client pays. It's safe for the bitcoind daemon because the portal establishes ssl/tls connections to make json-rpc requests and for the client too because he can update his block-chain and pay you the coins. The AP owner would be interested being on and serving the longest blockchain, the good one, because if not the coins he receives could be worthless and the client would not have to trust the AP owner because his client already includes some blockchain hashes including the entire genesis block. It's on the wiki :)

All this has a side effect... anyone could use the bitcoin infrastructure for free and that means you will never be left without connectivity when making a payment in a local store when 10 wifi networks are present.

Yeah, this would be optimal - perhaps sell a preconfigured router, which accepts connections on standard bitcoin port, and perhaps on Stratum, BCCAPI and Electrum ports too  - so anyone would be able to use their bitcoin wallet easily without hassles. This could also be useful for bitcoin accepting stores.

The problem of not having a connection to send coins is a non issue..

You make it available, and use a web based coin payment page.. 


If you look at captive portal and hot spot, they all work perfectly fine..

Lets assume you are connecting on your laptop.  You connect to the router and get redirected to a captive portal which gives you an address to pay to along with a text box to paste an offline transaction. You can either scan the address with your smartphone and pay that way or generate an offline transaction on your laptop and send it to the site directly.

It's not quite that simple; typical captive portals require that you trust them with your credit card number, but you would never want to give a captive portal your private key.

yep, with bitcoin every party is his own payment processor so the clients need bitcoin network connectivity or bad things may happen. Imagine a client having a shared wallet with another member of his family tries to pay you an hour of internet connectivity but the other person spent some coins on a new pair of shoes the shop next door.

His mobile wallet doesn't know it when creating the transaction so it will look like a double spend to you, but if you share that info with him, the wallet could redo the transaction using the correct coins. Now he happily browses the web searching to buy geeky things that cost the same amount as spent by the other family member :D

Offline transactions. You don't have to give anyone a private key.

What if youre not using the regular net but instead using freenet as the network this supports ?