What kind of pricepoint are you looking at? This is what I have in mind, though with rasperry-pi size board which is linux capable, like Cubieboard or Beagleboard. I'm looking at sub-$100 in quantity, units are the size of a pack of cigarettes. 3D print and Shapeways for development, injection mold in quantity at Protomold for about $3000 for molds plus a few dollars per case. Also plan on device being modularly configurable to plug in wall plug, use solar, or batteries as wearable device. Includes WiFi and software radio for other frequencies.

Government kills!

Non-governmental terrorism, organized crime, and nut job mass shooters combined have a couple of hundred million in body count to go to match government as the number one cause of bulk megadeath.

The US government also conducted radiation experiments on its citizens without their knowledge or consent from the 50s throughout the early 70s according to the San Jose Mercury and LA Times.

I'd rather discourage ASICs. Aside from the centralization issues they seem to be a waste of development effort and resources for a highly specialized "make work" type application. Also, since they are manufactured and deployed in batches, they create discontinuities in the mining curves. A steady stream of CPUs entering the mining pool is a lot smoother. Unlike ASICs, CPU systems can be re-purposed and run other applications.

Discouraging domain squatting is also a good thing. Will this network evolve to have anonymization and encryption like TOR?

I'm already enthused on the possibilities, most interested in the nuts 'n' bolts of mining to be prepared with an optimized platform when it starts since this is one of the shortest lead items per your announced schedule.

I'm very interested in Bitshares and have questions on mining. I very much like that it favors CPUs over ASICs and GPUs.

Questions:

1. math expression to predict performance - will performance be a function of CPU speed, core quantity, and available RAM, like:

Hashes/second=A*(CPU speed GHz)*(CPU core quantity)*(RAM size Gbytes) where A is a constant

or maybe

Hashes/second=A*(CPU speed GHz)^B*(CPU core quantity)^C*(RAM size Gbytes)^D where A,B, C and D are constants

another possibility is

Hashes/second=(A*CPU speed GHz)^B*(C*CPU core quantity)^D*(E*RAM size Gbytes)^F where A,B, C, D, E and F are constants

2. Will mining work equally well on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors?

3. Will multi core CPUs have higher performance per core than single core CPUs?

4. Is speed bottleneck from CPU internal clock speed or memory bus speed.

These factors will determine if it would be better to use high end multi core CPUs and fast memory or if low cost System-on-Chip boards can be used to achieve the lowest mining cost (Giga Hash?) per dollar.

I see a huge potential for this project if it can achieve its stated aims. Biggest risk I see would be to invest a lot in mining and then have the project not fulfill the rest of the planned features.

Twitter and Facebook are proprietary platforms, have been compromised by the NSA to spy on their users, and don't really offer any useful functionality beyond what can be achieved with a web site, email list, and forum.

I was being somewhat facetious, like there being so many transmitters crowding the airwaves trying to beat each other with more power that it could be captured from the air and used for energy.

For those in the SF Bay Area, there is a meeting Thursday, 8/22, 6-9 pm on a closely related topic, personal clouds. It would be ideal to have personal clouds implemented across an anonymous, encrypted, redundant mesh network connecting mobile devices, personal computers, and bulk storage devices.

http://personalclouds-es2.eventbrite.com/?rank=1

Info on personal clouds is at http://personal-clouds.org/wiki/Main_Page .

Hi Elwar, were you on the Seastead forum? Your nym looks familiar. Like the blimp. Looks like some kind of phased array antenna or sensor array. the evolution driven antenna design is very interesting.

Yes, one approach would be a meshed swarm of redundant, inexpensive units covering an area. Another would be fewer, more expensive units large enough for a phased array of WiFi transmitters like a Vivato panel, http://www.vivato.com/ .


One possibility is to incorporate reflective dish concentrators into gimballed spherical lifting cells which can track the sun to focus light onto a high efficiency photovoltaic or mechanical system. Catalytic hydrogen production may be an option as well.


Too bad spectrum is licensed. Open competition among transmitters with high signal strength might have led to enough wireless power in the air to actually capture. In reality, though, the wireless space would have probably subdivided into smaller and smaller low powered  cells and evolved into an open mesh network in an unregulated environment.

Doug Jackson of e-gold bent over forwards trying to comply and still ended up getting it hard with no grease.

Government employees cannot be relied upon to follow the law. They will change it to whatever suits them and their masters among the elites.

You cannot negotiate with terrorists.

An alternative to batteries would be a fuel cell to convert hydrogen plus atmospheric oxygen to electricity and water, since there is plenty of hydrogen on board any way, and there may be a tank and compressor or lithium hydride for extra H2 for buoyancy control. It's all well developed technology, simpler with batteries, a little more complex but optimized with fuel cells for lower weight and eliminating battery replacement. Biggest challenge I see is getting the service ceiling to 70,000 feet to clear the tallest thunderstorms.

It would be a fun project. I had originally considered it when getting my ham radio licenses for a robotic airship to cruise the world with video for hams to connect to and pilot remotely. It would be a lot easier to do now than it was 20 years ago.

I tried to read the linked article, taken to Quora page demanding Google or Facebook login. Both of these companies have been collaborating with the NSA to spy on their users. Also, Facebook tracks its users across the internet using their IP addresses. Could you please just post the article here?

Thanks.

Yes, main limit if any would be materials degradation, mostly from UV. Solar cells last at least 10 years, use UV resistant outer skin, maybe aluminum foil. Lithium or metal hydride batteries for night time power will need replacing every few years. Water can be condensed from air for hydrogen replenishment. A small volume of water produces a lot of H2 gas.

Oops, caught on now that you were suggesting drones to carry meshnet nodes, not the 'matternet' app. I've considered solar powered lighter-than-air for wireless networking platforms. Use hydrogen instead of helium, replenish lost hydrogen by electrolysis of atmospheric water, electric motors and props for station keeping.

Yes, open source drones have already been programmed with this kind of agility at universities. Videos and a lot of good info on drones and drone nets are available at the John Robb site, http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2013/01/index.html .

That explains why the tone of the original post was promoting the activity. Glad to know it wasn't written by a member of this community.

I voted for Gary Johnson, since Ron Paul was unavailable. As Carlton suggested, there really was no difference between Obama and Romney, and neither are significantly different from the Bushes, Clintons, or McCain.

P2P transport is on my radar as well. It will be a critical component for a P2P based alternative economy.

I think the 'killer app' for self driving vehicles currently getting little attention is door to door delivery, even room to room with motorcycle sized electric vehicles which can reconfigure to enter buildings. Eliminating the driver eliminates the need for large vehicles in most cases. P2P transport of single packages eliminates the need for heavy duty packaging to protect contents during handling and stacking. Convoys with 24/7 power generation vehicles can extend the range for long distance transport.

P2P VTOL aerial drone mesh transport networks as Carlton discussed are also a possibility. Drones are the only way I can think of to safely handle automated Bitcoin/Cash exchange. A drone can drop a cash packet from a safe height in exchange for Bitcoin. A deposit in BTC could also insure the safety of the drone during the exchange. A drone could drop a container for cash pick-up, which the customer loads with cash and tosses into the air for the drone to catch to purchase BTC for cash.

I concur, this is extremely important. Ideally, we should have modular configurable mobile devices with software radios with WiFi, mesh networking, SMS, VOIP, and connectivity to cell networks. Similar devices could be plugged in like Freedomboxes or connected to small, low cost solar panels to extend the network. External USB drives can be plugged in to add storage. Wireless routers like the Linksys WRT and WAP series running OpenWRT may be re-purposed as well.

Users can have personal clouds distributed across the network with redundant encrypted storage for personal files and an unencrypted, anonymously accessible commons of shared files. The meshnet would be similar to a large RAID drive operating over a network, with enough redundancy to accommodate missing nodes due to mobility, usage patterns, and hardware failures.

Several of us have also discussed the concept of a cryptocurrency recently at meetups recently to promote growth and resource allocation of the network, a Netcoin or Meshcoin, maybe generated by doing cryptographic work encrypting the communications, earned when data is uploaded from a node, spent when data is downloaded to a node. Nodes may encourage traffic to earn coin by providing local storage, internet access, cpu power for computing, or hosting content.

I thought Wikimedia did take Rubles. The Russian government does qualify as an organized crime syndicate, with over 20,000,000 in body count.